“A new sort of coordinate awoke”: Unleashing Pandora’s Box in Joanna Newsom’s “Waltz”
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 5
It’s probably no secret that I see “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” as a rich and layered artwork, one that continues to astound and provoke new ideas and connections, even 8 years after Joanna Newsom released Divers. I recently wrote about the philosophy of simulacra and eternal return in the song, and after that heady exploration, I wanted to try a different approach, sort of like a waltz with its twirls and returns. I’m going to share a few vignettes of ideas the song evokes for me. It may feel a little choppy — but I hope you’ll enjoy, and more importantly I hope you’ll walk away with some new ideas on Newsom’s work or new line of questioning to pursue.
If you’ve been reading these in sequence, then thanks for joining once again. If you’re jumping in mid-stream, that’s ok too, though you might find it helpful to read some of my earlier writing about “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, since I’ll be building on some ideas from those pieces.
Space and its limits
“Waltz” deals pretty directly with space and time, the possibility of multiverses, and the idea of “traveling light”. There’s a reason Newsom acknowledges a similar theme in Divers and in the film Interstellar (which came out after she had finished writing the album):
one of Divers’ headier concerns, as Newsom puts it, is “the question of what’s available to us as part of the human experience that isn’t subject to the sovereignty of time” — a theme she was intrigued to see dramatized in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar
Escaping the “sovereignty of time” —put differently, “making Time just another poor tenant” — emerges in many songs on Divers, but perhaps most viscerally in this one (you could argue that “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom” do as well…). Without getting into too much detail, the theory of time travel is connected with the bending and shape of spacetime. We’re back in the theories of relativity that Einstein first proposed. I found this exploration of “closed timelike curves” a helpful and digestible read on the subject.
The consulting physicist on Nolan’s film was Kip Thorne, who in 2017 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Back in the 80s, Thorne started to propose that a form of closed timelike curve — called a “wormhole” — might allow for travel backwards in time. As his colleague Prof. Sean Carroll put it, “In general relativity, if you connect two different regions of space, you’re also connecting two different regions of time.”
Another related area of theoretical exploration involves black holes. In theory, black holes are funnel-shaped, with nothing at the “bottom” of the funnel except a point of infinite density. However, as astrophysics professor Paul Sutter explains: “In theory, […] a black hole may be paired with a mirror twin, called a white hole, to form a wormhole.” Fascinating.
Let’s wind back the clock to 2008. Protests occurred over a new scientific facility at Switzerland’s CERN. Press buzz was also getting started for the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, where a new bomb material called “antimatter” would be stolen from the laboratory at CERN.
What was all the fuss about? Hopefully it won’t surprise you that it’s related to a circular object, in fact something very similar to the synchrotrons we saw recently. CERN had built the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator, which you can see described in this video (complete with time-warp graphics and audio) — about a minute will give you the gist:
The protests (in the real world, not in the novel) came from concerns about what might happen during experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, the concern that scientists might unwittingly “produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic”.
That sounds like a moment where someone might reflect —
We were wrong to try.
Regret and its limitlessness
We hear the song’s narrator express the regret of knowing too late, of discovering after the fact.
swear I saw our mistake
when the clouds draped like a flag,
across the backs of the fleet
When they see the mistake, it’s already too late. Perhaps they’d been blinded by the prospect of the “unlimited simulacreage to colonize”. We hear later that they didn’t anticipate the consequences.
Make it stop, my love!
We were wrong to try.
Never saw what we could unravel,
They had something, but now it has become unraveled. Their realization calls to mind the proverb, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry” — something so necessary, but taken for granted, captures the feeling we hear from the song’s narrator. It also echoes the lines, “As the day is long, /so the well runs dry,” which we hear as they are starting to discover time travel, perhaps unaware that the well is running dry. There’s a sort of ignorance to the state of affairs at the bottom of the well. (Though of course I acknowledge there are several interpretations of that line, this just being one of them).
Layers of Time
Talking about these moments in the song where the narrator seems to be ignorant of, just realizing, or sorrowfully regretting their mistake makes me particularly aware of the ways that time is out of order here. Like most memories, it’s certainly not linear, but in a work about time travel, I’m fascinated by the way that Newsom takes us on a time traveling journey in “Waltz”. I’ve written before about the cinematic elements of the song, and it’s true. A bit like a Nolan film… Interstellar is an apt comparison, but I’m also thinking of Memento.
In trying to piece things together, I found it helpful to map out a timeline of sorts, despite that being somewhat antithetical to the cyclical time of the album. Let’s treat it as a thought experiment, and not attach too much “certainty” to it. I’ve used the “before” and “after” language, along with verb tenses, to help loosely construct a linear plotline. Keep in mind that this doesn’t address (at least not visually) the element of the “eternal return and repeat” loop.
Here goes…
To give some voice-over, if you’re interested —
- A represents the time before the discovery of time-travel, multiverse-travel, etc. Before “traveling light”.
- B shows the discovery, which may have its own sequence within, but these lines capture more or less the unveiling of “traveling light”.
- C and its placement might be debatable. I like to think of it as unlocked by the ability to travel, and almost in some blissful in-between state after the discovery but before the Great Wars. You might interpret it differently.
- D assumes that the three Great Wars happen as a result of the discovery, though perhaps some of them happened before.
- E and F both take place on the day before the last (and 4th) Great War. E represents the state of belief at that time, and the launch of the lover’s ship. F occurs soon after that, with the moment of realization or premonition.
- G is likely the night between that launch and the next day, when the 4th Great War begins. It is the dream moment.
- H and I show the beginning of the 4th Great War, starting with the narrator waking up, and the New HLI charging in.
- J is my paltry attempt at representing the loop. Just where it loops back to is up for discussion. What we do know is the “careless” outcome of the 4th Great War, and its eternal return.
- K encapsulates the narrator’s “now” (if you can even say that). They plea for the loop to stop. They observe their bondage on the “round desert island”. I also found it interesting that the “you can barely tell” and the “I guard it” are also in the present tense, as if the secret is still worth keeping, even while they are bound in the loop.
One thing is clear: we’re not getting a start-to-finish linear narrative. The story unfolds in a spliced-together way.
Layers of Regret
I’m drawn to the speaker’s “now” for that reason. Above all, it’s a moment of regret. I want to dwell on what the narrator says at that moment —
Make it stop, my love!
We were wrong to try.
Never saw what we could unravel,
in traveling light,
nor how the trip debrides —
like a stack of slides!
From their privileged viewpoint of hindsight (you know what they say!), the narrator realizes they were wrong. I notice that verb — we “never saw”. That is, we never foresaw, we never predicted. And what are the two things they didn’t foresee? First, what they “could unravel, in traveling light”. And second, they didn’t predict “how the trip debrides”. What and how. Interesting.
I don’t talk enough about Newsom’s mastery of poetics, like rhyme, meter, and assonance, though I should. I’ll just note here that the internal rhyme with “unravel” and “traveling” is so satisfying to the ear! While “unravel” doesn’t strike us as an uncommon turn of phrase to describe things going wrong, in Newsom’s hands it also evokes a rich visual and metaphorical backdrop. We’ve all heard the expression “the fabric of time” (or the “fabric of spacetime”, or the “fabric of reality”), but have we thought about the image of that fabric getting a thread pulled, so that it starts to unravel?
And that expression, “in traveling light”! Certainly, the narrator is referring to the physics of space/time travel, and how the Lightborne Elite might travel upon light to navigate the multiverses. Newsom also calls to mind the everyday expression “travel light(ly)” — without much baggage. You might be thinking, this is not some carefree airline or hotel or luggage commercial where the heroine of the ad is whisked away to a lovely tropical resort with an easy roll-aboard…
And you’d be right — it’s not. However, Newsom isn’t just doing some fun wordplay. Traveling light brings to mind that carefree attitude. And when you don’t have much in your bag, you might have left behind your umbrella, or your winter coat, or your hiking shoes. So you’re carefree, and you’re unprepared. Like our narrator, who “never saw” what was coming. For whom “all we saw” was the bright side. And who wasn’t prepared for what the trip would throw at them.
“[H]ow the trip debrides”. How many of us knew the French word for unbridling a horse before this song? I won’t lie — I didn’t. (“The bridle bends in idle hands”?)
Débridement came to mean, in English at least, removing layers of tissue from a wound. (“Honey, where did you come by that wound?”). That image of taking dead or damaged tissue away, which then helps the wound to heal — what an interesting thing to apply to a trip. So this trip, this “traveling light” is removing layers of dead tissue? It’s not immediately apparent what the narrator means here.
Layers of Slides
Finally, we get that odd simile — “like a stack of slides!”. So here, in “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, we get another image that shows layering (a “stack”) just like we did with the layers of paintings in “Sapokanikan”. I’m both intrigued and puzzled by it. We’ve stumbled on a line that Newsom leaves wide open for interpretation, and any analysis of it demands a respect for that ambiguity and multiplicity.
As far as the object — the “slides” — I wouldn’t entirely rule out physical objects like those seen in spinning yarn, operating lathes, or swiftly descending schoolchildren. The two most compelling, for me at least, are microscope slides and photographic slides. I’d add that PowerPoint slides are an offshoot of the latter, but somehow I don’t suspect Joanna Newsom is much of a pie charts and bullet points gal herself. “Literary allusions are up and to the right quarter-over-quarter…” Hey, you never know — maybe Drag City makes her do a data-driven pitch deck for each upcoming record? But I digress.
Let’s have a look-see at microscope slides first, then.
As Dr. Barry Sobel, a microscope collector, writes, slides were in service of holding things in place for enlargement:
The earliest known slides were simply pieces of bone, ivory or even wood with a specimen; the earliest examples in this collection date to the eighteenth century. These slides had specimens simply mounted either on top, or (later) for transmitted light, between two pieces of mica. Later, glass slides were used.
Any number of specimens could be fixed in a slide — minuscule organisms in a drop of pond water, the wing of a fly or moth, a slide of tree bark, or a pinch of salt. The possibilities are nearly endless. Victorian collectors stacked their slides in trays stored in boxes or cabinets. Occasionally, scientists use a microtome to cut very thin sections of an object, which can then be mounted on a slide.
Coming back to the song lyrics, two images stand out for me. The first, that stack of microscope slides with many different objects on them, almost combining in some strange way a range of specimens that don’t necessarily belong together, almost like a griffin or a sphynx. The second image relates to the fixedness of the specimens — trapped and stacked — that evokes the helplessness of someone caught in the infinite “return and repeat”.
In order to really understand microscope slides, though, we need to zoom back to the microscope itself. First, we should acknowledge that the lenses in microscopes and those in telescopes are intricately interwoven — fitting for our sci-fi “Waltz”.
The origins of the microscope are a bit out of focus, but early credit for discovering microorganisms goes to two scientists who knew each other — the Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, who used his microscope to inspect the quality of fabrics, and the Englishman Robert Hooke, whose 1665 book Micrographia created quite the buzz (and likely influenced van Leeuwenhoek’s study). Hooke’s book, with its captivating enlarged drawings of otherwise speck-like objects, has been described as a “big bang” moment that exposed a wide audience to the microscopic world for the first time. He coined the word “cell”, referring to the structure he saw in a thinly-sliced piece of cork wood.
I with the same sharp Penknife, cut off from the former smooth surface an exceeding thin piece of it, and placing it on a black object Plate, because it was it self a white body, and casting the light on it with a deep plano-convex Glass, I could exceeding plainly perceive it to be all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb, but that the pores of it were not regular; yet it was not unlike a Honey-comb in these particulars.
Of course Hooke’s description calls to mind another line from Newsom’s Divers, in the song “A Pin-Light Bent”:
from that height was a honeycomb
made of light from those funny homes, intersected:
each enclosed, anelectric and alone.
The loneliness of those honeycomb cells calls to mind the monastic cells that Hooke used as his inspiration for the term.
So how did Hooke and others create such fascinating visuals at large scale? Certainly, at times they would look through their microscope and then draw from there. But like the Dutch masters, tools were also used to project images from the microscope onto a surface like a wall or a translucent drawing surface. Called “solar microscopes”, these devices served as entertainment as well. In his 1742 book on microscopes, scientist Benjamin Martin dedicates a chapter to solar microscopes and their uses, saying:
It may be proper in a Work of this Nature [that is, a book about microscopes], to give a short Account of the Methods of magnifying small Objects in a Camera Obscura, or Darken’d Chamber; especially as it […] is in itself a Matter of great Curiosity.
I know we’re talking about Newsom’s “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, but we can’t seem to get away from talking about “A Pin-Light Bent”! In that song, we hear:
[…] the Great Light that shines through a pin-hole,
when the pin-light calls itself Selfhood,
and the Selfhood inverts on a mirror
in an Amora Obscura.
The inversion in these lines is talking about how images in a camera obscura would be projected upside-down, so inverting them back with a mirror will make the image look “normal” again, though still reversed. If we think about the context from my prior writing about simulacra, we see the question of selfhood emerge — which is the real, and which is the copy? We’re squarely back in the realm of “Waltz”.
Imagine a darkened room. People sitting patiently, looking at the blank wall in front of them. Suddenly, a rush of light spills in, dazzling them with an image that moments before wasn’t there, an image that enthralls and delights, horrifies and surprises. At times, it’s like seeing a ghost.
I could be describing a modern-day movie theater. Or that 1700s Georgian cabinet of curiosities watching the microscopic world loom large. Or a 1600s Dutch parlor showing projections from a magic lantern (don’t ask Hooke how he felt about its Dutch inventor, Christiaan Huygens). Or even a much more ancient spectacle of shadow play.
It’s easy to see the fluidity and links between these forms of entertainment. Which leads us to our other potential “stack of slides” — the photographic slide.
Transparencies and slide shows have their roots in the magic lantern, the camera obscura, and such. A pane of glass with paint on it, still transparent enough to let light pass through. Static images to start, yes. But as I covered in some detail when I first wrote about about “Waltz”, when Eadweard Muybridge introduces the phantasmascope, we start to see the emergence of film and moving pictures. The video below is a fun view into what was going on.
With Muybridge’s inventions, you see images moving in a circle, but there are other inventions of that era that are more like flipbooks on an axle, and of course you have the photographs on a roll of film. The funny thing, as you can see in this clip, is that moving pictures are just that — they are individual pictures, moving quickly. It’s just an “old trick played with the light” and your eye at a certain rate of frames per second, and you then believe it’s in motion.
So, coming back to the “stack of slides” — could we think of film as just that? A stack of individual images ready to be projected? If they move quickly enough, we perceive them as fluid reality, but if they move too slowly, we see them for what they are — individual moments?
Those individual moments feel a bit like our song timeline above. Little slices of time, shuffled and placed a bit out of order. Thinking about this concept of light travel and time travel, we can imagine the narrator transitioning from a time when the filmstrip was nicely organized in a linear path, to one where the “new sort of coordinate awoke” and allowed them to traverse the filmstrip, or even chop it into pieces and splice them together in unanticipated ways.
Listening to the song, it’s almost like the narrator has loaded up the slide projector from their latest vacation and forced us all to watch it, in excruciating detail, but the pictures got a bit out of order.
Layers of Light
Returning for a moment to optical illusions and the eye’s limits, I’m struck by how much seeing occurs in the “Waltz”. There’re loads of it.
- “I saw his ship”
- “I saw our mistake”
- “we came to see Time is taller”
- “I saw the Bering Strait and the Golden Gate”
- “where I have been, and seen,”
- “Never saw what we could unravel,”
- “nor [saw] how the trip debrides”
- “All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide”
And even the dream is a bit like seeing, with your sleeping eye…In that dream the speaker tells of walking “in the garden / of Chabot, and those telescope ruins.”
Those telescopes, as I mentioned earlier, co-evolved with microscopes as optics and lens grinding got progressively better. Coming across these optical devices reminds us of the synchrotron and its X-Ray fluorescence, bending the path of electrons and producing radiant light as a result. It also echoes the “temporal infidelity” of “Anecdotes”:
I want to go where the light won’t bend —
far as the eye may reach — nor end.
A telescope certainly does help extend the reach of the eye, quite far in fact.
All this bending of light, either in a black hole or a translucent lens, makes me think of distortion. When I first wrote about “Waltz”, I discussed some of the history of trains and timezones and a “new sort of coordinate[s]” around measuring time. In the era before timezones, locals would set their clocks by the sun. Initially with sundials, “high noon” would be close enough, but as precision in time measurement became more important, people continued to use “high noon” as a starting point. Why? Because as seasons shift and the earth wobbles, and daylight hours shorten, high noon remains a constant. And (scientists came to discover) because light gets distorted more as it gets closer to the horizon, so looking straight up in the sky gives you the most accurate location of the sun or other celestial objects.
A special kind of telescope was used to take these observations, called a “meridian circle”. As a refresher, the meridian is the imaginary line running around the globe from north pole to south pole, and is associated with a location’s longitude. A meridian circle, or its close relative the transit telescope, is fixed on that north-south line and then used to observe how/where/when things are crossing (you could say “transiting”) the meridian line. This comes in handy when you’re trying to be precise about the definition of “high noon”, or what’s often called solar noon.
The problem, though, arises when the earth starts to wobble a bit — which it does! So the sun’s position at solar noon doesn’t remain the same throughout the year. Instead, it fluctuates in a ∞ or figure-8 form, following a predictable pattern each year depending on where you are in the world. The pattern that emerges is called an analemma. Looking at it, you can see the summer and winter solstices at the highest and lowest points, and the spring and autumn equinoxes at the middle points.
You’ve probably seen an analemma diagram before, but maybe not stopped to absorb it. They commonly appear on most schoolroom globes, sitting out in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Baja California. On these diagrams, you can see that the equinoxes align with the equator, and the solstices line up with the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Often, the diagram is accompanied by scales, with one labeled the “Equation of Time”.
Rather than reset the clock every day, astronomers take this annual pattern and find the average, or mean, location. You may have heard this term in the phrase “Greenwich Mean Time”. That refers to the average (mean) location of the sun at noon as it transits/crosses the meridian located in Greenwich, England — called the “Prime Meridian”. I’ll resist going down that rabbit hole, but I’ll invite you to dig more in the history of the Royal Observatory on your own time.
Let’s pause for a moment. Or a second. I want to recall the line about the “time we were lashed to the prow”, when “You and I” did “mean Now” and did mean “Years”. Of course, we’re talking about the delineation between past, present, and future. We’re also talking about the means of measuring and coordinates for locating moments in time. A Year is both a length of time and a way to refer to a specific year — like ’78 or ’81, for instance. Like Zeno’s paradox, slicing infinity into ever smaller distances, a Year can be divided into Months or Weeks or Days. Days can be divided into Hours. Hours into Minutes. Minutes into Seconds. You could say that years and days are somewhat primal because they emerge from very natural phenomena. Namely, a year represents one rotation of the earth around the sun, and a day represents one rotation of the earth on its own axis. Solar noon is another primal moment, with the sun at its zenith — the natural delineation there being AM and PM. Hours, minutes, and seconds are somewhat arbitrary, though, or at least they’re human inventions.
Measuring hours and minutes has evolved over history and across various cultures. The evolution of measuring seconds is worth describing, if you’ll allow me a detour. Minutes were invented as the “first minute (meaning small and rhyming with my boot) part” of hours, which was shortened to “minutes” but could have just as easily been called “firsts”. Subdividing those even smaller, we got the “second minute part” of hours, which was shortened to “seconds”. The concept was more theoretical for a while, because it was hard to measure them accurately. Eventually, a scientist was able to measure them consistently using a pendulum, which if you’ve ever seen a Foucault Pendulum, you know is powered by the earth’s rotation. That scientist was none other than Christiaan Huygens, whom we saw earlier. As with the analemma, that rotation is quite regular but not unchanging, and so using a pendulum has its flaws.
Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell is considered the greatest between Newton and Einstein, particularly for his work in unifying the physics of electricity with that of magnetic force, which is called electromagnetic theory. In his magnum opus published in 1873, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Maxwell explains:
Time. The standard unit of time in all civilized countries is deduced from the time of rotation of the earth about its axis. The sidereal day, or the true period of rotation of the earth, can be ascertained with great exactness by the ordinary observations of astronomers; and the mean solar day can be deduced from this by our knowledge of the length of the year.
The unit of time adopted in all physical researches is one second of mean solar time.
In astronomy a year is sometimes used as a unit of time. A more universal unit of time might be found by taking the periodic time of vibration of the particular kind of light whose wave length is the unit of length.
We shall call the concrete unit of time [T], and the numerical measure of time t.
As a pioneer in studying light waves, it shouldn’t surprise us that Maxwell proposed that seconds could be better measured using “a new sort of coordinate” — light waves. Most folks are at least familiar with the notion of an atomic clock, the same one that keeps our smartphone clocks in sync and keeps the Global Positioning System (GPS) positioning correctly. Those clocks run on the measurement of cesium atoms’ frequency, which turned out to fit the bill. As with most things in science, the work here is not done and improvements continue to be proposed… but I find it fascinating to trace the move from the astronomical scale (rotating globe) to the atomic scale (pulsing atoms). Much like the interconnectedness of telescopes and microscopes.
Speaking of connections (because isn’t that ultimately what we’re doing here?), I want to highlight this concept of unification theories for just a moment more. Scientists continue to look for explanations that tie seamingly disparate fields of study together. The first unification came with Newton (no friend of Hooke!), who connected astronomy and physics through laws of motion and gravity. Maxwell brought the second great unification, mentioned above. Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity and 1915 general theory of relativity (the word “relative” here is talking about unification — relating one seemingly separate concept to another, and then observing the sameness no matter where it’s observed) marked the 3rd and 4th unifications: Space and Time, and Energy and Mass (E=mc²).
Anyway. Sorry to get sidereally sidetracked! We left the “Waltz” with our narrator dreaming of their walk in the garden. And not just any garden — “the garden of Chabot”. Chabot refers to Antoine Chabot, who invented hydraulic mining, an environmentally disastrous but effective method of mining gold and other metals, while living in Nevada City, California. Given the presence of the “telescope ruins”, I’m pretty sure we’re not talking about the Chabot home in Oakland, with its persimmons and flowering quince, gifted by “a Japanese prince”. Chabot wasn’t much of a space nerd himself, so it’s unclear if he even owned a telescope. However by the 1880s, wealthy and established in Oakland, Chabot funded the first telescopes for the local observatory — an 8-inch telescope and then a transit telescope. Now called the Chabot Observatory, they describe it:
For decades, it served as the official timekeeping station for the entire [San Francisco] Bay Area, measuring time with its transit telescope.
I’m not pointing out anything others haven’t noticed by now, I’m sure. But if you don’t live nearby, like I did when writing about “Waltz” the first time, you may be surprised to learn that the observatory has had three locations over the years. The current one sits up in the Oakland Hills, near Joaquin Miller park. The initial location was in downtown Oakland, near the Oakland Flower Market. It’s just a park today, no remnants of the buildings aside from a small plaque and a mound of dirt. As the city got bigger and brighter, the telescopes needed more darkness, so they moved into the hills.
This second location, which opened in 1915 and eventually closed because of its seismic risks, still exists but has seen better days. You might even call them “telescope ruins”, or at least “observatory ruins”. This location is also in the Oakland Hills, just above Joanna Newsom’s college, Mills.
Layers of Tissue
In the dream, our narrator asks their true love — “Honey, where did you come by that wound?” — which we might interpret as a wound from the war. I alluded above to its relationship to debridement.
Now that we’ve discussed microscope and photographic slides, and the connections between optical devices, I want to return to that line — “how the trip debrides”. Debridement removes layers of tissue from a wound. A related but different procedure applies to the eyes, called corneal debridement, which cuts away layers of tissue covering the cornea. This procedure improves people’s sight.
I don’t want to close off the possibilities that Newsom’s line refers to other kinds of debridement, but in a song so rich with seeing and optics, I would hazard a guess that “the trip debrides” by removing what blinded the speaker. They “never saw” the ramifications before, but now they do.
20/20
When we think of sight as knowledge, I can’t help but think of the Titans mentioned in “Waltz” — “bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes”. Prometheus, who we’ve discussed a few times, comes from the Greek for “fore-thinking”. His brother Epimetheus, on the other hand, gets his name from the Greek for “after-thinking”. Foresight and hindsight. If I can take some small, not-very-poetic liberties here to distill:
We [now, afterwards, see that] were wrong to try.
Never saw [X]
All we saw was [Y]
Why does Epimetheus get this name? Some might say it was because he accepted a misleading gift, and realized the error afterwards. Others might say it was because he opened someone else’s gift when he shouldn’t have.
As the myth is told, when Prometheus created mankind out of clay, he created men. He was punished for stealing the gods’ fire (transported in a fennel stalk) and giving it to humans. As a punishment, the gods created the first woman, and against Prometheus’s warning, his brother Epimetheus accepted the gift. The woman came from the gods with a jar, and the myth tells that the jar contained evil spirits. Of course we’re talking about Pandora and her jar (later reimagined or morphed into a box). And like her counterpart, Eve, she may bear more blame than is due. It was certainly Pandora’s box, but who opened it — that’s been up for interpretation.
Thanks for reading, and check out Part 6 for a few more thoughts on “Waltz” and layers.
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