Listening to 60’s radio, the soundtrack of my early life, I hear the definable 60’s genre so clearly, but I can see how each preserves the essence of the genre from which they came. Each track. Dick Dale and his sped-up Greek dance processed through electric instruments. Petula Clark and her perfect almost lilt – so Julie Andrews – with her night club songs updated by removing the swing, removing the jazz intonations so the effect is more straightforward talking to you instead of performing for you. Simon and Garfunkel singing the Sounds of Silence: what turns that folk tune into a 60’s song? It’s right there in front of me, a slightly rushed pace in the folk part that meets the electric-backed, entirely generic rock arrangement of 1234 that took over starting with its grafting from both white folk and the more acknowledged kinds of black roots music. By kinds of black roots music, I don’t mean the blues. I mean dance hall music, played for families, played for people drinking and dancing. The blues is another genre of roots music. That of course relates to the classic, slower blues but it’s the melding of blues and the tradition of faster dance tunes. This includes waltzes because whites and blacks in America knew the tunes.
But beyond the roll of songs – The Supremes singing about a faithless man, singing about betrayal, taking the torch song and rendering it as the happiest tune, with a touch of archness in the obviously clever rhymes so it all fits together with such craft you can see the 60’s genre’s combining of old forms. That song also brought in elements of gospel cadence, but again smoothed out and sped up. There’s a specific speed. But I don’t want to talk as much about that as this: Donovan doing Atlantis live on The Smothers Brothers Show.
There are many moments in music which preach to you. Most are just songs: an idea rendered in musical form. The idea comes from the right place but it doesn’t speak from that place, which lies deep within, but comes from the higher level of the mind. There were a few performances that dug all the way down. The Beatles doing Hey, Jude was beyond epic because they were so far beyond all the rest that the performance, which was extraordinary, was an expression of the near endless love people had for them, for the guys who had so changed and enriched their lives. Donovan doing Atlantis captured something else: the truth of the story, something that I never otherwise would have heard on the radio with such depth. On radio, especially on the AM radios and car radios of the day, the long ending could sound kind of silly. On record, it was absorbing but it was also part of a record and, frankly, didn’t stand out as being different from The Moody Blues, like Nights in White Satin, except hippy-ish in a different, equally pretentious way.
Aside, Suite: Judy Blues Eyes with its Indian undertones shifting into Mexican influence. Bringing in influences is always part of music. All turned into a 60’s genre piece – who listens to Crosby, Stills & Nash now? It’s like their entire musical genre barely exists. I find pieces of it in the more self-consciously hip retro folk stuff, though that’s more Jack White et al derived. CSN again took folk and rock elements, married them so you can see both clearly. That becomes more country rock through the Allmans and their rock treatment of blues and rhythm and blues, and of course some guys I just can’t think of in the moment.
Back to Atlantis: the way Donovan performed the song live brought a depth of meaning to the repeating chorus because he told us – and you could see the audience listening – a story about this fictional Atlantis and then it becomes a not completely coherent image ‘way down below the ocean, where I wanna be, she may be’. What does that mean? As I heard him do it, as I heard the audience join in, way down below the ocean whe-ere I wanna be she may be I knew it was true. And it seemed like everyone who heard him do it knew it was true too. Way down below the ocean whe-ere I wanna be she may be. Way down below the ocean whe-re I wanna be she may be.
I can say: Atlantis is imaginary, a construct in a story, and it sits between the hemispheres of the real world down below the ocean of everything that is between you and this imaginary realm where you are together, I and you.
Interlude: The Kingston Trio were a big part of my very early listening life. They are almost pre-60’s: they took devotional folk and smoothed and sped it up a bit but the instrumentation and vocal stylings remain more truly folk. Take off a tinge and they could have been the The Byrds. I do this with every song I hear. Worst thing right now: my New Music playlist was filled with Taylor Swift influences, from her vocal intonations to the musical genre she’s creating, except of course with a few exceptions they were clumsily realized. It’s not easy to do what she does. You can imitate her vocal stylings but it’s difficult to comprehend how she fits them to the content and the musical context. And I can’t yet explain in a few words how she sometimes accompanies her voice, sometimes generates an underlying rhythm, sometimes contrasts and other times sweetens: her bag of tricks is vast, and people have trouble realizing how she controls them. And an aside in the interlude: if Taylor Swift were a man, he’d be considered not just a popular artist who used to be a country and country-pop artist but as an innovator and creative genius of the highest order. Always the question in my head for Taylor: how do you like being the girl? The connection I feel toward this person is partly pre-gender, that her voice, as I’ve said, is the voice of the person I’d talk to and play with in my head and then, as I grew older and confined that play more and more, to my room and on top of and under the covers of my bed. That’s not sexual, though it was often playing at romance, because our roles were fairly fluid and the voices would sometimes be the boy and sometimes the girl before one voice ended up as me. I think of this as being under common control and then separating. That brings me back to the song:
Atlantis: the imaginary realm where you and I are together. That’s what I heard: at the bottom of a vast ocean, you have to go very deep to find me. So I did. I went as deep as I could. Why does anyone dive deep? To find the person within. And to realize that person within is not just a you but that it is a multi-dimensional you which comes together in the distance across the CMs lattice to a point not where you are clear and distinct but where the seed of all the dimensions related to you comes into being, where the larger patterns across the lattice invert. Believe it or not, I can describe how this happens and why in formal language. I call it the detonator because it’s what an explosion is made of and why it occurs as it does. And it’s the seed of existence. Under common control back in bed, having shifted from a more shared identity of being together in my head, separating over time as though I am under an ocean and you are under the other side of that ocean, as though I am an Endpoint of a real hemisphere and you are an Endpoint and the path Between is way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.
I would have felt better about diving deep if the words had been ‘she will be’ but I never had a choice. I do not have within me the ability to succumb to temptation beyond a certain level. My preservation instincts kick in, both actual physical ‘you must stay alive’ instincts and the spiritual and emotional ‘you must stay alive’ instincts. I have always been true to that which guides me, partly because I felt that was truly me speaking to me and partly because I heard the voice as separate from me, as coming from a position that not only had authority over the sometimes pathetic and scared me but which had my interests absolutely at heart in a way no other voice could. One could say it’s funny how the mind works except I know how the mind works across fCM pattern layers and I don’t think it’s funny in the sense it’s unexplainable because I can explain it. Why are some people gay? I just sort of described it: I could have been a girl in a boy or a boy whose voice talked about being attracted to boys. In a few paragraphs below, I’ll sort of described the way killing ‘occurs’, connecting it to the acts of creation and destruction I can explain formally as they come into metaphoric existence.
As my boy self with whatever girl remains in me – quite a lot – separated from the girl self – and that girl self has a ton of boy in it too – stories came to me that explained what happened. Why can’t we be together anymore? Because you looked at yourself while we were playing and you saw yourself in a way that meant we could never become one again. Because I wandered too far and though I came back I could never undo the wandering and each step I’d take only entangled me more and more in my separate aloneness. My head filled with images of an entire family behind a thin sheet of infinitely flexible glass and the more we reached out to touch each other the more that which kept us apart developed and it became harder and harder to find a place where we were almost together. These were the most difficult parts of my early life: being sent on my way in the hope I’d find the way home. And East of Eden he was cast. Into the rising sun, into morning, into this life, into the expectation of death and all the intimations of mortality. Into this journey.
Then as I became a bit older a new story developed. I started with a science fiction story about a kind of endless war between good and evil and a completely dispossessed soldier, not even a wandering samurai though there are parallels, who somehow survived totally consuming combat to become a specialist in strategic reading of the patterns by which the enemy acts. I sort of remember the moment when the story shifted: the realization there has to be better way to fight the evil than attacking the symptoms of evil, that we should be able to read the symptoms of evil to determine where it will act and how we need to prepare for what it might do. This would allow us to focus our resources more efficiently to gain an advantage. Even if evil learned what we were doing, even if any advantage was temporary, the best choice was pursuing this path because only continuous diagnosing might reveal the evil’s essential abilities and tricks. This story started because I saw Marta Kristen on Lost in Space. If I insert the photo of her, you’d say: she looks like Taylor Swift. Yep. My other big crush was Yvonne Craig – Batgirl on TV – and she looks like Taylor with dark hair (and with different lips, like if you took Marta’s lips and …). Then there was Janet Lynn, the figure skater. But the main one was Judy Robinson (on TV) and it wasn’t because she could act or because would fantasize about her sexually or really in any other way; it was literally that I felt better when I’d see her and each moment she’d be on screen – and not talking because that only distracted me – I would try to fix her image in my head in three dimensions.
The story shifted very quickly to me running a strategy group and then rising to command a new kind of strategy group, one devoted to the highest level readings of the pattern. I reported to High Command. I had a crew. Since the story would iterate and improve, discarding elements that could not remain real – I’ll explain that in a moment – I can’t say exactly how this went but the general idea is that I was told or assigned a new group member, sometimes over my objections – because I don’t like being told what to do – and sometimes through devices, like being given resumes of candidates that I always rejected as part of the process of reviewing candidates and finding the one so spectacular I got angry at being manipulated and demanded to know why I hadn’t been made aware earlier. (The answer is indistinct in my head. It was usually a combination of dismissal, of telling me why I shouldn’t whine, and that she wasn’t ready and they were protecting her until she was ready.)
There’s a weird moment in the story, but first to explain discarding elements: a story is the reduction to real numbers of the complex and imaginary elements that extend into CMs and this graphs as a line associated with an area that encompasses where the thread may go, and some points counted in one iteration are excluded as the algorithm for counting the line becomes more efficient. This, by the way, is how fetishes develop, and that brings up something I was well aware of, that a story can simplify to the point where it counts the story as such a logical whole that it loses the magic, meaning it loses the need to be iterated – kind of sad, isn’t it, to see where logic and the loss of magic intersect?
That weird moment in the story came about because I developed the team characters. They were real ‘people’: though I can’t say what they looked like, I knew the characteristics of their minds and personalities. That was part of my job. And I was really good at my job. So the weird moment is when one of them – I think of him as a kind of blob with acute sensibilities – said to me ‘she looks like you’. The weirdness is that I had no idea what I looked like and thus had no idea if she looked like me. I was completely dispossessed from any ‘actual’ place. I could see how people were – and the command base was very busy – but I could never see me.
Back to Atlantis. I don’t think another song affected me as much and I didn’t much like the album. Candidates from that era? Tom Dooley. Hang down you head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry, poor boy you’re going to die. I never cared much for the story words about his crime – and yes, it’s the same story as I Hung My Head (by Sting, performed by Johnny Cash) with the crime of passion turned into a foolish accident – but the statement of mortality is infinitely true. It’s the young Trojan captive about to be killed by Achilles because we all die so why not now and why not by the hand of the near-God for anyone who kills you acts as God. Yes, I have always thought like that, more age appropriately and not as articulately, but I could put myself in Tom’s place except for the bad things he’d done because I’d never do that and yet life can kill you.
Another? Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane, but only some of the words, nearly all in the first and last verse. Each time I hear that song my head fills with an image of a young man leaving to go to war. It’s early morning and he goes in to kiss his little sister goodbye. She stirs for a moment and then goes to sleep but she gets up, walks into the hall, and sees her brother hug his mother and father goodbye at the bottom of the stairs. And then he opens the door. And he’s gone and she goes to the window and watches him get in a taxi. And then she’s sitting at the table and she looks at the place where he would be sitting. It’s sometimes a little boy. It’s sometimes a father leaving. But it’s always a leaving in the deepest sense of leaving: I may never be back and I promise you I’ll try to come home and I promise you I will always love you. It’s the Mudi of leaving.
If you don’t see a consistent theme, you’re not reading. This is me. Always has been. I’ve never controlled it. I’ve been controlled by it. I’m going to take this to a more private level of notes.
jomi: playing with perception 