Prophetic Men and Music

I am happy to say that I've got A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall pretty down pat. I just played it again after a few days not and made it all the way through without reading or stopping, which started one of the more satisfying rounds of music I've had in a while. Sometimes you get in a mood that you just don't want to change, but all things have a right ending. I played a few songs in between - an old original that has never been better, free falling (for old times sake, one of the first songs I learned on guitar freshman year - I remember being corrected on the strumming of part of it but just not getting it at the time), Josh Ritter's Potter's Wheel (another hard one to remember, though not quite as bad as Dylan's), and finally, just playing around with the sounds of the guitar and coming up with something right and letting it naturally end. I remember once seeing a spiritual show - I was recruited to help out ushering through someone I met at work - in a giant church in west downtown-ish Portland, by that long park with the statue fountains. There was chanting in sanskrit and spiritual sing alongs to lines like 'there is so much magnificence...near the ocean...near the ocean...' and I think my favorite part was when the husband (of the husband and wife duo) started playing a Beatles song and the wife wasn't too happy about it. (They also had an amazing young Indian-flute player.) But they were big on letting their songs fade out into complete silence; there was no clapping to cover that moment. They went so far as to say that that was the point, or the best part, which they probably meant (it was something to do with the spiritual part, I suppose). All this to say it is nice to play music alone and almost unheard so you can sustain the mood even after.
I wanted to follow up the last post about the Hard Rain with a quote from Nietzsche about prophetic men. Why? A lot of what I like about that song is its almost biblical feeling of prophecy - the young man comes home with mysterious insights which are portents to him of a certain kind of future. There's something powerful in prophecy, or at least in the ability to appear prophetic, which makes it something desirable - like, ooh, I would like to be like that. I'd like to write that kind of song, I'd like to make that kind of work of art (예술품), I'd like to be that kind of person. Enter Nietzsche with a response to this kind of feeling that arises in the admiring spectator. The passage is from the Gay Science (316):

Prophetic men.--You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic men are men who suffer a great deal: you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful "gift," and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity of the air and clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example (as may be observed even in Europe, and not only in zoos--namely, on Gibraltar). But we do not heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly changes into negative electricity, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: they do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel.

I like this passage - it's a good reprimand, and it is somehow comforting to think that prophetic men had to suffer for their 'gift' and didn't just get a handout in it - it makes the world seem both more expansive (there are whole feelings we don't know) and more just (if they had to suffer, they earned it). I also like the parable he uses to illustrate it just in itself - the idea that animals can predict the weather because they feel the pain from it, they feel it as an enemy - a good imaginative leap on N's part (more feelings we have no idea of), and dramatically-written. I'm curious about the pseudo-scientific reasoning he gives for it - a cloud's strong positive electrical charge suddenly changing to electricity to cause animal pain? Is that explanation really dated or naive or does something along those lines happen? (I clearly know no science.) And finally, I like that there actually are monkeys in Gibraltar, in England, and that Nietzsche took the trouble to point out that he knew this. I wonder, did he actually go there to look at the monkeys? Imagine that scene, complete with the spectacles and mustache. Or, as is more likely (and less funny), did he just hear an account of the monkey-viewing from an acquaintance or friend? Finally, telling us at the beginning of the passage that we "have no feeling for that fact that" prophetic men suffer humanizes them and is a call for us to feel compassion for them rather than applaud them as a phenomenon. I remember somewhere else in Nietzsche's corpus (I'm not going to bother finding out where) he characterizes the artist or poet more generally as one who suffers and tries to communicate his pain, only to be met by cheers and enthusiasm for it. It's an idea I've come across before - take one of Dylan's later great albums, Blood On the Tracks - he names it that for a reason. Those are some of the most pain-filled songs I know. "You're a Big Girl Now" "If You See Her Say Hello" and "Buckets of Rain," for instance. And a more living case - I once worked at a show for a singer-songwriter named Ellis, who was one of the most engaging performers in that between songs, she talked a lot and laughed like a dork in a way that made people happy and really like her. Her audience loved her, anyway. During the show, after a round of making everybody laugh, she said that she was so surprised at a show earlier that week when an audience member approached her and asked her how she could be so happy all the time. She didn't know she appeared that way, and told that girl something like, "Happy? Are you kidding? I was crying my eyes out an hour ago!" And everybody, her included, laughed about that one too.
Anyway, it's all well and good to wish to be prophetic, wish to be an artist, wish to be profound, what have you. But it's also good to recognize that in order to avoid being fake or superficial about it, to avoid pursuing an image of it (imagining yourself from an audience's point of view), going with this wish is also being okay with being unhappy for a lot of it. Maybe one does not want to suffer that much for it, maybe one is not strong enough to do so, and there's something to be said for that, too.
But the best part was about the monkeys on Gibraltar. It cracks me up that Nietzsche made a point of that. Apparently they're called Barbary Macaques, they don't have tails, and it is theoretically punishable by law to feed them.

Hard Rain

I want to memorize the lyrics to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall so I can play the song without looking them up on the computer. It's such a fun song to play, I promise. I just came across a cover of it by Jason Mraz (track 10 here), and though he plays well overall I don't like it. He does things like throw in "you bet it's a hard rain" or "I met a man who was wounded in love 'til I met another man who was wounded in hatred", showing that he doesn't have the proper respect for the lyrics - he just adds in words as filler that either add nothing to the meaning or changes it in a dumb way (what does it mean to meet someone until you meet someone else?). He also changes the guitar and makes slight changes in vocal rhythm, and the guitar is nice and more pretty-sounding, but one of my favorite things about playing the song is the relentless 3/4 rhythm of it - the strumming goes 1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3& (you get the idea) and that rhythmic effect is one of the two main aspects of the song that gives it its hypnotic effect. The other is the held-back quality of the lyrics - there seems to be a lot behind each line but we're not given enough to easily figure out what they mean. A series of cryptic, non-rhyming lines is usually a recipe for bad lyrics, but this song is saved by two things - its form, which gives it some degree of structure and coherence, and the lines themselves, which are both poetic and all fit together in a certain mood if nothing else.
I recently read an essay by Phillip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass, about the writing of Richard Dawkins, in which he observes that a crucial feature of good writing is to maintain a sense of the bigger picture in the readers. Part of the reason Lord of the Rings is so successful, according to Pullman, is that we know that everything that happens works towards a bigger, simple goal - Frodo has the drop the Ring of Power into Mount Doom and destroy it. Pullman thinks Dawkins is good at providing a big picture view like this in his scientific writing. (It's also a big part of Nietzsche's appeal - his claim to thoughts that 'span millenia' and make you feel as if you understand the basic direction of the Western tradition since the Ancient Greeks.) I think the Dylan song here is held together by a bigger picture as well, though it's kind of hard to articulate. We're listening to a dialogue and can sense the situation - a young traveler has just returned and is being asked about his journey by someone older who seems to know, love and understand him: calling the traveler "my darling young one" repeatedly and asking a follow up question after each answer, in increasing urgency - oh, where have you been? what did you see? what did you hear? who did you meet? And the son answers each time in such a way that his listener understands him but we only get a sense of what the listener is hearing. The son predicts some momentous happening beyond our comprehension, some disaster, some hard time, which leads the listener to ask the hardest question of all - what'll you do now, with your knowledge? And without a glitch in the rhythm, this elicits the final verse, which is pretty much heroic. And it's the last line before the refrain that gets me as I'm trying to play it, knowing that I don't know the lyrics or understand them but I'm warbling it anyway - "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." That's why I'd like to memorize the song, repeat it, and take the time to try to understand it, all just so I can really play it. That's also why I don't like it when someone musically talented like Jason Mraz plays it and is just singing words and making everything sound soft and emotional and pretty. He gets this last line slightly wrong and then repeats it (for emphasis of its significance, which he doesn't understand), saying "I'll know my songs well before I start singing," as if Dylan is just talking about making sure he's rehearsed his set list enough.
I guess the important thing that holds together the son's report on his journeys is that it seems like he was changed by everything he saw. A lot of it is charged with disillusionment and compassion, noticing the injustices, the outcasts, the unfairness of life among ignorance of it - obviously with "I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'; I heard the song of a poet who died in a gutter; I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley". But it seems like an honest and not all that happy look at life in its human complexities, one that necessitates the conclusion that we're up to a hard time and a challenge, which is what makes the last verse as inspiring as it is: he'll go straight to the heart of it, the worst of it, in order to reflect it to all of us and bring it out, and I think that's what he means by the song he has to know well, which why I think it misunderstands him to carelessly pluralize it.
Let us know if you have any thoughts on the song, the lyrics, the cover, any specific literary references you think he may be making, the state of the world, or whatever. I guess it's just worth mentioning at the end here though that the question and answer format of the song is based on an old ballad called Lord Randall, published by Francis James Child, and in that song the son character is telling his mother about being poisoned.

UPDATE: video clips from Christmas Day (they're cut off pretty suddenly).

Coming Home

Hello everybody! I admit I've been lax on the blog posts lately, but many things have been happening. Since my last post, I've flown from Korea via Bay Area back to Portland Oregon, and from there down to my country home in Roseburg to recover from jet lag.
There is a part of me that would like to be multilingual and international - this part wants me to go back to Korea for a long time and really get a grip of the language; it also makes me want to spend at least a year in Germany in order to rescue the language skills I learned in college. How great it'd be to move between those three languages - English, German, and Korean - I'd feel quite cool. But another part of me recognizes that that sounds like too much effort. It's a big relief being back in my home state where I understand the culture and the store signs, street signs, newspapers, and magazines are all in my native language. There's a strain to being a foreigner, and sometimes it doesn't seem like a bad idea to save your travel money and stay home.
Oregon is beautiful, too. As obvious as this may seem, it's striking, especially from the air as the plane starts coming down, that there are a lot of trees. Also, the hills are beautiful this time of year with all the soft grays of the oaks. Oregon may not have dazzling fall colors, but the subtlety of the colors in winter are awesome. Though I don't have any winter photos of Oregon right now (my camera having been on my Korean phone), here a few late summer pictures of my state from before I left.