blowing on subject of image

I’m not a great ‘Joni fan’ but one song – ‘Hejira’ – exerts a mesmerizing power. I don’t know if this is due to simple association, one of those songs which you cannot hear without remembering rooms and occasions, making the lyric content effectively irrelevant. Maybe. Or perhaps it is the musical composition and performance, Pastorius’ bass being especially evocative. Or do Mitchell’s lyrics possess a power of their own? Should song lyrics be able to sustain the same level of scrutiny as a poem intended for the page?

Let’s see.

First, I’m struck by how the centred lyrics in the CD booklet lose the run-on effect of the writing. I wouldn’t go so far as to break the lines into 4-line verses either – although it’s clear she’s working an abcb rhyme throughout. I notice, too, that she tends to employ quite open vowel rhymes – “café”/”away”, “resign”/”line” – allowing for the singing voice to linger and reinforce the wistful mood of the song’s argument.

Next, the unabashed use of “I” in full autobiographical mode. There seems no possibility of taking this as a ‘persona’. Even when Mitchell claims “I see something of myself in everyone” this seems very different to Whitman’s “I” containing “multitudes”. This is not a transcendence of Self but its intensification. If you like Mitchell’s albums then you buy into this confessional “I”. If not, you better look elsewhere.

I detect Beat influences – or, at least, sympathies - in her spooling lines, the ‘on the road’ scenario as the fundamental metaphor of male-female relationships. The generic “vehicle” and “café” in which she finds herself are also suggestive of hip, bohemian lifestyles. Furthermore, the upfrontness of feeling, MY pain, MY suffering has a sexual politics that has to be considered against simple narcissism.

Looking at the lyric as 4-line verses, a recurrent tendency emerges in terms of Mitchell’s handling of imagery. She has a liking for a two-line assertion – typically of feelings or a philosophical truism which is then ‘grounded’ by an image. For example:

“There’s a comfort in melancholy
When there’s no need to explain
It’s just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today”

There are two interesting qualifications – i) where the image (typically from nature) is itself anthropomorphicized – “moody weather”; ii) where the image itself is highly abstract – “Whether you travel the breadth of extremities/Or stick to some straighter line”. The latter image would not be out of place in an Emily Dickinson poem.

However, it is in these lines that the song seems to crystallize:

"White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room”

In terms of argument, the climax would seem to be lines 29-32 (“I know – no one’s going to show me everything/We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone”) but – to my mind – she is being too explicit, too much is being asserted, the imagery too available.

What’s so powerful about the “White flags” sequence is the absence of explicit statement – although the idea of surrender can easily be related back to the “petty wars” of the opening lines. There is something compelling about the movement from overtly ‘poetic’ images (snow plus moon) to the ‘realism’ of finance and modern architecture, coupled with two shifts of perspective (the chimneys reflected in windows, themselves seen from a room, by implication the viewer/singer detached and lost). Imagine Zukofsky being given the lyric – might these be the lines he’d leave intact?

Yet what might satisfy the Objectivist might not work so well as a song lyric. For the power of these lines is inseparable from the gradual build-up of sounds & cadence. Mitchell’s lyrics have their own music – before we need to talk about the instrumentation. Taking lines 29-32 again, listen to the ‘o’ sound as it echoes through “know”, “no one”, “going”, “show”, “go”, “so”, “stone” – arguing against my earlier accusation about the “forceps:stone” imagery. Sound-wise it is merited. Now turn up the music itself and lyric and composition work to reinforce each other as the bass – always that bass – sounds those mournful “o’s”.

I’m not sure what to do with Mitchell’s – probably? – unconscious punning (“Benny/bene”, “Goodman/good man”, “porous/poor us”) but who cares? Her voice ‘plays’ the words adding meanings by means of intonation. Her vocal is – as such – the top part. This is the melody, the sax solo. Her lines achieve - like Kerouac at his best - that breathing “beat”. Maybe that’s what works the magic?