This is kind of the opposite of the 'old Country sound' post. This was never a beautiful song as a punk rock bit. Put in this context, and it suddenly is.
Somehow it's not even ironic that a guy in clown makeup is singing the thing straight, which the original band couldn't do. The irony of being a clown cancels out the irony of being sincere, owning the emotions honestly and expressing them truly. I have trouble doing that myself, sometimes. There's a huge weight. Maybe I'm getting better at being honest about my feelings; maybe.
In the end the band stops playing after several renditions of "Carry me home," with the last one being incomplete. The band simply walks away, muted, sad. This is exactly how life leaves us: finally, home no longer exists. The home of my youth, which I dream about almost every night, has been washed away by time. There's no home to go to.
So perhaps felt Chesterton, who sought another home in Mary.
And I thought, "I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like yourself, goes on."
O go you onward; where you are
Shall honour and laughter be,
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me.
Ride through the silent earthquake lands,
Wide as a waste is wide,
Across these days like deserts, when
Pride and a little scratching pen
Have dried and split the hearts of men,
Heart of the heroes, ride.
Up through an empty house of stars,
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
I make no apology for linking a punk rock song to punishing questions of metaphysics. It only proves that punk rock is a real form of art; it can be, at least, even if it needs the double-blind form of a painted clown singing it to make it clear.
7 comments:
You know, I looked up the original and the clown is much less ridiculous.
For years, one after another of my grandfather's parents, aunts and uncles, then siblings and friends, and finally his wife, all passed away.
I guess kids and grandkids and great grandkids are different. He loved us, but there was always a loneliness then. All the rest in the generations before and all the rest of his generation that he loved were gone.
He was home, physically. He retired to the farm he grew up on. But everyone else had gone on, and it wasn't home anymore.
Yeah, that’s it. God’s put us on a hard road.
He might say, “It could have been worse,” and with justice. He could have made it as bad as hell. We don’t deserve any better, because every man is damnable. We are, though, because God made us this way. He made a world of extraordinary beauty, in which we all must kill to live: even plants and trees, and only more so we who think of ourselves as the higher animals. They are all predators, the higher animals. So are we, apex killers, the greatest in the world.
Yes. My grandfather taught me that about farming. Although he didn't make a living farming after his 40s, he always had 1-2 acres in gardens. In his late 80s he quit. This was disturbing to me, and I asked why he quit.
He said something to the effect of, "I couldn't kill the critters fast enough to save any for us to eat anymore."
I keep this in mind when I meet vegetarians and vegans, but I'm not so impolitic as to bring it up.
I've tried to dodge this issue forever. Over five decades in the same house (a short gap around college), and it's still home- the house is. The neighborhood it's in and the city of L.A. that I knew and loved in my youth? Dead and gone. More and more I want out, not just because of the insane politics, but because it's not "home" anymore. The house is my refuge in the midst of a surround of strange lands.
Ultimately, I guess we realize everything here is transitory- time ticks, the stream flows, and the only true home we'll ever really know is in the next life.
Heh- was just thinking I must bore the kids to tears with my constant note of some local edifice saying "you know back when I was young, that was...."(whatever it used to be). Ah, well. Can't fault a man for reminiscing.
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