Religious Stubbornness: "Pure Gold" by the Mountain Goats

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club 

Here is a psychedelic ditty inspired by a pinball machine: "Pure Gold" by the Mountain Goats.

 

What universe is this happening in? There's no way to make sense of these lyrics in terms of any recognizable situation. It's like we're on drugs. We just have to let go and let the trip unfold.

In This Year, commenting on this song, John Darnielle tells us about a pinball machine called Twilight Zone, which displays the message, "Don't touch the door." Does that help us to hear the song? It can, if it gets us to stop trying to piece together the dramatic moment in Darnielle's life that inspired the song. (Where I come from, we call that "irritable grasping after fact and reason.") Now we know that there was no such moment, only a message spelled out in little light bulbs that a young songwriter saw again and again until the phrase was burned into his mind.

But thousands of people saw that same message without writing this song. Darnielle wrote it because he declined to read the message simply as instructions for how not to lose at pinball. It was an inspiration, which means (if I may be permitted to say so) that it comes from some god. Yes, there are gods even in pinball machines. If that bothers you, just think of "god" as a word that means wherever songs come from.

Why would I call that a god? Well, I don't know about you, but I revere songs, especially when, like this one, they're bangers. To me a song like this is something holy. And when I find such piety in myself, I do what pious people do and insist on it with a religious stubbornness, even if it makes me look foolish. I insist that this is a revelation:

And all at once the street is filled with light,
and all at once, the street is filled with sound.

The revelation comes in the midst of dizziness and disorientation: the door burns, and the whole building turns. This is how it always is when a god draws near. It is, in Darnielle's words, "a whole scene." And finally, with everything lit and loud, we can say what we really need to say:

When I hold you, I know our number's being called somewhere.
Let them come on down.

The notion of a number being called is ambiguous. It's a date with destiny, but there's no way to know whether the couple is being called to beatitude or perdition. The call comes from an indefinite "somewhere." But in our enthusiasm, we are ready to face this uncertainty with our own call in return: "Let them come on down." Bring on whatever may come. This is how it always is when a god draws near.

I have questions:

1. Why is this song called "Pure Gold"? Is it synecdoche for what's worth holding on to, come what may?
2. Do you get the same vibe from this song without the harmonization? Here's a recording that mostly doesn't have it. To me it doesn't hit the same way.

 

The Fire of Love: "Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!" by the Mountain Goats

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club series. 

Here is a song about destruction, devotion, fire, and household chores: "Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!" by the Mountain Goats.

In his commentary in This Year, John Darnielle tells us that the effect of the song comes from the way the first stanza keeps building up the image with phrase after phrase extending the life of the sentence.

I used to think this kind of thing—layering categories onto a sentence—built intensity, because I'd misunderstood something Keats wrote about intensity in a letter, and I didn't think Keats could be wrong. But I hear what Darnielle is saying: it's actually languid, the way the syntax piles up like the winding path of a soft-serve ice cream: "there's a desire in the first stanza to linger, to repeat while we can, because it's going to get so active in the second one that the just-gone time of sought-after repetition will seem like a lost era of safety and known outcomes." 

At the same time, he also describes this sentence structure as continuously "tightening the knot": a more sinister image for the song's development. That all makes it sound like something terrible is going to happen in the second verse. And in a sense, it does, although not in a cataclysm of consequences, but in a loving touch:

your footprint on the snow was fresh and new
when you touched me I felt fire come through

We could take this fire as just a figure of speech for romantic excitement, but given the presence of real fire, maybe we can feel this "fire come through" a little harder than that. Fire is painful—purifying—purgatorial. Fire destroys. Fire is holy danger.

If the danger comes through in the form of the lover's touch, the "safety" of the first verse comes from the distance between them. They can see each other through the window, but not touch. But in the second verse, everything heralds the lover's arrival. The glow of the fire and the scent of the peach wood create a sense of the holy, like incense burning in a church, evoking a treasured memory and transforming the space, making it ready.

Then the lover approaches. Their footprint is "fresh and new," something surprising and unprecedented. There are no "known outcomes" here. This is how love comes into our lives, not with promises and assurances, but with an almost menacing unpredictability. As it draws close, we feel its heat, the heat of the ungovernable, terrible fire of love.

Framed by this encounter, the refrain takes on a religious depth:

I will do as I am told.
I will keep away the cold.
I will do as I am told.
I will keep away the cold.

This refrain is in what Darnielle calls the "incantatory mode," achieved through anaphora (repeating the first couple words in each line). It has the weight of a vow, uttered in fear and trembling. When the fire comes through, you can run away, or you can stand and let it take you. And you can't know whether this fire will destroy you or burn away everything small and petty in you.

As usual, I have some questions:

1. The title seems like something written on a marquee, but not the way it would be written. "Triple X" is written out as a phrase instead of as just "XXX." The "Love! Love!" might be a play on "Live!" But why? What is this title doing for the song?
2. Sometimes Darnielle belittles his older songs as being over-dramatic. And maybe that's all we have to say about the "killing floor." Is this literally happening outside of a slaughterhouse? Or is this just how the hero feels about the home they share with their lover? Why?
3. Does anyone know how a peach tree smells when it's burned? 

Romance of the Useless Key: "Third Snow Song" by the Mountain Goats

Here is a song about the lengths to which a man will go to read a plaque: "Third Snow Song" by the Mountain Goats.

 

This song refuses to state its theme. There is no refrain to tie it all together, no overt expression of what this all means. That makes commenting on it feel a lot like commenting on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. But you know me, have I ever been afraid to comment on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. The answer is no, I have never been afraid to comment on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. You know the poem, but don't you want the occasion to read it again?

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Here we have a poem that withholds its theme. That's because it wants to show you something, and telling you would just make you feel like you'd already seen it. That's why people talking about this poem inevitably keep repeating the poem to make their point. Reading the poem gives you the experience, and you can't do much more than point at it.

Darnielle's song is the same, but more so. He doesn't even tell you that a seemingly insignificant thing matters. He just makes it matter. Part of this is the repetition of certain lines (accompanied by the rare chord changes):

That's a whole lotta water.
That's a whole lotta water. 

These lyrics imitate the action (as my boy Aristotle would put it) of being astonished by something familiar. This river has been there forever, but our hero is seeing it as though it were a sudden event. Where this fits into the drama, insofar as this poem has a dramatic element, is that we were starting to wonder whether the hero might not just go home, it being so bitter cold. How will the sight of all this water affect him?

We don't know yet, but we see him, for some reason, removing a key from his key chain, a key he's "forgotten the purpose of." As we used to ask about MacGyver, what's he doing with that thing? That's how the drama develops, with the decision already made but the audience in the dark. We finally get an answer in the last lines:

I hammered it against the ice.
I hammered it against the ice. 

Evidently, he's decided to clear the bridge dedication with what he has available to him, and in doing so, he's given purpose to a purposeless thing. That's kind of romantic. It also is a reflection of what the song itself does: here we have someone taking one of the more useless things he's ever done and making it into a story about determination and resourcefulness. There are worse things you could do in a song.

Do I still have questions? Yes, I do: 

1.  It's left mysterious why the sight of the water affects the hero the way it does. Is this something we should try to fill in? If not, how do we receive Darnielle's withholding of the explanation? (This is a question I think we should ask about all Darniellean withholding.)
2. Like "The Recognition Scene," this song makes a lot out of something small and even a little feckless. Is there a similar inversion of genre here? Is there another formula Darnielle is messing with by undercutting an expectation of grandeur?
3. How cold is it where you are? It's getting warm again here in Texas.

John Darnielle's Anti-Tragedy: "The Recognition Scene" by the Mountain Goats

Here is a song, about stealing and gluttonously consuming sweets, that makes people cry: “The Recognition Scene” by the Mountain Goats.

The song gets its pathos from straddling past and future, fondly remembering anecdotes from an epic three-month candy crime spree and turning ahead in the chorus to a time of loss. The past, however, stubbornly refuses to give any clues to the future. Why will “you” be gone? We don’t have enough pieces to put together a definitive answer to that question. We may like to wonder about it, to toy with possibilities like we’re eating candy: are they going to jail, or leaving the country, or dying? We can entertain these possibilities freely, but not settle on one. You might say we… can’t break the code?

Another mystery: what is the recognition here? We have Darnielle’s explanation, in his book This Year, that the title comes from the theory of tragedy and refers to the moment when “the hero understands that he’s too deep in the machinery–the specific machinery of tragedy–to escape it alive.” But that’s no help. This “hero” doesn’t seem to expect to die; in fact, they expect to live a forlorn, perhaps painfully long life without “the only love [they]’ve ever known.” They certainly don’t meet the classic tragic criterion of being “good, but not preeminently good.” They’re just a feckless candy thief.

And why does the song keep repeating the same line? 

I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.
I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.

This doesn’t look like much on the page. And it breaks any realistic interpretation of the song as a speech directed at a lover. If they were speaking, they would wait to see how the other person responds, not repeat themselves. You may say that’s just something songs do. Fine. Then I will ask, why do songs do that? Why does this one? 

What is happening to us as we listen to this song? We inhabit two perspectives: because we are listening, we take on the position of the lover being addressed; at the same time, the story-telling mode invites us to identify with the hero, because that’s what we do when we hear a story. We take on both these positions without knowing much at all about either of them. 

This song is only a scene, not a whole tragedy, nor is it conventionally tragic. We drop in without all the context and without the benefit of the tragic formula, and we try to make shift. No sooner do we get a little orientation than we are thrown ahead without explanation into a moment of recognition about the future and held there. The repetition of the line (and of the same three beguiling chords) poetically expands that moment, prying it open so we can linger on it.

If you like this song, it’s probably because you feel something on the chorus. I can’t tell you what you’re feeling, but maybe you’ll recognize this: the anticipation of loss happens in a place outside of time; the past, present, and future are all wrapped together in a moment that does not simply arise and pass away but abides. This moment of recognition about the future, which is happening now, was already there on the surface of things in the remembered anecdote about the getaway car in the second verse:

I saw something written in tall, clear letters on your face,
but I could not break the code.

What the hero is seeing now was already published plainly as can be in the past they are remembering. You may disagree, but there is some irony, I think, in the hero’s observation that they couldn’t make head or tails of it. How can you not read what’s written large, loud, and right on the surface? 

Only in the tragic cloud of unknowing does this happen. The tragic hero does not see what’s happening, even if it’s in plain sight, until the moment of what the Greeks called anagnorisis (making-known-again), which is not a revelation but a kind of un-un-seeing. Oedipus knew exactly what he was going to have done–the Oracle told him–but he does not see himself doing it, doesn’t know he has done it until the recognition scene.

What is peculiar is that in watching Oedipus Rex, we know the key things that Oedipus doesn’t, but in listening to “The Recognition Scene,” our situation is the opposite: everything we want to know is withheld from us, leaving the anagnorisis floating almost free by itself, as if that were possible. 

That’s a neat trick, and I think it’s Darnielle’s invention in this song. I’m not saying he invented holding back key details. That’s not just in this song, and others have done it centuries before him. What’s new here is deploying this device to reverse a classic discursive structure. Sorry for saying “discursive structure” in a book club, by the way. I know that’s gauche. But I promise I’m not trying to show off my booklearning; “discursive structure” is just the only thing I know to call it when I’m talking about the shape of the relationship between participants in discourse (like an author and an audience, for example).

The classic discursive structure from Ancient Greek tragedy is one of dramatic irony: the audience already knows what the hero is going to recognize. In Darnielle’s invented anti-tragic form, the hero recognizes what the audience still wants to know.

Still, after all that, and recognizing the folly of asking, I have some questions:

1. How is stealing candy thematically appropriate? Adults committing a child’s sin? Something about What does that have to do with anagnorisis?
2. How much should we actually be thinking of the paradigm of Oedipus? Are there other tragic models we should consider?
3. Is there somewhere else we should be sharing thoughts and questions like these? We don’t want to show up a month late and claim ownership of a book club space that’s already more public than what we’re offering. YouTube doesn't seem to be a good forum for long-form writing. (By the way, in this phrasing, we’re channeling the spirit of a man who would sit down alone and say, “Hi, we’re the Mountain Goats.”)
4. If there isn’t such a space, is anyone interested in joining this one? I don’t think I have it in me to write one of these every day. Let me know if you want to join forces!

Why prison seems inevitable

Thanks to a recommendation from @eveewing on Twitter, I've started reading Angela Davis's slim but meaty volume, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Chapter 1 lays out the cultural and economic reasons why it's difficult even to raise the possibility that we might not need prisons to enjoy a peaceful society.

Prisons, Davis observes, are paradoxically both distant and omnipresent in our lives: we in "the free world" tend to think of them as a place where other people ("evildoers") go:

The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

The capitalistic system in which "migrating corporations" abandon vulnerable communities for cheaper labor provides the prison industrial complex with a rich source of potential inmates. Citing Ruth Gilmore, Davis points out that it also provides a receptive seedbed of communities eager to reap the promised economic benefits of building more prisons.

In the dramatic expansion of the prison system during the Reagan era, capitalism provided itself with a self-serving solution to the social problems created by its own social irresponsibility, by making them both profitable and invisible.

But even as the prison system, by design, hides itself from view, pervasive media images compel us to experience prison as something necessary and natural:

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.

Even though the massive expansion of the prison system in the United States has not delivered on its economic or social promises of kick-starting languishing economies or significantly reducing crime, it has long gone largely unquestioned. There has more recently been a growth in skepticism, but the discussion is dominated by reforms, rather than fundamental changes:

Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call lithe free world." How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

The one regulation that would free us all from Facebook

After Mark Zuckerberg's disappointingly deferential Senate hearing on Tuesday, the more strident and focused hearing in the House yesterday suggests that something like a bipartisan consensus is developing that Facebook should be regulated.

It may not be clear yet on what terms, or by what department, or as what kind of entity; but a definite sense transpired that Facebook and other companies like it (if indeed there are any other companies like it) cannot be trusted to manage its own responsibilities to us, its users.

What kind of regulations does Facebook need?

Yes, we can subject the company to external audits of its management of personal information. We can apply the regulations already in place for media companies and financial institutions and any of the many other pies Facebook has its fingers in. We can impose Zeynep Tufekci's proposed restrictions on data harvesting.

Probably we should do all those things.

But the real root of the issue, the reason why Facebook's business model is a national concern, is power.

Imagine that half the customers of an international enterprise think it's incompetent at the primary thing that company does to make money. It sounds ridiculous. Surely those customers would go find someone else to work with.

What could possibly keep them from doing that?

Why is it that literally half the people who use social media websites don't trust them to protect their data? How can that be? Why don't they "vote with their feet" and delete their accounts?

We know the answer. Ask any two Facebook users why they are on the platform, and one of them will tell you that it is only because it's "the only way they can keep in touch" with others on the platform.

And that's the power Facebook has over you. That's how they can keep you logging in even though you know damn well how reckless and manipulative (dare I say evil) they are.

They've got the family announcements, the party invitations, the baby photos, and the critical health updates on your sick grandmother, and they're not going to show you any of those unless you log in.

The whole issue of how to regulate Facebook would become much simpler if the half of Facebook's users who hate it could leave without losing access to to those updates.

And there's a fairly straightforward way to do that: require Facebook (and other social media services) to support remote following.

Which is what exactly?

What the hell is remote following, you ask? (Assuming it's not Facebook's new drone surveillance program.)

As countless explainers of decentralized social media have done before me, I will describe remote following in terms of an analogy to email.

What do you use for email? Yahoo? Gmail? Your own server?

Do you find it surprising that you can send emails to other people who use email, even though they're on different email platforms? Of course not. An email platform that didn't allow you to reach anyone with an email address on any other platform would be completely unacceptable.

There's no technological reason that social media services can't operate in exactly the same way. When you post on Facebook for all your followers to see, there's no reason why people whom you have allowed to follow you from other platforms shouldn't be able to see it too, whether they're on Twitter or The Wandering Shop or Kitty.Town.

If Facebook supported remote following, then a user on Friendica would be able to send you a follow request at say @earthling@facebook.com.

Or if Twitter supported it, you as a Facebook user could request to follow @notanalien@twitter.com.

Or as an octodon.social user, I could connect with your Google+ profile that you forgot you had by following @seriouslynotanalien@plus.google.com.

I Am Not Making This Up

This may all sound completely fanciful, but as a matter of fact, all of the social media sites linked above already do it! Users on any of these sites (as well as hundreds of others) can follow and share with users on the others (or opt not to share with those users).

That's remote following, and it's the only thing I want from Facebook.

Of course they'll never do that voluntarily. They profit immensely from the fact that people who don't in the least bit want to use Facebook nevertheless have to use it.

The only thing that makes Facebook special is that everyone you care about is on it. If you didn't have to be on Zuckerface to see updates from your friends and family, their iron grip on our online social infrastructure would break.

Suddenly the platform would become a commodity instead of a closed and centralized network. Suddenly we would no longer have to choose between protecting our privacy and interacting online with people we care about. Suddenly we would all be free from Facebook.

Make America All Right Again

This is a message to my friends, especially to pro-life Catholics, who voted for Trump.

First of all, we're still friends. I know that you're not ignorant, racist, misogynist fools, even though in my view you voted for one. I know you voted for him despite his faults, not because of them, with tears in your eyes, aghast that the future you've prayed so long for has come at this cost. And I sincerely hope that you get whatever goods you hoped for from this election, and that they are real and lasting goods.

But now is the time for you to own the secondary effects of your choice. You've held your nose at these festering facts, or simply denied them. I beg you to acknowledge now that electing Donald Trump will have many evil effects that you did not intend in voting for him. I beg you to pledge now to do all you can for the next four years to mitigate these effects.

First, there's a reason that the KKK officially endorsed Donald Trump and are celebrating. You're not a racist, but your ballot doesn't know that, the numbers don't show it, and white supremacists everywhere believe that your vote meant one thing: that this nation belongs to white Christians and everyone else can step aside. They will be emboldened, because they know now that in America, you don't have to suppress your hatred anymore. People of color are going to suffer, and though you didn't mean it, you did this to them. Please work actively to improve their lot. It's not enough for you "not to see race." You need to see it now. You need to assess with disciplined honesty the realities of racial injustice, and work in your own spheres of influence and in local elections to amend them. Call your representatives and demand that they make race issues a priority. You don't want this to be David Duke's country. Don't let him have it.

Second, it's not debatable whether Trump objectifies women. It's practically his brand. There is no way that his deep-seated disrespect for women will not manifest in his activities as a public servant. And the very fact of his presidency will not have a regressive impact on our culture. You're not a misogynist, but your ballot doesn't know that, the numbers don't show it, and misogynists everywhere believe that your vote meant one thing: that objectifying women is fine; they can say what they want about women; they can do what they want. Women are going to suffer, and though you didn't mean it, you did this to them. Please speak out against misogyny and rape culture, whether it marches proudly in the light of day or winks and signals and acts polite. Wherever you can, wherever you have an influence, make room for women.

Third, Muslims in America are rightly terrified about their future. America has elected a man who has called for a ban on Muslims entering the country, frequently employed inflammatory rhetoric against Islam (often not even bothering to hedge with the usual "radical" tag), and blamed Muslims for our country's failures in preventing terrorist actions. (To be fair, at the last debate, Clinton subsequently took the mic and did the same.) Even if he never implements any of these policies, his election will likely stoke an increase in violence and harassment against Muslims in America (just as the success of Brexit did in Britain.) You don't think "Islam hates us," but your ballot doesn't know that, the numbers don't show it, and Islamophobes everywhere believe your vote means one thing: Muslims don't belong here. Muslims are going to suffer, and though you didn't mean it, you did this to them. Please, work to spread understanding and quell ungrounded fear about Islam. Watch for and report anti-Muslim discrimination. Develop a sensitivity to Islamophobic language and tropes and call them out in media and in your social life.

(As a side note, here's something you can do if you are witnessing an act of harassment. The case described is Islamophobic harassment but the technique can apply as well to any case.)

Fourth, I'm sure everyone knows how much Trump's newfound enthusiasm for the rights of LGBTQ people is worth. It's a transparent extension of his antipathy to Islam. "I'll protect you from those bad Muslims" is his whole promise to them. He will do nothing for them when there is still so much more that has to be done. And his running mate openly regards homosexuality as a mental disorder. You have nothing but love for the LGBTQ community, but your ballot doesn't know that, the numbers don't show it, and actual homophobes everywhere believe your vote means one thing: queerness is criminal. LGBTQ people are going to suffer, and though you didn't mean it, you did this to them. Please, listen to the fears of your friends, family, and loved ones and fight to defend them.

Finally, there are all the matters of policy on which Donald Trump is inclined to blunder. Contact your representatives and urge them to pressure the president-elect on the many issues on which his policies are so flawed: police reform, stewardship of the environment, and immigration, to name the few that loom largest in my mind. You have less power on these issues than on the cultural concerns, but your voice matters.

If all of this sounds very "PC" to you, remember that the new political correctness in America is to sweep all these concerns under the rug and pretend they don't matter. Be better than the hateful culture you're unlucky enough to be stewing in. Please, you can't be indifferent to the evils that the Trump presidency, the one you chose, will cause. We need your help now to make America all right again.

Edited 2016-11-09 @ 8:04PM: the original version of this article neglected to address the effects of Trump/Pence on the LGBTQ community.