Where Is My Mind: "Going to Port Washington" by the Mountain Goats

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club.

Here is a love song that will turn your mind inside out: "Going to Port Washington" by the Mountain Goats.

This song does more scene-setting than a lot of songs by the Mountain Goats. It's cinematic in its approach. The first lines show us the broad context, then we zoom in further and further until we are looking at the highlights in the beloved's hair. This movement draws together images with a mood-setting chord progression to build a home for a simple act of perception, transforming that perception into a puzzle piece perfectly slotting into place.

The trees were all decked out in their best fall colors;
there was a snap in the air
when you eased down the window
and the New York sun brought out the highlights in your hair

Rhyming the very long fourth line with the very short second one is something that works in a song that wouldn't work as well in a poem. It would rather make you sound like Ogden Nash. But in a song, it can have the effect of blowing time open, proving that there was always more room than you thought. That fourth line starts on a pickup and then loads up every beat. There is just so much to say for the "highlights in your hair."

This cosmetic image turns out to be cosmic in weight:

and gently, gently 
the constellations aligned

Those highlights, framed by the arboreal finery around them, sharpened by the brisk air, and illuminated by the gentle touch of the sun, are miraculous. And you know what that means: Amos is going to talk about gods again.

Miracles bespeak a divine neighborhood. Here we have a local god: "the New York sun." That phrase subtly belies what we assume to be obvious, namely, that there is only one sun, about 93 million miles away. To speak of "the New York sun" is to invoke a sun belonging especially to one little world, a sun that is not principally a giant ball of flaming plasma in the far distance, but a god whose dwelling place is a house built of trees, air, and human agency.

The meaning of the divine action of the sun is left unsaid:

and as we crossed over the Throg's Neck Bridge
I had something on my mind

What does the hero have on their mind? Not some abstract reflection, to be sure; the scene is too concrete to accommodate any such thing, and gods don't generally go in for philosophical puzzles anyway. It's also not something the hero could just say, or they would say it, wouldn't they?

Just at the moment when the whole song comes together into the hook, the moment in most songs when things are said outright and unfurled, when all is revealed—at just this moment, like Shifu snatching the dumpling out of the bowl before Po can snag it, the song turns the information knob all the way down. This is Darnielle's kind of refrain, in that it refrains from telling us what we most want to know. Is he cruelly taunting us by withholding this information? Or is he writing songs about things that can only be said by not saying them?

"Something on my mind" is what you say when you are visited, at your innermost inmost, by an ineffability, an unsayable inkling. Granted, it could also be what you say when you have an idea as clear as day to you, but that you can't get into a form that will pass all your communication filters (your anxieties, your principles, your commitments, and your desires). But the constellations have aligned, and what does that mean if not that everything is propitious to the arrival of this "something"? Nothing is in the way, but the "something" remains incommunicable because that's just the kind of something it is.

We have another encounter here with "the developing urgency of the second verse." It starts gently enough, but then it builds in intensity starting on line 4, which is rhymed more rapidly with line 3 instead of 2, plus an internal rhyme for an extra punch:

I could feel the new day dawn
and somebody'd gone and turned the waterworks on 

What are those waterworks? Fountains? Sprinkler systems? Gushing fire hydrants? It's hard to say exactly. The line is under-defined because the exact image isn't as important as the feeling it evokes of an unpredictable power being unleashed. It's apocalyptic, in the sense of a veil being drawn away, and nothing being the same. New day, new visions of the future:

and slowly, surely
I saw the whole story unwind

But is that "unwind" benign or malignant? Is the story spooling out according to plan or losing cohesion and falling apart? Once again, we can't know, and this not knowing is part of what we are trying to know. Not knowing is essential to the experience because this is a love song, and love is dangerous, uncertain ground. Accordingly, the return of the refrain is couched in terms of love:

I had never loved anyone like I loved you
and I had something on my mind 

We might be tempted for a moment to think that at last the hero has come out with it and told us what's on their mind: it's love, duh. But the conjunction "and" belies that interpretation: besides love, in addition to love, there is also the ineffability, the god who arrives amidst the danger of love, touching hair to light, working mischief on the municipal water supply.

When this happens, when a god draws near, what do we do? Worship? Obey? That's what's typically done with gods, but this song suggests a different kind of religion. We do not see the hero moved to any action, but only a kind of keeping: they keep returning to the refrain, a saying that keeps silence and keeps a place safe for the dwelling of the god. 

Or is this keeping, this god-guardianship, itself a kind of action? That depends on what kind of place the mind is. Is it an inside, hermetically sealed off from the outside world of action, the kind of interiority that makes philosophers worry about the "mind-body problem"? Or is the mind already on the outside, in the sun, at the mercy of the waterworks, permeating the world of action?

The answer lies in the form of the song itself. If we assume that the mind is its own place, separate and enclosed, then the refrain is on a different track from the rest of the song. That something is on the hero's mind is just another piece of information dropped in out of the blue. This interpretation just doesn't hit.

If, instead, the mind is out there in the world, then the way I feel about the refrain makes some kind of sense. It is not a sudden, jarring turn from the outside to the inside, but the natural end point of a path we can follow from the trees to the air to the hair to the mind. The song's arrival at the mind feels motivated and cohesive.

Then the hero's having something on their mind is indeed a kind of action. If the world is the home of the mind, then the action of god-guardianship transforms the world.

I still have questions:

1. Does it make sense to talk about cause and effect here? Does the action of the sun cause the arrival of that something on the mind? Or are they the same thing? And does the something on the mind cause the emergence of the new day in the second verse?
2. If my talk of gods rubs you the wrong way, why is that?