On the customs of country (music).

I've been listening to a fair bit of country music lately, including not only long-time favorites like the Carter Family, the Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and the alt-country I'd begun to learn about in the past couple of years (Miranda Lambert, Shelby Lynne ...), but for the first time some contemporary pop country: the ones you see in commercials or gossip pages, Brad Paisley and Shania Twain and those. Now, I claim no expertise on this. Zero. I've barely begun to delve; all I have is one boxed set (here's the track listing). But two traits have fascinated me: the musical indistinguishability (often) of country pop from "mainstream" pop, and the utterly distinct rhyming patterns of contemporary country pop lyrics.

About the first I haven't much to say. I'm sure it's been said: Sugaland sounds like the easy-listening music I heard when accompanying my mother to get a haircut when I was a kid, Martina McBride sounds like remastered seventies hits. The very idea of "a country beat so strong" (Jasmine Rae, "Country Singer") came as a shock to me. That's not there in the country I'm used to, which is mostly from before it had crystallized as a genre -- so really, regional folk music -- and from the late sixties country-rock boomlet. The heavy, often slick, production is unfamiliar, too -- since I don't even listen to the pop music it's drawn from. Yet half the songs explicitly self-identify as country, and most of the singers sing with a Southern accent. Explicit self-reference returns with an obsession barely heard in rock and roll since the Beatles and no longer a focus in hip-hop for many, many years. The titles alone: "Country Singer," "Little Miss Honky Tonk," "Planet Country," "Where I Come From," "Maybe It Was Memphis," "Giddy On Up," "Chasin' Rodeo," "Redneck Woman" ... I don't know whether it's defensiveness, or acknowledgment that the division between country and "mainstream" popular music is sociological and commercial rather than musical; and that even the divided intermingle closely. I'm not really sure what qualifies Brenda Lee ("I'm Sorry" -- that song from the diaper commercials) or Ryan Adams as country even sociologically.

So that's one thing. It prompts me to comment also that some of this is wonderful music. Almost all of these people are technically accomplished performers, some with charisma that survives delocation. Some of them are exceptionally talented singers and a few appear to be exceptionally talented songwriters. Most of them have probably deserved their success in one way or another, insofar as people can be said to deserve success. No attacks here. (Speaking of defensiveness ... )

The second thing, about the rhyme: I've never heard other kinds of pop so thoroughly embrace such loose, assonance-based rhyme patterns. "Commitment/ Someone who'll go the distance" and "Commitment/ And everything that goes with it" aren't rhymes if Gaga or Britney or -- perhaps more likely -- Beyonce sings them. They just aren't. But Leann Rimes takes them seriously as rhymes. "All of my life I've spent hoping/ That I could give someone-a such devotion" isn't a rhyme except when Kenny Chesney sings it.

Of course hip-hop has a long and illustrious tradition of stretching rhyme -- but that's because the extraordinary rhyme density demanded wouldn't be possible without it, and further the performers make a lot of effort to make things rhyme. "Stepped out the house and stopped short -- oh no! Went back in, I forgot my Kangol" wouldn't rhyme if it were me saying it, but Slick Rick doesn't say it, he raps it, and there you have it. Compare further:

Take a little trip, hater, pack up your mind
Look forward not behind, then you'll see what you find
I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought could rhyme
Now if his momma is a quarter, daughter must be a dime
I gotta meet her, don't take no shorts. I don't use abbrevi-
-ation, I don't even play the radio neither,
Only if I need to know the sports or the weather

(yes, fine, I also only know old and famous hip-hop) with

Heads Carolina, tails California
Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer
Up in the mountains, down by the ocean
Where it don't matter, long as we're goin'
Somewhere together -- I've got a quarter
Heads Carolina, tails California.

"Quarter"/"daughter" isn't a perfect rhyme, but it's a lot closer than "quarter"/"fornia." Besides which, obviously, Andre 3000 is propelled forward by the rhymes, unevenly and in unforeseen directions, whereas Jo Dee Messina uses them to circle back to her opening line. They're both trying to say something more complicated than can be easily done with "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza pie"-style rhyming; so JDM takes some liberty with bourgeois rhyming conventions, and Andre takes some liberty with bourgeois conventions of linear speech. Really interesting.

Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:

I was chasin' sun on 101 somewhere around Ventura
I lost a universal joint and I had to use my finger
This tall lady stopped and asked if I had plans for dinner
Said, "No, thanks, ma'am, back home we like the girls that sing soprano."

That's from Allan Jackson, "Where I Come From," and he really is doing what Andre (and Big Boi; not so much Killer Mike) and Slick Rick did in the cited songs. He's taking words whose assonances and consonances you wouldn't even notice -- Ventura, finger, dinner, soprano (pronounced "sopranner") -- and stringing them into a loosely told story whose point is the perspective of the singer more than any particular tale being told. He's using delivery to create rhyme, and from those rhymes emerges a character. Good stuff.

On the image of God.

Κύδιστ’ ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε παγκρατὲς αἰεί,
Ζεῦ φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μετὰ πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε· σὲ γὰρ καὶ πᾶσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν.
Ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα, θεοῦ μίμημα λαχόντες
μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζώει τε καὶ ἕρπει θνήτ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν·

Noblest of immortals, many-named, omnipotent,
Zeus, First Cause of nature, helmsman by law --
Greetings. Appropriately I address you though mortal,
For we are born of you; we possess the image of god
Alone who live, and crawl earthbound, and will die.

-- Cleanthes, "Hymn to Zeus" ll. 1-5 (3rd century BCE)


I have been thinking a lot about what Cleanthes -- the second head of the Stoics -- can mean when he says we have the image of God. He doesn't mean what Genesis 1:26-27 means, whatever one makes of it: "And God said, 'Let us make Adam [or: "a man"] in our image, after our likeness ...' And God made Adam in his* image: in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them." The surprising plural (the verb for "said" is singular, as usual with that grammatically plural term for the divine, and Hebrew has no "royal 'we'"); the image and likeness, and then "likeness" dropped in the following parallelism; the juxtaposition of biological sex with the image of God -- they are not the same as Cleanthes' mysteries. Yet the question is the same, and comparison may illuminate. In any event it is impossible to read Cleanthes without hearing the Bible, so we may as well put that to work.

In one way his version should be easier to fathom, for he has more explicit ideas about what God is made out of than does Genesis -- so that it should be easier to understand what an image or likeness or representation (the Greek "mimema" can mean all of those and more) might be. Genesis often speaks as though God had a body, but never -- except here? -- gives any clue as to what such language might refer to. On the other hand, Cleanthes, like all orthodox Stoics, is a pantheist: he believes that "God" and "the universe" do not name or describe distinct entities, he believes that there is no piece of the universe that is not God -- not only not divine, but not God. So the initial clarity gives way immediately to fog. Cleanthes's God does at least have a clear material content, the sort of thing of which a likeness could exist -- but by virtue of the very same thesis, that God is the universe, we lose sight of what it could mean to single out a part of that universe as specially divine.

As Cleanthes was clear where Genesis said nothing, so oppositewise Genesis tells more than Cleanthes about what it means that Adam is made in the image of God. For the ellipsis above covers the omission of a sentence about ruling birds and beasts and land and so on. The plan is clear, if not the execution: God intended Adam to mimic the divine insofar as Adam was intended to rule Eden.

So far we have three options, none of which suits Cleanthes' purposes as stated:

(1) "The image of God" refers to God's physical pattern or shape. Our bodies -- both male and female -- reflect God's body because they resemble it.
(2) "The image of God" refers to God's material composition. As God is made of [body and spirit? spirit only?], so too are we -- and we alone.
(3) "The image of God" refers to God's role in the natural hierarchy. As God rules the universe, we rule our patch of earth.

Genesis endorses (3) and, at least on the face of it, (1). (2) is a part of the way it is often taught among the traditionally religious, in my experience: not that as God is body and spirit so too are we (though perhaps Christians, who do believe that God has been mortal flesh, accept this), but that we have some special divine feature not shared by e.g. table lamps, or cobras. There is also a non-corporeal way of taking the patterns mentioned in (1): as God is merciful, so must we be merciful, as God is just so must we be just, as God feeds the poor and clothes the naked we too must do all we can to leave the world better than we found it. I do not include this as an interpretative option since "image of God" has given way to "imitation of God"; but anyway it is a famous midrashic interpretation. (See Talmud Yerushalmi Peah 15b; Sifre Deuteronomy 11:22; Bavli Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah on 23:19; probably more places.)

A fourth option is suggested by the more macabre invocation at Genesis 9:6:

"Who spills a man's blood, by a man shall his blood be spilt, for God created man [or: a man; Adam] in his image."

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity. As we have obligations to God [the passage's context is God reexplaining to Noah how he is to live after he emerges post-diluvian from the Ark], so we have obligations to other human beings, for which God holds us accountable and expects us to hold each other accountable. (This interpretation of Genesis gains some support from its connection with Leviticus 19:2 -- "You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy" -- and Deuteronomy 13:5 -- "After the Lord your God you shall walk.")
****************

With these options on the table, back to Cleanthes. He means a little of each of these, I think, but none of them as stated.

(1) "The image of God" refers not to God's physical pattern or shape but to the shape of a divine life. We participate in God's image insofar as what we require to succeed in life is to resemble God more and more.

(2) "The image of God" refers not to God's material composition (which of course we share, along with everything else in the universe) but to God's nature, which is reason. We are made in God's image insofar as our perfected nature reveals itself too as reason.

(3) "The image of God" refers not to God's role in the hierarchy of nature but to God's unequivocal embrace of nature. We have God's image insofar as we embrace the totality of things, which is God.

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity, of obligation as well as of love -- hence Cleanthes's paternal language. But what this itself can mean, I do not know.

Further things I do not understand in the first lines of Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus":

-- the repeated allusion to our mortality -- is it defiant (of death, using divinity as shield)? humble? merely contrasting us with God?
-- "helmsman by law" (or "lawful helmsman") -- what can he mean by law, if not the law of nature that God is meant to embody? and if that, then what does it mean to acknowledge that God rules by law? merely to restate that the law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent -- it has no kind of fault or flaw -- and God, our lord, embodies the law?
-- "born of you" -- ??????
-- and I still don't understand the meaning of "image of God," or its significance, or the use to which he's putting it here -- though I have my own thoughts on that, for another time.


*Personally I make it my practice to avoid assigning sex or any other attribute, and in particular physical attributes, to the divine; but I cannot misquote a source.

On September 11th.

My godmother was there. I didn't know for sure until the weekend, when she still hadn't been seen. Aleha hashalom, requiescat in pace.

My father was there the first time. By 2001 he worked in midtown. My mother and sisters were up in the East 70s and 80s.

My cousin was working at the Woolworth Building. She got out of the subway at Park Place or Chambers, saw the crowds flowing away from the surface, and got right back on the train.

My high school best friend hadn't started school yet and was going to Century 21, but she wasn't hurt.

And I was in Connecticut, in class, not understanding, even when a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon got up in the middle of class and walked out. Not understanding, I thought it was a movie at first (yes, just like the Onion says); I couldn't think what it meant. I was ashamed not to be in New York. I was only two weeks gone and going back the next week for Rosh HaShanah. I did go back, by then with extensions on all my papers and a never-taken-up invitation to group therapy. I got so much dust in my lungs over three days in Brooklyn Heights I was sick through Yom Kippur. It was everywhere. You could practically see it on the melted candles and missing persons signs all over the Promenade and all over downtown Manhattan. I walked the Bridge like a pilgrim among pilgrims, some in facemasks for protection as we got closer to the site. Everything was closed. The closest to feeling better I've ever come was walking home over the Bridge (the car side!) during the blackout two years later, when the crowds of strangers -- to each other, too -- were all talking and laughing, inviting each other to spontaneous who-knows-how-long-the-freezer-will-be-out barbecues and corner singalongs with guitar. Then too nobody could reach anybody, but it was all right.

*

Tuesday, September.

Tuesday.
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.

I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.

But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --

the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:

the Twins.

(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)

After.

Newish movies have become old movies,
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.

I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.

Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.

(November 10, 2005, during the commercial breaks of a movie ("When Harry Met Sally ..." yet) filmed partly in New York between 1970 and 2001)

Still.

Without comprehension
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.

(January 5, 2006)

On correct use of prosody.

Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:


All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.


I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"

Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.

Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)

Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.