My wife has taken a
shine to Carole King. This means that we
have heard “Tapestry” about seventeen times in the last two weeks. At the risk of stating something patently
obvious, like “bananas are a great fruit” or “Hagen Dazs vanilla ice cream
tastes really good”, “Tapestry” is an absolutely wonderful album.
I can remember hearing so many of these songs on the radio
as a kid, driving around with my mom.
And how as a six year old you’d see the album and the barefoot cool as
the posture for every hip teenage babysitter you encountered. It is such a pleasure to reengage with so
many of these songs. “I Feel the Earth
Move” is such a fierce, lusty sentiment.
Elemental like something a character in an Aristophanes play might have
howled. “It’s Too Late” is the message no
broken hearted man ever wants to hear a woman say. It’s unimpeachable. There’s no way around it. Deal with it. “Beautiful” is makes me want to
cry. I want to drill it into my girls
heads as they march off to school in the morning. “You’ve got to get up every
morning with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your
heart. Then people gonna treat you
better. You gonna find, yes you will,
that you’re beautiful, as you feel.” In
print is seems trite. Sung by her, it’s
an anthem.
There are no overt blemishes on this creation. The lyrics to “Tapestry” itself are a bit
hokey, with toads and wizards, but hey, it was of its time. I can clearly recall hearing “Smackwater
Jack” as a child and dwelling on the lyrics.
“You can’t talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand.” This all seemed pretty sensible as six-year
old. It’s a basic truism. You just can’t mess with it. Born in Manhattan, grew up in Brooklyn, was a
hit making machine for other people (The Shirelles, The Beatles, The Monkeys,
Aretha Franklin,) and finally came into her own to break all records with
“Tapestry” a truly 十全十美[1] creation. I don’t want to hear the
album another nine times this week, but it has been a pleasure to reengage with
the work and it is fitting an proper that we honor this fine New Yorker and her
chrysalis emergence here at the sea and sand crossroads.
I drew reference to another New Yorker yesterday. Carole changed her name from Klein to King
and Moses changed his name from Finkelstein to Finley. M. I. Finley, the author of the work I’d
mentioned yesterday, “The World of Odysseus” was a child prodigy and graduated
from Syracuse University by the age of fifteen.
My daughter, who’s school has her doing three years of study in two,
appreciated this feat. In 1952 while
teaching as a professor at my wife’s alma matta Rutgers University, he was
summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked if he’d ever been a communist. Taking the Fifth, he was fired and prevented
from working in United States academe.
And as with so many other fine American academics, like the Sinologist
Owen Lattimore, he fled to England where he was embraced, took up a teaching
career at Cambridge and became a British subject in 1962 and then was knighted
in 1979. Sir Moses' analysis of heroes in Odysseus day
could also be applied to himself when faced with the din of the demos as personified by Joe McCarthy:
Whatever the conflicts and
cleavages among the noble housholds and families they were always in accord
that there could be no crossing of the great line which separated the aristoi from the many, the heroes from
the non heroes. p. 108.
One of the powerful pieces in Finley’s work, for me, was to
reframe another “banana is a great fruit” truism. Greek mythology is an archaic, simplistic
forerunner to the more evolved leap into monotheism. Believing in gods of thunder and the sea, was
what primitive people, the world over did.
More evolved societies assumed a monotheistic posture and more evolved
still did away with the need for a god-head altogether. I don’t know that I ever took Greek mythology
as an intellectual leap that allowed for the development of Greek, Roman and
therefore Western philosophical traditions in its own right.
Juxtaposing Homer’s contemporary Hesiod, Finley ends his work with the
following:
“In the end it remained for a poet
who stood outside the heroic world to take the next great step. In the case of Hesiod we are certain and we
can not be for the poet of the Iliad: It was he who organized the individual gods
into a systematic theogany and made justice
into the central problem of existence, human as well as divine. From Hesiod a
straight line leads to Aeschylus and the other great tragedians.
In those succeeding centuries the
miracle that was Greece unfolded. Homer
having made the gods into men, man learned to know himself.” p.146.
No comments:
Post a Comment