Enough to Ponder That Koan

I submit that Paul Weller has a sensitive nose.  Or at least he did when he was in the Jam.  Jam songs regularly arise on the random mix of 5000 songs I have spinning about on my iTunes at the gym.  Head over to the chest press and it’s “Saturday’s Kids.”  I just about never mind listening to "Saturday’s Kids."  The next day it might be “Butterfly Collector” and I’m happy to slip into the world of “All Mod Cons” as I zip up my coat and walk back to the car.  Walking out the gym I notice that once again, he’s mentioning perfume.  Why is that?

There are only two or three people I still know well enough, who know the Jam well enough whom I'd bother asking the following question:  Name three Jam songs that use the word “perfume.”  My father and brother have bonded over their love for crossword puzzles.  Not so I.  I have never particularly cared.  But perhaps the need to ask this question in this fashion is related to crossword puzzle-like thinking. 

My dearest friend is the primary target of this pointless line of inquiry.  He replies appropriately that this sounds like some sort of Buddhist koan.  I must look up the word “koan” and, noting that it is Zen riddle used to provoke enlightenment and I quickly concur, pointing out that, in addition to telling the girl in her own little dream world that her fashion sense is second-rate like her perfume, during “Butterfly Collector” on their third album, and that Saturday’s Kids, wear cheap perfume cause it’s all they can afford on their fourth album, we hear on their fifth LP that when Paul cuddles a girl, he smells her stale perfume.  I can’t think of any others.  Perhaps there are.  I just checked “London Girl” from the second album to be sure.  My friend absorbed this quietly and chose not to swat the shuttlecock back over the net. 

None of this matters, of course.  Who cares that Paul Weller got repeated mileage out of one word or another?  Except that all those songs are stored up there.  They carry great meaning in the webbing of my formative teenage brain.  And when one revisits them from the vantage of fifty rather than fifteen they reveal different insights.  And when an insight or a pattern is noted there are only two or three people you know well enough, who’d care enough to ponder that koan, with you.  Perhaps someone in Paul’s life scented themselves in a notably poor fashion or argued with him about a brand or he read something somewhere that posited the concept as especially important.  This is where my mind was, driving home from the gym, when I decided it was a pattern that needed to be communicated. 

Thursday, 01/25/18