Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
By: James Caig
Tags: Lyrics, Poetry, Music, Joanna Newsom

A late afternoon lustre, still as Sunday. I remember being in the car. Kids crammed in the back, awkward cosy redcheek slumped — full of innocent air, like stuffed toys clutching their own stuffed toys.

The elastic tie with London at full stretch, about to spring back.

And I remember the sun — no, the light, making carousel flashes of the day just gone: cut grass, blossom fallen around and under trees, the ripple of laughter, and of hills, birdsong. The glow of sunshine warm and soft, a gentle breath of wind, each glancing off us like it would the face of a stopped clock. Time behind us and ahead of us.

It’s like the world on pause, when the light is luminous and the day tires and the shadows stretch and nature circles back to quiet. Trees lay their arms out behind their heads, reach their fingers into field corners. The hills edge downward, their day’s exploration done.

And Joanna Newsom is singing:

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow

Down into the bones of the birches and the spires of the churches, jutting out from the shadows

The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow

And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope in the mouth of the south below

It’s the cadence of the words that pulls you first. Falling, unhurried, assured, like the curve of the hills banking away from us. The music like birdsong — fluttering plucked wires and orchestrated curlicues.

But the words. The words.

They animate: sun, poured like wine. They gleam: a rusty light. They sing: bones of the birches, bale and the barrow, mouth of the south. They capture too how the faded and the dilapidated and the old can be radiated by that same lustre I remember, by nature’s indefatigable beauty.

The moment I heard Ys by Joanna Newsom for the first time was a beguiling concoction of nature, stillness and memory. It is a moment I return to and a moment that returns to me. The shock of the voice, high-pitched and creaking like backwoods pine. The antique swell of the music, each song carved more ornately than the last, its edges undulating, shifting, twisting and turning, like a landscape, the lines finding their own winding, natural course as would a mountain stream. Sometimes the stream slows, the terrain evening out. Sometimes it tumbles down, a torrent under which you can only stand, overwhelmed by the cascade of words.

And, Emily, I saw you last night, by the river

I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water

Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever

In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror

Reach in, grab a pebble — a phrase. Turn it over. Hold it up, let the water drip. Let it catch the light. Mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror. You’ll see the world looking back, made new.

Emily, then, is a song made of nature, stillness and memory. But also wonder. A wonder at what we might perceive if we allow ourselves, if we gave free reign to our senses. The words, embedded in a particular landscape, in a particular experience, convey a deep, umbilical connection to someone the writer loves. The words conjure this wonder, and conjure us to see it. The words are written about and to a sister. To Emily.

Anyhow — I sat by your side, by the water

You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger

Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades loosed in December

I promised you I’d set them to verse so I’d always remember

Emily is an astrophysicist, and a teacher to her sister. Through Emily, Joanna learns about the universe. Joanna is clever too, though in a different way, a precocious girl who fashions a nursery rhyme to show her sister she understands, a nursery rhyme to contain the cosmos. In this family, within this relationship, formed against this landscape, these so-called ‘two cultures’, science and art, are equal, each offering wisdom, each a vessel for childlike wonder. Each a source of poetry. Each — when pitted against our flimsy, transient idea of everyday reality — eternal.

The meteorite is a source of the light

And the meteor’s just what we see

And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee And the meteorite’s just what causes the light

And the meteor’s how it’s perceived

And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet and offering to thee

It’s a chorus, of sorts, and one that plays with perception and reality. This is appropriate. Somewhere among this torrent of words lies a story, something goes horribly wrong, only it’s not quite clear. Perhaps over the years I’ve been mesmerised by the the words — the words — or maybe it’s deliberately obfuscated. The main event happens off stage. We see neither bone nor the void from which it was thrown. Just the light. Luminous.

But even in this nursery rhyme here we’re being misled. Joanna, still learning maybe, or simply the sister with the gift of poetic license, has switched the meanings of meteorite and meteoroid. Why we’re not quite sure. Perhaps it’s narrative detail, placed there for anyone willing to look closely enough. Newsom does tend to leave clues like this, and her fans like to look for them: crumbs in the forest she knows will be picked up and picked over, by people hungry to know where every allusion leads, or where it came from. Follow the trail online and you’ll find forums full of theories, shared by people who scour lyrics and record sleeves, look for references in videos. Obsessives, looking for the meteoroid. I think they should be content with just the light.

Those fans will tell you, though, that Emily, the song, contains a mystery. A tragedy.

In search of the midwife who could help me And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines

For some, the mentions of midwife and motherlessness suggest a miscarriage. Certainly the second half of the song appears to be about something going wrong for Joanna. As a result the sisters’ relationship turns from teacher and pupil, to nurse and patient. Emily’s support is unyielding, but there’s a suggestion that she unwittingly makes things worse for her sister as she exposes an intensely private experience.

You came and lay a cold compress upon the mess I’m in

Threw the window wide and cried, “Amen! Amen! Amen!”

The whole world stopped to hear you hollering

You looked down and saw now what was happening

The lines are fading in my kingdom.

Things fall apart. Her surroundings turn. The community she lives with make her the centre of attention.

The talk in town’s becoming downright sickening

Joanna characterises the townsfolk as gossips, uncivilised.

The muddy mouths of baboons and sows and the grouse and the horse and the hen

She even acknowledges that how much that deep connection we have with our family can hurt us.

The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and hold us close forever

But eventually, things even out. We pause. The torrent becomes a stream again, the stream slows to a trickle. There’s a call to return, and naturally a reunion between the sisters is marked by a reunion with everything else that’s important. They go back to the landscape. Back to nature, stillness, memory.

Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now

Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow

Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow

With hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up-a their brow

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour

The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours

It’s beautiful. Nothing dilapidated here, nothing sloped. Everything’s happening at once. Nature seems drunk on itself, a mesmerising, fizzing cycle of countless microscopic details. And somewhere inside what we’re shown, hidden, or perhaps hovering among it like dust motes caught in the sun, no — the light, or the lustre of a late afternoon — is that feeling again. A calm. The same residual stillness from the beginning of the song. Time behind us and in front of us. Light bouncing off a stopped clock. We’re back at the end of the elastic. When everything makes sense and nothing matters.

We could stand for a century,

Staring, with our heads cocked in the broad daylight at this thing

Joy, landlocked

In bodies that don’t keep

Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being

And I remember again the light. I remember being in the car.

I remember a sense of awe, at the eternal, fleeting, profound, meaningless beauty of it all.