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Thursday, September 04, 2008
QUIET MAN
John Prine
John Prine
Atlantic : 1971
[Buy It]
SO QUIET IN HERE
Van Morrison
Enlightenment
Polydor : 1990
[Buy It]
THE QUIET ONE
The Who
Face Dances
Warner Bros. : 1981
[Buy It]
QUIETLY
Fred Eaglesmith
Tinderbox
Lonesome Day : 2008
[Buy It]
CHATTERBOX
The New York Dolls
Too Much Too Soon
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
During the summer, my wife and I spent a few weeks taking my kids to see my parents. One weekend, some friends of my parents visited the house with their adult daughter, who was probably twenty-five, maybe a bit older. We had met a few times before. While the rest of us had conversations that ranged from polite and boring to exciting and impolite, she remained quiet. Not off to herself, exactly. She stood near us. She held a beer. But she was very quiet, almost like a tree. Later on, after the guests left, the rest of us were talking, and someone wondered if the woman had had felt uncomfortable with the group. My mother than proceeded to speculate. Had we come on too strong? Had we said something to offend her? Maybe she was having a hard summer. Maybe she was sick. Maybe that morning a cat had climbed up onto her face and gotten her tongue. "But then we'd see claw marks," my mother said. (She is not quiet, generally.) We came to no conclusion.
Later, I was sitting in a room with my dad, who wasn't saying anything, and I found it didn't bother me at all. My dad was reading and he set the book down. I thought he was going to talk. He didn't. He went out to the porch to look at some trees. If you ask a quiet person to explain the content of their silence--which seems like at least a minor paradox--they will tell you that there are plenty of other possible explanations. For starters, they might be switched over to receiving instead of broadcasting, communing rather than communicating. That was the case with my father, and it's also the case in John Prine's "Quiet Man":Oodles of light, what a beautiful sight
Both of God's eyes are shining tonight
Rays and beams of incredible dreams
And I am a quiet man I love this song because it is from John Prine's first album, and I love that album, but I also love it because it slows me down before I judge quiet people too harshly. Maybe they're seeing rays and beams of incredible dreams. My father was looking at trees.
This suggests that there are at least two kinds of quiet, and that outward silence is not always indicative of an inner void--or, for that matter, an inner turmoil. There is a third alternative: silence on the outside and balance on the inside. I saw Van Morrison in concert last year, and when he wasn't singing, he was wordless. Silence preoccupies Morrison; he has written about it several times and even titled an album Hymns to the Silence. Often it is not the absence of sound so much as the presence of peace, as he attests in "So Quiet in Here":Foghorns blowing in the night
Salt sea air in the morning breeze
Driving cars all along the coastline
This must be what it's all about
Oh this must be what it's all about
This must be what paradise is like
So quiet in here, so peaceful in here
So quiet in here, so peaceful in here
The warm look of radiance on your face
And your heart beating close to mine
And the evening fading in the candle glow
This must be what it's all about
Oh this must be what it's all about
This must be what paradise is like
So quiet in here. so peaceful in here
So quiet in here, yeah, so peaceful in here This is a compelling case for paradise, but less straightforward on the matter of quiet. For starters, he's not alone; the first four lines seem to suggest so, but then, out of nowhere, there's another heart beating close to his. So shouldn't he be talking to that other heart? In company, you circulate. As it turns out, he is, but with music rather than simple language, since he seems to believe that the words used to describe events and experiences (as opposed to the events and experiences themselves) aren't meaningfully connected to any vital essence: to spirit, to love, to infinities. He doesn't want quiet so much as purer sound: All my struggling in the world
And so many dreams that don't come true
Step back, put it all away
It don't matter, it don't matter anymore
Oh this must be what paradise is like
This must be what paradise is like
It's so quiet in here, so peaceful in here Quiet doesn't have to mean quiescent. In the Who, John Entwistle was the quiet one, like George Harrison was in the Beatles and Charlie Watts was in the Stones. (Our research department suggests that Charlie Watts may in fact be mute.) But he was quiet like a pro basketball guard is short, quiet because he wasn't a lead guitarist like Pete Townshend, a lead singer like Roger Daltrey, or an explosive drummer/clown like Keith Moon. On "The Quiet One," he insists on this context, and makes a case that he is doing more with less:Everybody calls me the quiet one
But you just don't understand
You can't listen, you won't hear me
With your head stuck in the sand
I ain't never had time for words that don't rhyme
My head is in a cloud
I ain't quiet, everybody else is too loud Again, this doesn't go a long way toward vindicating the quiet woman in my house. There's not much evidence that she, like Entwistle, wanted to be understood if not exactly heard. Are there malignant forms of silence? Fred Eaglesmith thinks so. "Quietly," from this year's excellent Tinderbox, starts off as a love song. There's no talking and only a little movement. The whole thing happens in slow motion:Quietly
Her hair falls across her pillow
Quietly
She stirs in the morning light
Quietly
She stares up at the ceiling
Then she sits up and she looks into my eyes Silence can be sexy if it's post-coital, or pre-coital--or coital, where too much blather and funny accents can be distracting. Eaglesmith's song starts sexy like that, but then there's a turn for the worse. The woman's quiet is exposed as neither wonder (as in the Prine song), proximity that shames language (as in the Morrison), or preparation for powerful expression (as in the Entwistle). It's just silence, at least self-absorbed, probably sullen, and even a little punishing. It turns out that she's miserable and planning to leave. Interestingly, the man who is singing the song is so exhausted by her inability to express herself, by the way her silence suggests blame and abandons him, that he lets her go.
Many people have sounded off about silence. Adrienne Rich said, "Lying is done with words but also with silence." It can also be used to tell the truth disreputably, as Fred Eaglesmith suggests. At the same time, there are plenty of people over the course of the planet's history who have lionized silence. Sam Rayburn said, "No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut." But I don't think I agree with Sam Rayburn, who got to say what he wanted to when he wanted to. I tend to agree with Francis Bacon, who said, "Silence is the virtue of fools." Once, years ago, during college, I went on a date with a girl, and it went well, and so we went on a second date. On the second date, she said nothing, or nearly nothing. We sat and had a drink. I remember asking her if she was okay, and she said, "yes," and I think she may even have meant it, but I wasn't okay with the way in which she was okay. I was afraid of what her silence meant and when I overcame my fear I found that I was angry at her for presuming that silence was the best that could pass between us. Ultimately, it wasn't silence as romantic tension. It wasn't silence as comfort. It was silence as the virtue of fools and maybe vice, too. In intimate situations (bed) or semi-intimate ones (date) or even hemi-demi-semi-intimate ones (porch with parents' friends), language may be imperfect but silence is the perfect crime.
Okay: I have said enough.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
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