Hejira

Apologies for the length of this but, given the song’s complexity, it hasn’t been possible to make my thoughts on it any shorter.

This song is a kind of cerebral road movie, full of onward movement, fleeting images and introspection, while the music itself has a rolling quality to it. The lyrics read like thoughts that might go through your head when you’re already well into a journey but still have a long way to go (and you've the acuity, life experience and articulacy of Ms Mitchell, of course).

The song is about flight from a desperate situation, echoing Muhammed's Hajj from Medina to Mecca. Though in contrast to the desert environment of the original, the setting here is bleak and wintry. Indeed, it feels like the outside world is almost monochrome, perhaps reflecting of her own inner world at the time, an impression that is lent further weight by the album cover. The song, and the album, seem to explore a hiatus, a period of withdrawal from an otherwise colourful emotional life; a distance to be travelled in the hope of finding some sort of welcome, or at least resolution, on the other side. She seems to be in post-relationship trauma, and has withdrawn from the world, almost gone into hibernation in this winter cold, in order to deal with it.

The song is not situated in any one location, but rather in a linear progression of locations through an area most likely in the northern US or Canada. Various settings are mentioned - a cafe, a pine forest, a church, a bank, a hotel room - mostly interiors, perhaps unsurprisingly given these cold conditions.

The lyrics begin by dropping us immediately into her continuing journey, with the completion of another stage. The locations are indistinct and shifting (‘some vehicle’, ‘some cafe’), as if she's become so inured to being on the road that everything has become generic to her. And this anonymity may be something that she’s trying to deliberately disappear into. It's even possible that she's feeling so disconnected from herself that, withdrawn into the interior, she sees her body as a kind of vehicle in which she’s moving herself around. She seems to have walked out on a relationship (‘A defector from the petty wars’) that was so full of conflict and bickering that not only has her love for him has fled (as she herself has now), but she’s been left with some level of psychological damage (‘shell shock’). She grew tired of having to explain and justify her feelings to him. Now melancholy can move through her unhindered, as naturally as the way the heavy clouds move by overhead - she can observe without having to analyse. It was an unhealthy, greedy relationship (‘possessive coupling’), though the lines which follow can be read in two ways : either that they both had to keep parts of themselves hidden from the other in order to maintain the fiction of a functional relationship, or that she suppressed things in herself and he also suppressed things in her. She now says, 'I’m returning to myself' - she’s beginning to repatriate her estranged parts, and to occupy her own authentic being again. In the relationship she was bound almost exclusively to him, but having broken free, she is now able to reestablish connections with the rest of humanity (‘I see something of myself in everyone’). Snow swirls in clumps from the sky as if fastened to a dancer's dress.

The second verse begins by asserting how difficult it is to either remain engaged in life (though perhaps she’s thinking specifically of relationships here) or retiring into seclusion; and then the difficulties of either exploring all points between the bounds of possibility (‘travel the breadth of extremities’) or sticking to the more standard course (‘straighter line’) of most people’s paths through life. In her current journey she seems to be opting for the straight and safe, both in terms of the highway and of her at least partial retreat from an otherwise adventurous life. She sees a couple sitting together on a rock in the cold, and foresees their relationship as either warming them or going icy on them. Though in her sour view of things, she perhaps believes that any relationship is destined to veer off the straighter line into the extremities of hot passion or cold contempt. She hears, or possibly imagines she hears, faint music coming through the snowy firs. Her website tells us that the four lines beginning ‘I’m porous with travel fever’ are adapted from Camus. She reshapes his words to reveal that, while her mind is glorying in this elevated freedom, and soaking in new experiences, her wilful body yearns to be with somebody again. ‘I know no one’s going to show me everything’ could mean that she doesn’t expect anyone to be all-wise (perhaps she’s still thinking of Camus), or perhaps that nobody she’s in a relationship with is ever going to be entirely open with her. But it seems more likely that it’s part of an existential emptiness, since it leads into the line, ‘We all come and go unknown.’ Again, this could mean we come into a relationship not really known by the other person, and leave without ever having been properly understood. But (and she might be thinking here of the story of The Stranger, Camus’ most famous novel, which is seen as an existentialist work) the line seems to be more about mortality, about our time on earth - that we’re born, and we die, and what impact have we really had in our ‘deep and superficial’ lives between birth (the ‘forceps’ of the delivery room) and death (the grave’stone’)? We come into the world unknown, and leave it again without ever really having been understood, and once we’re gone all memory of us fades back into the anonymity from which we came. Each human life, seemingly so full of feeling and experience and impact, is really in the end insignificant (‘...full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing,’ as Shakespeare put it).

The third verse has her in a churchyard looking (or continuing to look, following on as it does from the preceding existential angst) at gravestones (‘granite markers’), whose inscriptions include the ‘finality’ of the date of death and often a piece of text stating that the deceased lives on in ‘eternity.’ She turns her gaze on herself, writing these lyrics (‘chicken scratching’) in the hope that they, and through them some part of her, will live on after her. But she’s also aware that her songs may ultimately have the transient insignificance of a chicken scratching in the dirt for food, and the meaningless marks it leaves there. The word ‘chicken’, being slang for frightened, also implies that she’s doing this in an anxious way, frightened of death, or of being forgotten, or of having lived a meaningless life. She enters the church, where she watches lay visitors lighting candles in memory of those already gone, and the molten wax running down the candles’ sides like the tears of their loss. She thinks of the religious beliefs and practices she’s watched all her life, but seems to see it all from an atheist point of view herself. She continues by stating that we’re only physical particles in constant flux, using an astronomical point of view to imagine herself and the rest of us from way outside our solar system, insignificant small specks on our planet’s surface as we orbit the sun. Yet how can she hold on to that lofty concept when she’s always in a relationship, emotionally attached to someone, orbiting him (perhaps they orbit each other) instead. She knows it’s not the laws of physics that are binding her to the other person, and perhaps this realisation brings her back down to earth at this point. ‘Winter chimneys’ again spells out the season, and smoke (possibly smoke from domestic fires in the days before clean air legislation, possibly steam from heating systems condensing in the cold air) rises from them and is caught by the wind, making it look like ‘white flags’ flapping. The moon (a symbol of love and femininity, and perhaps a remnant of her previous astronomical viewpoint) is visible, and she imagines the chimneys are waving white flags of truce at it, as she attempts to make peace with her own romantic longings. She’s seeing these chimneys reflected from the glass walls of a bank building, or from a hotel room window - or perhaps she’s looking out from her hotel room and seeing smoking chimneys reflected in the window glass of a bank. These are two more anonymous locations she’ll be very familiar with in her travelling - the hotels providing her accommodation, and the banks she visits in order to withdraw money (these were the days before widespread availability of cash machines/ATMs, and even the routine use of plastic).

The last verse is a partial reprise of the beginning, but her reasoning seems to have come full circle, like a car wheel performing a full rotation to arrive at a different position. She’s still fleeing a relationship, or perhaps relationships in general, but realises that in time she’ll fall for someone else and be dragged by her desires (the word ‘sucks’ implies it’s against her will) back into another partly-fulfilling, partly-unsatisfactory coupling, returning to the same old pattern. Perhaps by her interpretation of the winter chimneys she’s prepared the ground for this. And whereas the song began with her travelling only to flee a situation, by the end she realises that this journey is only taking her ultimately to a new but similar state of affairs. Significantly for this song about an ongoing journey, the music doesn’t reach a definitive end, but fades out as it rolls on, as if into the distance.