| Jackson Browne – Colors of the Sun Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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"Pompous Pig" summed up the most salient point of the song, the rejection of established religion as a path to salvation. This would have easily resonated with baby-boomers in the late 60s, and you might even say they had already heard this message many times before. I'm much less struck by the polemical in this song than how it evokes my own walks in natural areas, those expanses of time when there was nothing to do but look around, and nothing to hear, except the sound of the tides or wind through the trees. Even scattered bird calls reinforce the feeling that human life-as-usual is not the center of the universe--or that the universe at hand is much more spacious. In the cover of this song by Tom Rush, I have always pictured some setting where you can see for miles and miles with no sign of human habitation. The "colors of the sun" and even the glint of a coin are points of light that can be noticed by turning an eye, not to the skies, but closer to the ground, just as listening to wind through the trees allows you to pick up what might be thought of as the radiance of sound that we call harmony. I wouldn't be surprised if Browne had been exposed to the evocation of childhood in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," with the famous part--"The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem apparelled in celestial light." I was also reminded of a passage in Baudelaire's "La Vie antérieure" ("The Life Before"): "Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux, Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique Les tout-puissants accords de leur riche musique Aux couleurs du couchant reflété par mes yeux." ("The swells, unfurling pictures of skies, Interweave solemnly and mystically The all-powerful chords of their splendorous music With colors of a sunset reflected in my eyes.") It can be argued that both writers were invocation an idea of a past life, whether autobiographically in Wordsworth, or in Baudelaire as a more immediate connection to, or absorption in, nature (complete with a French imperialist fantasy of "nobles sauvages"). In the Rolling Stone review of Browne's album "For Everyman," "Colors of the Sun" was dismissed as an "oversimplified, childish indictment." I won't assume Browne had read Baudelaire, but the song might be less about a teen or young adult in rebellion than someone who's also remembering or maybe tactically re-experiencing childhood--something as common as a day at the beach. Coming of age is not just about conflict with an older generation; it's about growing into larger dimensions, whether experienced as a distance to your own past or being tuned into, or "woke" to, a broader world around you. If the song were only about disillusionment and teen rebellion, it would be of little interest. But this take overlooks what's laid out at the beginning of the song, and probably more important, even if more elusive and more mood than message: the capacity for wonder and the urge (as well as the power) to find connections. It's what poets do all the time (as William Carlos Williams directs them: "No ideas except in things"). The quoted passage from Baudelaire also suggests that forces of nature can register as a religious experience--the solemn and mystical chords that Baudelaire might have heard from a church organ, not to mention his notion (in "Correspondances") of nature as a temple with its own "forest of symbols." Browne doesn't just rehash the cultural and intellectual past in a nebulous way. He's actually much more straightforward, especially here: "Awake to understand you are not dreaming, It is not seeming to just be this way" (I can only construe "seaming" above as a typo). This isn't about rebelling or being disillusioned, let alone wearing erudition on his sleeve, but affirming a reality, whether outward and perceivable, or the inward resonance of a feeling. And to know that feeling, you don't have to be a credentialed poet or scholar. We can sneer at the glorification of youth culture 50 years ago that now looks dated and silly, but we can also see something more imperishable in the song--that plunge into something wider beyond or deeper within (through memory or creative "perception of relations") that can be experienced by people in any generation. Within a year or two after this song came out, the Beach Boys would make the connection to Wordsworth more explicit in their "Surf's Up" album. But I'm more taken by Browne's "wake to understand," that kind of moment when you snap out of it, only to find it was the trance that was real. |
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