Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer(de)

All the songs on Horses are very powerful. Like so many songs from the era they are powerful, because of the combination of music en words. Not their meaning. They seem to be full of meaning, but they are more like a Rorschachtest-picture. A Rorschachtest picture is a random picture and people are asked to tell what they can see in it.

It represents nothing, but it uses our minds patern recognizing ability to see possible paterns in it. It is similar to looking at the clouds and trying to see things in them. If you try very hard to see faces, you will see structures that resemble faces. At times they can be very convincing. Some people see paterns more easily than others. This can either be early recognition or a tendency for misinterpretation and fantasizing. People with fantasy see more things in a Rorshach test.

Now the songs on Horses are like that, aspecially "Land" is a sound based Rorschachtest. In the sixties musicians, artists began experimenting heavily, and rejecting the old schemes of harmony, a thing that had happened in paintings earlier in expressionism. In this expressionism structure was rejected. In the sixties people holding on to traditional structures were called "square" (On of the most stable structures). For themselves they used words like cool or hot. It was a revolt against ordered sosciety. Its the goal was to break the old structures.

It was done in art, speech, behavior. The more erratic the better. To liberate onesself from structural thinking a lot of drugs were used. Drugs disassemble logical thinking and create a dreamlike or nightmare state in which there are all kinds of emotions becoming stranger actors on their own. As they are no longer related to the overall person, they are more or less chaotic, but they do invoke each other in a seemingly logical way.

What gave the Rorschachtest the illususion of meaning? It is the fact that it has symetry. It consist of two mirror random images. This immediately invokes our brain to seek meaning as symetry is quite rare in wild nature, but the product of our rational thinking.

In the same way a sense of meaning is invoked in chaotic songs by underlying a musical structure. The record horses actually has a very sound, almost austere, clear structure to all the songs and is superbly tightly played. This contrast the songtexts that caleidoscope of feelings and sensations one gets from using drugs like LSD.

This effect you get from endless practice on musical instruments and playing together to a point it no longer demands any imposed thinking. Even when one is stoned, the practice allows that that the musical structure survives. This structure is mostly kept alive by the drummer and the basist. These people are always the most stable in band. They can continue a steady Rhythm. Rhythm is symmetry in motion as symmetry is repetition.

So what are we hearing on horses that makes it such a remarkable experience are exeptional powerful but also conflicting emotions. Patti who came from a very religious background and remained religious all her life. That is her starting point in life and that is the starting point in Horses. Part of her prayers are still in the songs, like: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

So religious it also gave her deep fears:

"I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged."

"When attention flagged, I would draw a truce and visit my friend Stephanie. She was convalescing from an illness I didn't really understand, a form of leukemia. She was older than I, perhaps twelve to my eight. I didn't have much to say to her and was perhaps little comfort, yet she seemed to delight in my presence. I believe that what really drew me to her was not my good heart, but a fascination with her belongings." ... "I had a secret compartment near my bed, beneath the floorboards. There I kept my stash — winnings from marbles, trading cards, religious artifacts I rescued from Catholic trash bins: old holy cards, worn scapulars, plaster saints with chipped hands and feet. I put my loot from Stephanie there. Something told me I shouldn't take presents from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed." ... The following afternoon, I abandoned my post to sit with her and have cocoa. She was very quiet and begged me to stay even as she drifted off to sleep.

I rummaged through her jewel box. It was pink and when you opened it a ballerina turned like a sugarplum fairy. I was so taken with a particular skating pin that I slipped it in my mitten. I sat frozen next to her for a long time, leaving silently as she slept. I buried the pin amongst my stash. I slept fitfully through the night, feeling great remorse for what I had done. In the morning I was too ill to go to school and stayed in bed, ridden with guilt. I vowed to return the pin and ask her to forgive me.

"The following day was my sister Linda's birthday, but there was to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. When they returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me to tell me Stephanie had died. "

I suspect this was a turning point in her life and she felt really evil, even beyound salvation. She later explainded that is what "Jesus died for someones sins but not mine" means. It is no rejection of Jesus but feeling unworthy.

When she moved to New York she met Robert Mapplethorpe on the first day. They immediately bonded both young and aspiring to be artists. And they were dead poor somethimes sleeping on the streets, but fullfilling ideas of her Heroes, Jesus, John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud.

"Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, languorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. "Tell me the Stephanie story," he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic, as we tried to pretend we weren't hungry. And always, when I got to the part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, "Patti, no ..."

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark."

They were like a rolling stone, living on the fringe of society seeking sensations while fighting not to starve. People like to romantisize this artistic life but it also is a life of desolation, and getting drawn into crazy behavior with often pretty crazy people. That those people are somehow talented does not make them less crazy. And the use of drugs and need to survive makes them egocentric. I do not believe for a second this was a glorious life especially when Robert left here and came back a Homosexual. Though they had a very special relationship and were very close friends, Robert was not the great love of her life, they had become to self-absorbed for that.

But what makes Horses truly exeptional is that Patti at the point in her life found something she had been deeply yearning for. She had met someone who she was madly in love with, I suspect for the first time in her live, this skinny desolate looking person, found true love with another musician Fred Smith. This created the two exeptional love Songs on the album: "Frederic" and "Dancing Barefoot". Patty feels like she is actually in Heaven as she describes how angels look down on her sleeping love Frediric.

Imagery from heaven and hell are deeply present in her mind and are woven in the songs on the album. It creates a beautiful but at the same time disturbing combination of extacy and violent emotions running havoc, especially in the song "Land". Land is really the landscape of emotions going through someone who is at the same time pretty stoned. In "Land" the more violent emotions take over.

I suspect here we find flashes of memories of her first homosexual friend who she probably had a sadomasochistic relation with, images of explosive songs of the Doors (expecially "the End" and when "the Music is over") and Jimmy Hendrix who was master in translating his drugsexperiences into music. Listening to Hendrix is actually safe substitute to drugs, so powerful is his music.

So Horses is this caleidoscope of emtions and in a way is actually is the pinnacle of what people in the sixties were striving for and thus it also represents the end of this period, and a transition to a less idealistic period in which revolt takes a gloomy more agressive turn, the punk era. This has gone over to even less aspiring music of Gangster Rap and blunting music styles as ideals have given way to commerce. The individual search for higher awareness turned into egocentric individualism. So in a way the record Horses is almost like funeral to the ero.

For Patti herself is was happy period and she spent some good years with her love Fred Smith, before he sadly betrayed their love and prematurely died. (They only thing I can say good about him is, he was a wonderful father). She retreated from music for mariage and to go on travel with fred and raise children. She and Fred also engaged in seeking social justice, which translated in the optimistic song: "People have the Power". The record and found love freed Patti from a being a cast away, and turned her into a legend. To speak in "religious terms", "it saved her life". And it really shows her strong character that she gave up music for being a wife and mother. For most artists the addiction to fame is stronger than drugs. But for Patti it was proof God had not rejected her, her soul was not lost.

Now this site is called songmeaning. com and it suggest that any song has meaning and when meaning is not apparrant is has to be deeper meaning. But often it is rather the meaning that people impose on the song than the meaning that the song relates. I find myself misinterpreting songs all the time. Like "I can get no satisfaction" from the stones felt like the protest of a generation, but Jagger explains it as the loneliness of living in hotel rooms between gigs. Most of the time they a simply emotions of the artist and nothing much more.

However in the sixties people were desperately looking for deeper meaning, and started worshiping groups that gave them the feeling that they were relaying that. But is was a shared illusion created by emotion. For instance the song "A wither shade of pale" was considered the pinnical of higher meaning, but the group later revealed the words were just gibberish and had no meaning. It was the music underneath that feels like attending a funeral that created this effect of witnessing something truly life changing drama. The words simply play into out minds and draw out our own images.

It is art, and art is "artifical" and really a con. Great ancient philosophers considered it as such. For people who live in emotions, who are extravert by Nature, the record horses is the pinnacle of art. The musical play is really exceptional and Patti's voice is an exceptional instrument for translating raw emotions. It grabs you by the throat like no painting could ever do. It lifts you to heaven and plunges you screeming in hell and at creates an atmosphere of total abandonment. It really is a scary album. It show beautiful flowers on the edge of a dark abyss. It is this contrast that turns beauty into pain and pain into beauty.

Patti said the album was meant to be a comfort for a certain kind of people. I guess she meant people hanging on on the edge of society in total desperation. As eerie as the album is, it is not the kind of music that would invoke people to commit suicide. It brings you to the egde, but it also gives hope.

To explain the song is like expaining a dream and trying to understand, who the dislocated actors are. You want to understand the song from its actors itself, not from a higher meaning. The actors are not driven by reason. They are feelings.

The first part is about Johnny. Johnny is the ego (ego is a feeling too, it is considered a male controlling entity). The ego is made to look at himself, "he" is looking in the mirror and is scared of what he sees. It invokes other emotions, fears and he gets into a panic (horses surrounding from all directions = existential fear). He wants to survive at all costs (sex = procreation = survival). The ego is figting for control (surivival mechanism).

He then meets with his higher self (Angel), telling him how weak he really is "Angel looks down at him and says, Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?”

Now the ego flees into suicidal behavior to get rid of the pain. He cuts himself up. That actually describes some of the life Patti has been lving, fleeing into extreem behaviour and drugs, symbolized by Rimbaud.

"You got pen knives and jack knives and Switchblades preferred": selfdestructive behaviour "Then he cries, then he screams, saying Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain: suffering ego "And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud, Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud": The ego want to flee reality

But then in the darkest moment things get quiet, higher self takes over: "There's a little place, a place called space" "It's a pretty little place, it's across the tracks," "Across the tracks and the name of the place is you like it like that": Being content

What was feared before (possibly to allow love in) now becomes uplifting "There's a mare black and shining with yellow hair, I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair" "In the night": seamingly hopelesness "Up there ther is no land, but the land": There is no certainty other than uncertainty "up there is just a sea of possibilities": This uncertainly also offers other possibilties, thus hope

How does this go on: "There is no keeper but the key": No solution is given to you, it evolves as you take it "Walls of possibilities": Possibilities seem like bariers at first "Except for one who seizes possibilities": Except for the one that seizes them, then they become keys "I seize the first possibility": so that what I do ("I" here is the higher self talking, now lower ego (Johnny) is gone)

Now this is not a story. A story is about a person. There is no person here. This is agents interacting. As it goes on, we see that Johnny, ego, has lost single control. I becomes We. "Our lives are now entwined, we will fall yes we're together twining" "I died": The I becomes we, and loneliness/onlyness dies

Things are now moving up "at that Tower of Babel they knew what they were after" [Everything on the current] moved up

The ego can not stop the change, because Love (remember Patti was deeply in love) has taken over "I tried to stop it, but it was too warm, too unbelievably smooth"

The ego fights it, but is no longer heard "The scream he made (and my heart) was so high (my heart) pitched that nobody heard, No one heard that cry, No one heard (Johnny)" "It was a black tube, he felt himself disintegrate and go inside the black tube, so when he looked out into the steep saw this sweet young thing umping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter"

This is where it should have ended. But it goes on with an hommage that is totally unconnected and out of place. They (who, maybe John Cale?) did that to connect Land with the next song Elegy that is about Jimmy Hendrix. In this manner the songs on Horses are made to connect. But it is arty nonsense and pretentious. "In the sheets there was a man dancing around to the simple Rock & roll song"

So what this song probably is, is subconscious emotions of someone really stoned in an almost dreamlike state. The strong sexual violent imagery probably tells us something about her violent relationship with homosexual lover Robert Michael Mapplethorpe, who was really into BDSM (erotic practices or roleplaying involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism).

Patti likes to publically remember his boyish innocence, but she also says he was a good boy seeking evil. He pretty much selfdestructed dying of AIDS. Let's stop pretending that a homosexual lifestyle is the same as that of common heterosexuals with a little gender reversal, and it is nice getting mixed up in that. Robert really developed a taste for the dark side of life and Patti clearly shared in that.

This album is dark for that reason. And this album is the turning point in her life, and it came at the turning point in het life. It is through real love that she was freed. How she became socially involved, gave up fame for marriage, and again found deep love in her daughter. Her life feels like a trip in Dante's Hell, but she came out. And that is remarkable.

Her life seems like a story of a young girl becoming obsessed with fear loosing het soul. It becomes a prophecy as she steals a pin from a sick girl, that consiquently dies. It must have felt to her, that she played a role in that. That she somehow took away her lifeforce. And now was she punished with disease as well. She really regarde herself as being evil.

That is also comes back in "Johny looks in the mirror". What mirror is the ego looking in? Patty says about Robbert: I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. That is the mirror. Robert is her mirror. Johnny is her ego, but he also is Robert driven by ego to dark side, to pain and sexual lust. And that is also her salvation als he leaves her for a male lover. And though she feels abandoned, this offers the sea possibilities, and out of that comes the love with Fred. And they were madly in love, for a long time separated they had these long telephone calls (see "Frederic").

The song is called "Land" and the word comes on two occasions, both: "There is no land but the land". Basically it says the land is where you land. That is what you seize from the sea of possibilites. But in order to that, you have to cut existing relations first. This why first is says:

"Like playing in the sea, in the sea of possibility, the possibility Was a blade, a shiny blade, I hold the key to the sea of possibilities There's no land but the land"

That is what we all know in our hearts. To open our heart to a new realtionship, we have to cut the cord that ties us to a previous relationship. And this is hard even when a relationship is giving lots of pain. There is a lot of agression in the song toward Johnny, that leads to cutitng the string in the heart:

"His vocal chords started shooting like (of a horse) mad pituitary glands The scream he made (and my heart) was so high (my heart) pitched that nobody heard, No one heard that cry"

After cutting the string is again that innocent girl she used to be before meeting Johnny. "o when he looked out into the steep saw this sweet young thing (Fender one) Humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter"

And that really is the end of the song.