Don't Interrupt the Sorrow

@TrueThomasLucy was discovered in 1974 in Africa, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia, by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago.

@TrueThomasLucy was discovered in 1974 in Africa, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia, by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago.

I like what True Thomas has written and this may repeat some of what is said there, but I want to provide an end to end analysis. The poem deserves my best effort. We have all had that vague feeling of sorrow that occurs at some stage of a relationship when the...

I like what True Thomas has written and this may repeat some of what is said there, but I want to provide an end to end analysis. The poem deserves my best effort. We have all had that vague feeling of sorrow that occurs at some stage of a relationship when the end is near or at least the future of it is uncertain. Joni puts the thing to rhyme and embeds it in primitive, mournful rhythms that are so infectious, I must have listened to it 10,000 times through my high school and college years. But just recently I realized I only bathed in the feeling of the song (I lean toward melancholy music, so this song is chocolate for me) and never took the effort to analyze it, to my loss. Joni says she never liked poetry but she has written a real poem here. The poet tips the hand only momentarily for the audience to get a glance at the entire meaning. The use of the word anima is key. It is a Jungian term. Jung says that since the male is not female, but must relate to the female in relationships, he relies on females in his experience--some of them archetypal, like Mary and Eve, to conscientiously or subconsciously form his inner female. The well adjusted male carries an anima that is conscious and informing. Ill-adjusted or primitive man is subconsciously limited by the anima. What we have in “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is not just a liberated woman, but one of the trail blazers (1970s), we will call her “real” woman here, confronting a subconscious male limited by his primitive anima; let’s call him “neanderthal” just for fun. So, this song depicts a Jungian crisis. This crisis in the male is actually termed “anima rising” by Jung. The real beauty of this work is that Joni shows us how the primitive anima subtly interacts to destroy relationships. The opening stanza is a scene of, lets call it “after party remorse” after a night of over-partaking of the spirits. And here is how the neanderthal destroys intimacy: he says, “Your notches, liberation doll.” That is, look at the empty glasses you accomplished tonight, (sarcastically) real notches on your liberation belt. (After all, the patriarchal woman is a tea totaller.) This might be healthy banter, if it’s ilk occurs rarely, but the sense is that he is “in her face” all too often with the “liberation” comments. In fact the whole stanza suggests that this went on in drunkenness the previous evening, ”in flames our profit witches,” that is yours and my patriarchal women constantly at odds. So, the real woman feels the guilt of the anima rising (“wash my guilt of Eden, wash and balance me”; please free me of these archetypes) and says, “don’t interrupt my sorrow with your acidic remarks, “be polite.” (“I have always thought this is a marvelous deescalation phrase: “be polite,” and have wondered if Joni herself uses this to deescalate.) The neanderthal’s “notches” remark invokes the feeling in the real woman that he has “chained her with that serpent to the Ethiopian wall.” This refers to the fall in the garden of Eden. She has given into the temptation of drink just as Eve gave into the temptation of the serpent. Criticism leaves the trail blazer feeling vulnerable to comparisons with tradition/social norms/archetypes. How sad that neanderthal is subconsciously driven by his archetypal Eve to affix his lover in a label that makes her feel so trapped by the walls of the cave of his subconscious. (“Ethiopian walls” evokes thoughts of the earliest cave man dwellings which have been unearthed in Ethiopia, in fact during the 1970’s.) What would be wrong with, “wow we strapped on the wine bag, didn’t we?” So this is how the anima destroys intimacy. Subconscious/archetypal walls entrap and prohibit freedom. Stanza two is fairly straight forward. The healthy, awakening and real women fights the archetypes of the anima rising. The Queen of Queens here is Eve, and the real woman just wants to wash herself of the guilt of Eden as depicted in her religious foundations. She says that the anima is uprising in her tonight. That is his unhealthy subconscious appropriately angers her. Stanza three depicts the feelings of a woman confronted by the unhealthy subconscious anima (Mary and Eve used as a weapon.) It makes the awakening woman resent her foundations in the truth and the church. “Truth goes up in vapors; The steeples lean.” Patriarchal/archetypal women are safe in the neanderthals primitive bible-belt-like foundations, but this causes her to doubt her healthy foundations in faith, “God goes up the chimney; Like childhood Santa Claus”. Then finally, she gets in a barb at him, “The good slaves love the good book; A rebel loves a cause” That is, “you are slave to your archetypes, but I am free to take up my cause.” As a Christian, I used to wonder if this stanza is a slam on Christianity, but now we can see that, not necessarily, it is only for certain a slam on Christian archetypes used as weapons consciously and subconsciously. So stanza four, she is tired of his unhealthy attempts at controlling her. She has been her own person since she was seventeen. And she is leaving on the 1:15 train. His only response is some nonsense that determines he has no understanding of the anima or its rising. “Petrified wood process Tall timber down to rock," that is “I used to be tall trees and now I am a rock?” or “I have no idea that I am in a subconscious relationship, and I am going to stand firm like a rock.” In stanza five neanderthal continues to lash out. He resents her being so bold as to point out his challenged psychological health and responds “we walked on the moon” as in how dare you take a superior tone to me, “men walked on the moon!” (pitifully presenting himself as the archetypal man.) The statement falsely suggests NASA employed no women. Apparently the book Hidden Figures was not yet released! Then Joni shows us another way relationships are destroyed. He says “YOU be polite,” using the healthy woman’s deescalation words to fire back an escalation. Not good. The cycle of the anima rising repeats itself in “death and birth and death birth...” him killing her spirit and her reviving it. In the last stanza I suspect the real woman has been kind enough to help clean the place up before she leaves, this has given her the chance to count the glasses, 17, and as you do this in your stooper you are struck by what you have been drinking: Rhine wine, milk of the Madonna, that is, Liebfraumilch and I suspect she is talking about Blue Nun (young people do not know this, but THE party wine of the 70s, the FIRST international wine brand that sold 3.5 million bottles per year in Britain alone throughout the seventies, and was at every party I attended in high school and college, but in the 80s was poo-pooed by adults because I don’t know, they didn’t want their kids to have as much fun as they did? I suspect Blue Nun is still appropriate for the young wine palate and would be enjoyed immensely.) Anyway, it is interesting that what fed the anima rising was the milk of the archetype, the milk of his “clandestine” subconscious, Even as she cleans things up, he won’t let up the sorrow, he lies and cheats more about how men walked on the moon without women’s help. Then comes the gem. In contrast to the anima rising and intimacy destruction by limiting archetypes we have seen in the previous stanzas, we have the healthy person, the real woman informed, not limited by her archetypes: “It takes a heart like Mary's these days; When your man gets weak.” This is a precise statement of the song’s theme, healthy archetypes conflicting with weak, subconscious ones, real woman vs. neanderthal. Also, the trail blazer lets her peers know that what she is dealing with is WEAKNESS. (Here too we have some reassurance that the real woman does not have to abandon a Christian foundation.) Quite a song, heh?