Mercy Street, by Peter Gabriel

I started this as a typical me run-on post on Kactus's Superbabymama, in response to this video of "Tajabone" from the movie Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Then I realized this is all about me, and it belongs here.

Kactus got me to think about songs that have jumped out and taken me by the throat. I don't know how to link to a video, or even the music, but I bet you probably know this one, Kactus:
"Mercy Street"
I only guess that because you like Laurie Anderson, whom the articles say he hung around with in this period, late '80s.

See, I don't know anything much about the politics of which artists are cool and which aren't among whom either. That was pretty much Natasha's department. I think she had all the back story of anyone, actor, songwriter, movie folk, ready to pop out and she kept it all straight.

All I know is this. A fellow Dabney House resident, a guy I looked up to, was playing this one day. Actually I didn't know where it was coming from, I just followed the sound like a fish on a line, and listened to it. I got the words pretty well in my memory but I wasn't sure--I don't know whether Gabriel just sung it so clearly I heard them all or whether the lyrics were written on the album--probably the latter.

Apparently I "know" as much as anyone about what the song "means."

Well, I just read Anne Sexton's poem "45 Mercy Street" for the first time ever just now.

I don't think it would be fair for me to say anything much about what the poem means, even just to me, just this second.

But here's what I found in the song:

Though I could figure out that Sexton was a suicidal poet readily enough at the time, and it has a plaintive, minor undertone, for me this song was like clean water, clear light, liberation. I hear all the darkness, all the despair (well, I get that it's there anyway) but actually what the song did for me was crystallize the positive vision of "materialism" in the Marxist sense.

See--

"looking down on empty streets, all she can see
are the dreams all made
solid
are the dreams all made real

all of the buildings, all of those
cars
were once just a dream
in somebody's head..."

That got me. I know I'm supposed to hear it all post-modernist, that the "dreams" of these other people are some kind of narrative trip that composes our world, this world that leaves us empty, despairing, miserable. But the first thing I felt was that it affirmed the worth of dreaming, of building, of striving. You can make your dreams solid and real. "Words support like bone." Because, I felt, words can be true words, honest words. Promises can be kept.

Anne doesn't find her worthwhile life in this world. Her life, her soul, is broken. The poem is about her fruitless search for 45 Mercy Street, the home she remembers, the place where she was loved and had meaning, and she doesn't find it. The last verses imply she "fails." She dies. The boat with her father is Charon's ferry to the underworld.

And yet--I felt that, I got that. But more important to me was the vision that whether we find it or not, the solid dreams are still there somehow. If we fail to get them, to build them and nurture them, in this life of ours, still truth and meaning go on somewhere out there. Maybe there is redemption and hope for us too. At any rate there is beauty, even if we have to rip our hearts out to see it.
It meant a lot to me.

Maybe I should revisit this.

Actually maybe I should blog it instead of clutter up Kactus's comments.
OK here goes. Select! Cut! Paste! Voila le blog-poste!