But imagine an American Zarathrustra saying;
‘What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents’. This would be the voice of the poor innocent American, those far off from the centre, and there’d be a presence in the voice, beyond the hollow and incomprehensible pile of things usually heard in the usual voice saying the usual things, a voice that unchains itself like a slow rainbow, an allusive bridge tempting a sense of eternity that is irreconcilable and sad. In it are differences that fall on the other side of reasonable memory and reasonable hope. This is the voice from the hinterlands and nighthawk bars, fairgrounds and lonesome places where snake-oil songs and tales of hope and despair rise to demonstrate another reality of the starkest contrast. Here the songs and tales soothe the pain, bring hope and solace out of the irreversible succession of moments traipsing towards nothingness. This is the territory of Dave Macon at the start of singing ‘Way Down The Old Plank Road’ where he cracks his whip and shouts ‘Kill Yourself’. Dylan’s Basement Tapes hum out of this weirdness. Grimms’ tales are an easy fit too.
There are traces of hidden traditions that criss-cross this American land. There are sounds that become repeatable, recognizable, recalled at one end which is like the very start. In this respect the uniqueness of each identity is erased through repeatability and everything that seems to be passing is simultaneously re-recognised as returning. This is of course, alongside all else, Biblical: as in Acts: ‘Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began,’ and in Noah’s defiant, ‘ While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease…’ When anthropologist Mercia Eliade writes of this eternal return, it: ‘ … has the meaning of a supreme attempt toward the ‘staticization’ of becoming, toward annulling the irreversibility of time. If all moments and all situations of the cosmos are repeated ad infinitum, their evanescence is, in the last analysis, patent; sub specie infinitatis, all moments and their situations remain stationary.’ The Grimm legacy speaks easily to this as well where in these tales for a moment there’s no movement and everything is sucked up and laid bare.
What America is is also is a species of utopian thinking, the rough hewn, jim-crack type we get in its fairgrounds and circus tents, where weird and off kilter figures throw in baroque dreams and tales that hover all strange and thin above deep still waters and silent, bleeding lands. Fog lifts an inch and odd shadows shimmer at impossible angles from cryptic buildings robbing lights and blending different depths of dark. What this utopianism feels like is a brutal retelling at a reduced price where the value nevertheless stays high and everything is kept miraculously intact.
This is the way a solitary agony is approached in Bob Dylan’s ‘Nettie More’, for example, where the doomed and condemned killer of his own true love, on his way to his own execution, tells us of his eternal love in a tale that’s a body immersed in his own temporal, finite circumstance. It takes up the voice of the guy who sings of his feelings for the woman he has murdered. It’s a narrative that attempts to face down doom with unforeseeable possibilities. It breaks the difference between the past and the future and hopes the swollen thrumming beat of the gallows drum is heralding a miraculous turn whilst the whistful refrain signals the futility of any hope that he ‘might make it home alive’. He draws down the blackness of his execution and extinction, having no innocence or cunning left :
‘Oh, I miss you, Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o’er
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there’s no one left here to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes’
Here the apocatastasis – the technical term for eternal return myths – is tempered with a bleak and moving satirical edge where we’re left wondering at the delusion of the criminal whose story and song is as willful as god’s. It’s brutal and rough with his tenderness which we know he can’t properly understand. America has a certain genius for that sound, one painfully aware of the time that will come inevitably permeated with nothingness. Famously when Dylan was asked about the crucifixion he quipped in serious play that it happened last Tuesday. He could equally have said next Tuesday. This event isn’t one that happens in the same time as 1066 or 1776 or 1798 or whatever. Passing and becoming are not successive events. Eschatological time ‘… has two faces, one that of passing, the other of becoming.’
Two voices of Americana becoming: Roy Orbison has a voice that is forever becoming, a voice at midnight going to noon, when it is neither this day nor the next, or the last, but is uncanny and at risk of never ceasing, never starting. It is the voice of the Queen of Hell reincarnated in Americana’s Circean grove. Brandon Flowers of ‘The Killers’ has a voice that sounds as if on the perpetual edge of breaking into tears that will sweep up all the confusion and terrors. These two voices – Orbison’s and Flowers’ – seem to capture the sense that life’s very reason, virtue, purpose, happiness, its very urge and passion is deep down nauseating and apocalyptic, like a thaumaturgic God sniffing a magical flower. Listening to ‘This River is Wild’ Flowers voice expresses a sense of a superhuman effort to exceed what he knows are the limits of being human. The catastrophe of the bands’ arrangements, which ought to be alienating and bombastic right through, are freed into his expressive cries that launch heroically across the abyss of the final note and silence. The wonky sounds and over-hard drum beats work as metaphors complementing the abysmal Gothic beauty of Flowers’ voice that passes over everything it touches like doomed affirmation. It’s pure Grimm curious.
In 1971 Dylan wrote:
‘where i live now the only thing that keeps the area going is tradition – as you can figure out – it doesn’t count very much – everything around me rots… i don’t know how long it has been this way, but if it keeps up, soon i will be an old man – & i am only 15 – the only job around here is mining – but jesus, who wants to be a miner… i refuse to be part of such a shallow death.’
What Zipes continues to do with his investigations into these tales is draw us back into these vital mysterious undercurrents. He is one of the essential critics working today who knows how to swim with his eyes wide open.He reminds us of the question we’re all struggling with: ‘What language do you speak when you speak of such secretive things?’ and presents the first edition of Grimms’ tales as an answer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
Buy his book here to keep him biding!
