{"id":40412,"date":"2012-10-23T16:16:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T20:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40412"},"modified":"2019-01-14T16:50:43","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T21:50:43","slug":"fang-song-on-the-poetry-of-neil-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/23\/fang-song-on-the-poetry-of-neil-young\/","title":{"rendered":"Helpless: On the Poetry of Neil Young"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a fascinating if incomplete musing <\/a>on the New Yorker<\/em> website this week regarding\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u2019s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn’t read would decide to write a book, though it\u2019s often true that writing and reading aren\u2019t necessarily two sides of the same coin. They are often very different coins, operating in very different currencies. When you go to a bank to make change, the exchange rate is never in your favor.<\/p>\n

I forwarded the piece to my friend Bill Flicker, out in Los Angeles, who wrote back that he never listens to\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u2019s words, that they are simply placeholders or crumbs that are scattered on a walk through a musical forest. Actually, I do<\/em> listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they\u2019re remarkably visual and evocative:<\/p>\n

Blue blue windows behind the stars.
\nYellow moon on the rise.
\nPurple words on a grey background
\nTo be a woman and to be turned down<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How did those windows get behind the stars? I don\u2019t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. As for those purple words, they shine against the grey background much as Matisse\u2019s goldfish shine through the water they swim in. I can see them clearly reflected on the surface of being turned down. Turned down like a bed, like a stereo,\u00a0like a deal. A woman turned down. I can see that reflection even if I can\u2019t explain it. If I could, the song might not be as powerful as it is.<\/p>\n

What is the color
\nWhen black is burned?
\nWhat is the color?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I know what that color is but I\u2019m not permitted to say. Joy Williams once wrote that \u201cthe children had told her once that the sun was called the sun because the real word for it was too terrible.\u201d She was listening to\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u00a0when she wrote that.<\/p>\n

Shelter me from the powder
\nand the finger
\nCover me with the thought
\nthat pulled the trigger<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger. Not cover me with earth. Not cover me with death. But cover me with the very impulse behind my death. Cover me with the will that I should die, that I should cease. That idea, that line, is worthy of anyone you can name. Anyone. It\u2019s large as the sky. Yet small enough to fit into a song. That\u2019s the terrible beauty of it.<\/p>\n

Not all of\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u2019s songs are as evocative or as powerful. Songs pour out of him at an alarming rate, and for better and for worse they are part of an enormous work that\u2019s still in progress, that keeps expanding. There are songs that seem ungainly or odd, that seem to have their gears showing, but I tend to think of these the way I think about those extra widgets or metal bits that come with a Swiss Army knife. I don’t know why they\u2019re there, but they seem like they\u2019re there for a reason, part of a larger scheme. Sometime much later, when you\u2019re lost in the forest of the night, that useless whatsit might be the only thing that could save your life. You never know.<\/p>\n

The elegant simplicity of\u00a0Young\u2019s songs does not seem manufactured. There\u2019s neither a faux primitivism nor a childlike celebration of the obvious a la, say, the venerable comic strip Nancy<\/em>.\u00a0Rather, they combine a child\u2019s focus and need to meet ideas head on with a zen equanimity. The sense of foreboding we feel isn\u2019t necessarily in the songs but in us. These are reports sent back from a place beyond judgement. from a weatherman used to the cold:<\/p>\n

Wind blowing through my sails
\nIt feels like I’m gone<\/p>\n

See the sky about to rain
\nbroken clouds and rain<\/p>\n

Big bird flying across the sky
\nthrowing shadows on our eyes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Alec Wilkinson, who wrote the New Yorker<\/em> piece, Young\u00a0has missed out on \u201cexamples of language carrying complicated thoughts or feelings, the way they are carried in the poems of writers such as Philip Levine or William Butler Yeats or the prose of a writer such as Isak Dinesen.\u201d Well, yes. And no.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d all be better off for having Philip Levine and W. B. Yeats and Isak Dinesen in our libraries and in our heads. But\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u00a0operates in a very different and a very special arena. His songs seem to be both post-literate and preliterate in a powerful and distinctly modern way, leapfrogging over logic and seeming to come straight from the unconscious. Maybe not even his<\/em> unconscious, more out of a collective yearning or out of some deep and mostly hidden national or international dream state. If swamps or lagoons could hum, they’d probably hum\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u00a0songs.<\/p>\n

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City. He last wrote for the Daily on Nick Drake<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a fascinating if incomplete musing on the New Yorker website this week regarding\u00a0Neil\u00a0Young\u2019s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn’t read would decide to write a book, though it\u2019s often true that writing and reading aren\u2019t necessarily two sides of the same coin. 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