¤ milky moon ¤

My all-time favourite song by anyone! At the moment. But I think it will stay that way for a very long while... It just soars and seems to defy gravity, it makes me dance and cry at the same time. It's so deep and intense, it's wonderful, gorgeous, divine!

My feelings exactly! A close second for me right now is A Pin-Bent Light, I like them right next to each other - it feels to me like Pin-Bent Light is this gorgeous, deep, intimate hush that unfurls into the ecstasy of Time, As A Symptom.

The interesting thing about "Go free, and graze. Amen." is that in Monkey & Bear, when the horses do exactly that, they get grass-sick and die; the horses that didn't join them learn from the experience to "stay by the gate that you are given," etc.

Yes, I think there is quite a change in perspective here. But then Areion isn't any old horse, is he?

I'm not sure those lines in Monkey & Bear are meant to be taken as condoning the horses' perspective, anyway. That section of the song is kind of separate from the rest - it's background, the explanation for why the farm gate was left open, allowing Monkey to persuade Bear to escape with him, presented as a fable in the narrator's voice, but I think it's a kind of sarcastic fable.

The narrator is, later on, clearly partial, being sympathetic towards Bear and contemptuous of Monkey: consider "Though cast in plaster, / our Ursala’s heart beat faster / than monkey’s ever will"; "So, with the courage of a clown, or a cur, / or a kite, jerking tight at its tether," vs. "Deep in the night / shone a weak and miserly light"; "and the thought troubled the monkey, / for he was afraid".

It can be assumed that the narrative voice is similarly partial from the start. I'm not convinced that we're meant to take the narrator's report on what the horses learnt from the experience as an endorsement of the lesson. It's introduced with, "What is now known by the sorrel and the roan?": the narrator reports what the horses understood, but doesn't state that that's what they should have understood. The way that it's written on the lyric sheet, and the tone when it's sung, also suggest irony, to me:

"And had the overfed dead but listened
to the high-fence, horse-sense, wisdom…"

The ellipsis at the end, leaving the thought unfinished, evokes sarcastic imitation, to me. The sing-song, childish rhythm and tone of "high-fence, horse-sense wisdom" seems almost to negate the word 'wisdom'. Overall, I get the impression that the narrator is being insincere: it's not 'wisdom' at all, it's horses (easily cowed herd animals) being horses. In the narrative structure of the story, the death of the horses who fled serves as foreshadowing for Bear's fate: Bear was clearly tormented before she left the farm with Monkey; she had a "life’s-worth of hunger", her coat was "worn translucent". Monkey's vilification of the farmer can't have been too far off the mark. It's unclear (to me, at least) whether or not Bear drowns at the end of the song; whatever happens to her, she indulges herself in a feast to make up for a lifetime of starvation, much as the horses did, and this act of self-emancipation and reparation is presented as heroic. So what if the overfed dead had listened? They'd be alive and back under the tight-fisted rule of the farmer; at least the overfed dead died free and after experiencing abundance for once in their lives.

So I'm not sure if the reference to Monkey & Bear indicates a shift of perspective as much as an integration of the song's argument into Time, As A Symptom. There are references to some of her other songs, too. Emily is referenced by "...the field when the wind combs through it..." ("...dragged a comb through the meadow..."); In California by the "ear of corn" ("my heart is yellow as an..."); "life-liver ... river" nods towards Easy. I think what Time, As A Symptom does, in a sense, is draw the themes of her work to date together into a single statement - appropriate, given its place at the end of a cyclical, self-referential album.

Yeah, it's totally clear that the narrator's sympathy lies with Bear. You may be right that it's not so much a change in perspective as an affirmation of the perspective that was already there! I agree about all the references from other songs, those struck me too, as well as the recurrence birds, and of horses and ships in some other songs on Divers. I get the impression that the "ear of corn" (which is definitely white and gold! ) in Time, As A Symptom is meant to be a procreative symbol or metaphor or whatever, and I'm now wondering if that might be the case in In California too...

/agreed!
The last 2 songs and particular this one are my favorite thus far.
the way the album ends mid-word is fantastic.

Probably a rather obvious 'reference', but given the oceanic theme, can we presume that 'White Star' is intended to evoke Liverpool's White Star Line shipping company, operator of the RMS Titanic?

Also, as had been pointed out on the Joanna Newsom Lyrics website, it's interesting how the truncated final word of this, the final song, "trans[cending]" loops back to the first word of the opening song, "Sending", which is apparently also mirrored in the same note being played at the end of one and beginning of the other.

Thanks for pointing that out, I just thought she was talking about a White Dwarf type of star or something!
Yes, the "loop" effect has been mentioned in quite a few reviews as well.

Someone (re)created that loop here by overlapping the ending and the beginning. It really sounds like it could almost be one song!

Thank you for posting that, Julia. It really is such a good fit, isn't it!

You can call me a silly woman, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that this album signifies the end of this part of her life and the beginning of a new one and that she's really given herself permission to become a mother now, if that's what she is allowed. Go free and graze. Amen!

This was posted on Joanna Newsom Lyrics:
"A way a lone a last a loved a long the" is the last sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which also deals a lot with time. This last line is actually the first half of the opening line of the novel, meaning it cycles back to the beginning and doesn't really have a start or end. Similar to FW, this last song ends mid-word and picks up back to the start on Anecdotes, which begins with "-sending."

Yay! Now my TWO favourite artists have quoted James Joyce!

The last two songs on this album are the only ones without any question marks.

Alex Ysoltsev wrote:The last two songs on this album are the only ones without any question marks.

Interesting! I ran the numbers:
MEM: 5/12 tracks have question marks
Ys: 5/5
HOOM: 15/18
Divers: 9/11

The songs with no ?s on HOOM are:
Jackrabbits
Autumn
Does Not Suffice

A platter of questions:

Should we go outside?
And do you want to run with my pack?
Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?
Am I so dear?
Will you just look at me?
Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window?
C’mon, will you dance, my darling?
Do you wait for me there?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?
Will you call me, when you get there?
Have you forgotten everything?
Don't you know what you ought to do?
Well daddy longlegs, are you?
Tell me, what is meant by sin, or none, in a garden seceded from the union in the year of A.D. 1?
Won't you love me a spell?
Who was it that you then loved the most?
Will you keep an eye on Baby Birch?
Will you leave me be, so that we can stay true to the path that you have chosen?
Kindness comes over me; what was your name?
Do you spite me?
Do you know why my ankles are bound in gauze?
And then, Slow-heart, are you gonna know him?
Tell me, honey, did I pass your test?
Where will you go, if not here?
You want your love, Love?
Whose is the hand that I will hold?
When are you from?
Will you tell the one that I loved to remember, and hold me?
Are we leaving the city?
Our flock had cause to leave, but do we?
Have they drowned, in those windy highlands?
Or does that man endure, somewhere far away?
How do you choose the time you must exhale, and kick, and rise?
Why don't you come back on the tree, turn the color green the way you ought to be?
And how long did you climb that night, with the ice in your lungs, on the rungs of the light?

under a CPell wrote:My all-time favourite song by anyone! At the moment. But I think it will stay that way for a very long while... It just soars and seems to defy gravity, it makes me dance and cry at the same time. It's so deep and intense, it's wonderful, gorgeous, divine!

Amen. Really... no words can describe the feeling I got the first time I listened to the album in its entirety and reached that last suspended note. It really is a transfixing, transcending piece of music. Hope she plays it live! I'm quite curious to see how she would perform that whole last segment of the song with only one vocal line.

I've grown pretty attached to the idea that 'white star' refers to both the Titanic liner and the state of white-dwarf stars- the two seem to share a lot of similarities and call to mind a lot of the record's themes.. all of these layers are so thought-provoking, I love it!

The 'white ship' phrase might reference the short story of the same name by H.P Lovecraft, which can be read online here: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/tex ... on/ws.aspx

I wonder if "the river of time" is maybe a reference to the painting Time Is A River Without Banks by Marc Chagall?

This is kind of interesting, re: "undarked", clocks and luminosity and unforeseen effects and all that jazz -

Undark was a trade name for luminous paint made with a mixture of radioactive radium and zinc sulfide, as produced by the U.S. Radium Corporation between 1917 and 1938. It was used primarily in watch and clock dials. The people working in the industry who applied the radioactive paint became known as the Radium Girls, because many of them became ill and some died from exposure to the radiation emitted by the radium contained within the product. The product was the direct cause of Radium jaw in the dial painters. Undark was also available as a kit for general consumer use and marketed as glow-in-the-dark paint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undark