George's Arrowheads
So I was sitting there, blue as an Easter egg, on Easter afternoon 2006, though that's not important. But then again, what is important? I'm looking at a notebook in which, during that odd gloomy hour, I scribbled, "Am I wrestling with a great internal struggle -- figuring out the meaning of life and my role in the universe -- or just lurching on empty?"
What's important to me, what's interesting to me? I couldn't remember. What have I liked about making music, for example? I looked around the room for clues. In my notebook I even wrote, "Clues, please." Then my eyes fell upon George's arrowheads. George, one of my wife Kristi's long-lived uncles, is gone now, but his arrowheads, glued to a rectangle of black felt and framed in an 8 1/2 by 11 plain wood frame, are hanging on the wall of the family mobile home getaway in rural mid-Wisconsin. A one-display museum.
Why did this seem like a clue? And why would a person go walking around a field looking for these particular stone tools, shaped in this particular way, then go to the trouble of aligning them and gluing them to a fabric and mounting the whole assortment in a frame, to be hung on a wall? And why, on this gloomy late afternoon, did this dusty old project seem to answer my existential question?
The word that popped up like toast in the dreary kitchen of my brain was "taxonomy."
Taxonomy is described somewhat variously, and its etymology is often differently slanted (one dictionary says, "from Greek taxis 'arrangement' and nomia 'distribution.'" Another says 'arrangement' and nomos, meaning 'law.'" A third says 'arrangement' and onoma meaning 'name'. Etc.). And there are usually two main related definitions of the word, as in the trusty Infoplease dictionary (www.infoplease.com/dictionary/):
1. The science or technique of classification.
2. Biol., the science dealing with the description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms.
I'm talking about the first more general definition. The "technique of classification" is what links me and George in our arrowhead collecting and songwriting obsessions. Grubbing in a pasture and coming home with a sackful of related stones is not very different at all from grubbing in a marsh of words and coming home with a pageful of related rhymes or similarly metered phrases. It all has to do with classification; with dredging order out of chaos.
It struck me that songwriting (and song appreciation) involves taxonomy on a number of levels. There is the classifying by rhyme and meter, as I mentioned.
But there is also the taxonomy of ideas, in a way. Often a song has a number of verses, each one very much like the last in importance and pacing and so forth, sort of like the cars in a NASCAR race. Oh, they have their differences -- one says Viagra, one says Tide, one's a Chevrolet, one's a Yugo -- but they're all quite similar in essential ways. The next song would be more like, say, a tractor pull, where all the tractors are similar, but all very different from NASCAR cars.
Here's an example: In the traditional song Blow Ye Winds Of Morning, the author -- unknown today, as far as I can tell -- searches in his memory for grim realities of the whaling life that might fit the in the taxonomic classification of Unpleasant Components of Whaling Which Could Be Described Well In Two Lines of Verse. He thinks of seasickness. He thinks of bad food. He thinks of physical danger. He thinks of lousy pay. And so forth. And at the same time, he's also searching through other taxonomies, like those of meter and rhyme. Out of what must be an absolute nightmare of a chaotic seagoing employment, he comes up with, in these instances:
On seasickness:
It's now we're out to sea my boys, the wind comes on to blow
One half the watch is sick on deck, the other half below
On bad food:
But as for the provisions, we don't get half enough
A little piece of stinking beef and a blamed small bag of duff*
On danger:
Now clear away the boats my boys and after him we'll travel
But if you get too near his fluke, he'll kick you to the devil
On bad pay:
Now comes the stowing down, my boys, 'twill take both night & day,
And you'll all have 50 cents apiece on the 190th day-----*duff (alteration of "dough") is a boiled flour pudding, with bits of dried fruit if you're lucky.
You can see the differences of these verses, of course, like you can see the individuality of each of George's arrowheads. But you can also see how they are all similar taxonomically, in that they comprise a museum display of Unpleasant Components of Whaling Which Could Be Described Well In Two Lines of Verse.
I wish I could find an example that wasn't one of my own songs for this next observation. My apologies. But I often use misunderstood taxonomy as a basis for humor in songwriting, and I'm sure others use it too. We have a song that is really not much more than a series of taxonomic classifications. It's about romance, among other things, and has as its premise, stated in the intro:
It's your job to try and figure out which word in each grouping doesn't belong there...
Followed by lines like:
Aries, Virgo, Leo, Gemini, Cancer, Taurus, NISSAN, Capricorn, Libra.
Find the taxonomic inconsistency. Then for the big finish of each verse, there's an extra taxonomic twist, such as:
Car theft, robbery, mugging, burglary, ROMANCE, hijack, arson, larceny, HAIRBRUSH.
At first you think "romance" is the taxonomic misfit, but then realize that no, it's "hairbrush." This surprise retroactive taxonomic reclassification of the word "romance" in the listener's mind is (I like to think) what's funny.
So. It's great how, just when you think
you've lost complete track of what used to dimple your mug, you
get the Big Clue from the most unexpected of places. Thank you
George, my fellow taxonomist.