stretching [and] the truth

i had decided that i wouldn't like Stan Rogers any longer—but, before doing that, i had to solve a lyrical mystery.

the song "Lies," about the age of beauty after the seven kids have left for school, has in it two lines which lift the other verses from what would otherwise be irredeemably insipid sentimentality; both achieve a sense of scope through their specificity of reference.

the first has words and sense, both of which i understand: "Pours a cup of coffee, drips Carnation from the can." what i don't understand is why this reference should get me. but it happens every time. maybe it's because i shouldn't really comprehend this, nor should it mean something to me; i probably learned it while biking in Canada and not watching the scenery, probably saw some evaporated milk not spoiling on a windowsill behind a fluttering gingham curtain—and, probably, all of this subliminally. but, in any case, i just think of the triangle punctures, the thin residual trickle narrowly prevented from touching the surface upon which the can rests by a rough and conscious, though attending to everything else, thumb. and my face wrinkles right up.

as for the second, i grasp the meaning—but i cannot for the life of me understand the subject of the simile: "So this is beauty's finish! Like Rodin's ____ ____ ____." as is my (and, perhaps, The) usual predilection, i fit something in those three syllables and, with a process very much like finding mathematical limits, continue to substitute until nothing more is gained to warrant the finding of the alternate. so much of our reasons for knowing, for creating—for doing anything at all—are, merely and ultimately, so that we are not forced, by jarring elision, to stop singing; if we mumble in the same rhythm, we do, after all, hold the meter. moreover, the insertion is never without reason or a sense that could—and would—be defended and, thus, i would almost say, serves as an equal (and possibly better) on purely epistemological grounds.

[here i am reminded of several such defenses. even in my younger days, i realised that it is always better to present a stunning, elaborate, and unmitigateable proof for the existence of that which is heard—rather than admit that, just perhaps, one has mis-heard. i'll only say it once, but here it is: "from my great-great grand-daddy reaching up to me" is, indeed, the correct version. there. i now hope to enjoy a long and glorious harmony, particularly in car rides along the [p]Turnagain Arm, with my sister.

to be sure, however, it is most necessary to make every attempt to avoid leaping to subjective interpretations of lyrics, no matter how the "real" could, in fact, be improved upon by the "thought-you-said" version. to this end, it is often helpful to consult liner notes. a rather immense problem occurs, however, whenever one is confronted by any in the following list of scenarios:

1. Google has not yet (either absolutely or relatively) come into being as Salvator Mundi, Junior

2. the manufacturer of the cassette asks the preposterous $2.00 that is 70927 times your combined monthly allowance for a copy of the album's lyrics

3. you are stuck for the entire summer driving in a crowded vehicle (although many of the actual passengers change with each new iteration) to Portage Glacier along the aforementioned pTurnagain Arm and (because you cannot read while being thus engaged, without vomiting) do not have at your disposal the ability to peruse certain vital documents, should they exist. none of these paltry circumstantial inconveniences has the ability to change your being required to intone along with the tape in order to, quite literally, save yourself from going mad

4. you simply hold a firm belief in your ability to hear—and can't imagine your ears ever deceiving you.

sooooo...when you clamber out of the car, at long last, the two of you dash into the bedroom you share with your brother, rig up the rectangular tape recorder, sweep away the corrugated debris from the Wizard of Oz cardboard puppets (along with the lies, deceits, and false promises concerning both enthusiasm-for-project and practise schedule), haul out the Steno notebooks and get down to business. the task at hand: a thorough and accurate record of the Tom Chapin song, "Picnic of the World," in which many many (but, clearly, not all—there being no room for rogue states even in Clinton-era songwriting) of the nations are envisaged, to the tune of Offenbach's "Infernal Galop" from Orpheus in the Underworld (known in the piecrust-rollicking vernacular as "The Can-Can"), on a gigantic lawn with the usual inedible edibles. suspiciously, not a single enclosed land mass is (yet) spewing—either from the salmonella barely contained beneath the superficial grilling and the mayonnaise or the thoughtless and swaying-while-holding-hands idealism that is blatantly violating the integrity of borders, left and right.

in any case, we were drawn by the tune's manic pace and, after our hearts had assumed it, the witty and synthetic concept that caught us up in the transcriptional challenge. although at other times, endlessly amused by the Chipmunk Button on the top of the player which rendered the most prosaic passages of, say, Garrison Keillor or Scarlatti absolutely hilarious, solely by virtue of being sped up by a factor of (your choice) either 3409 or 6818 (hilarity x2), this time around it was painstaking slowness that counted. as such, it depended foundationally upon the squeaking halt-and-rewind process:

Vlad.: Oops, too far that time
Est.: Fast forward it
Vlad.: Oh, we missed it now
[more painful rewinding]
Est.: Too far, again

God.: JUST LET IT PLAY!

and, with that booming intrusion into what would, otherwise, have been a perfectly content investigative afternoon, we found ourselves in a dilemma: should we accept the offer, which had followed quick on the heels of the outburst (and in the same decibular elevation that could have indicated hasty judgement and, thus, insincerity—but which, in any case, had been heard by far too many witnesses (in the form of visitors from the Lower 48) to be rescinded upon)), of the very $2.00 whose grant proposal had been formerly rejected? with these funds, we could appeal to the company which promised, for such a price, to send us our coveted sheet filled on both sides with words, and which would, within 6-8 weeks, facilitate our memorisation process. or should we, having forged our way through the better part of the song, continue in what had become a fail-safe—screech, jerk, halt—method and—squaaaak, pthththth, eeeeeeeeeeee—with which we would, really, soon be finished? were we sly and manipulative, we'd have taken the money and run...back to the tape recorder and pencils whose erasers were nearly gone by now, saving the $2.00 for something really important. like (it was only later that one of us would, incidentally, discover a brilliant means whereby to scam—ahem, earn—money, dribbled out in nickels, both for doing and not doing Nothing.) we had, at this point, only and wholeheartedly, eyes for the present undertaking. if everyone (including all of the sequential rounds of guests who had come along for the ride and the Glacier at its end) had, soon after this point, fled from the premises, we never realised it. when we threw the bedroom doors, swollen though they were in the heat of that Alaskan summer, open in preparation for the artistic culmination, we thought everyone had been there all along, waiting batedly for us to dance our new-found lyrics....]

well, then.

back to the topic at hand. listening to that line about something with three syllables in Rodin's oeuvre, i became as convinced that the appropriate term was "Belomor" as i was that it could not be—since that would prove, quite simply, too perfect. because, you see, Belomor is the shorthand alias (literally "white sea") for the great Soviet feat of commun[al]ism: both in building the system of canals from the White Sea to the Baltic and in writing about it. the construction began in 1931, supported (perhaps imbalancedly) by a great need to, immediately, draw a "map of a whole country born anew [that] was almost as simple to read as the plan of a city"—and by the ceaseless labour of Stalin's arrested. as if this immense reconfiguration of the soil and the (prisoner) soul was insufficiently revolutionary, the 1935 collaborative account, by 37 different authors, was posited as an even greater Revolution: that of the notion of "authorship," itself, (in that it could be "collective")—and, by scarcely-concealed extension, the concept of and potential for ideological leadership. each of the "37 Chekists" (you can make the Korrect General Bonded leap yourself, i trust) contributed a chapter that, in some way, addressed the notion of reforgeability, itself. Maxim Gorky "summed up."

not being quite up to refor[c]ing a conceptual framework to suit a particular purpose—in this case the resolution of syllabic and thematic truth—in the same, shall we say, unflagging manner, i admitted the great unlikelihood/ness that Rodin, having died in 1917 after all, had sculpted—much less entitled—a work of the same name as the book i was currently reading. nonetheless, i hitched my hopes on an outcropping further within reach. which is to say: that the title was French (like Rodin! i thought that, being French and all, maybe he called his (French) works by French names...) but that it sounded like my Russian candidate. although i already told you that i don't know French, myself, i somehow remembered something about the language having, among its mysterious elements, both "belle" (which sounds like "Bel-") and "mer" (which sounds like "-mor"). i was seeing beauty and the sea; my thoughts were slipping into a heady kind of historical linguistic determinism, a mythic revisionism that could cure even the deepest Soviet Realism.

that is, until i managed to find still nothing on Rodin and his acclaimed Mermaid Years.

i had, by now, definitely put off the putting off of the Stan Rogers—and was singing this single line constantly and schizophrenically, inserting all manner of objects into the unidentified flying gap. but, i tell you, nothing worked like the Russian.

the desperation of reality loomed before my crazed eyes, the only image visible and the only thought conceivable. until, that is, i stooped to imagine (because i had heard tell of languages in which not everything is splayed out like a confessional hysteric) that perhaps this French-i-do-not-know was among these legendary ones with unvoiced letters and—just maybe—some totally inefficient vowel clusters that could concisely sum to "e," "o," and "e/o" (in that order and held fast with the indisputable consonants anyone could hear: "b," "l," and "m"). i submitted this exact sentiment to Google for scrutiny and, 0.14 seconds later, was rewarded beyond my wildest dreams (although within 0.14 more seconds, the linguist's among these would be dashed to pieces beyond the wildest Epoxy).

and this is beauty's finish:
Rodin's Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière

but why cannot her mirror tell her lies?