Patterns: Paul Simon's Prosaic Pathos

The Beatles and Bob Dylan may get more ink today, but the songs of Simon & Garfunkel voiced the isolation and soul-searching as meaningfully as any artist of the Sixties. We listened to their albums, studied their lyrics in English class, and deeply reflected on the things they were saying.

"Patterns" was a song from their third album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. At the time I was unaware it first appeared on Simon's 1965 album The Paul Simon Songbook. We had a record player in Mr. Sebes' art class and two girls there seemed to control what music we listened to there. It was Simon & Garfunkel continuously. And I don't believe anyone ever objected.

The song "Patterns" is actually pretty bleak. It states that life is a labyrinthine maze in which we are trapped like rats. There are patterns but we never seem to find our way out or have any control over the game.

According Wikipedia, "A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated like a wallpaper design."

Artists can become fascinated by patterns. We see them everywhere in nature.

Psychologists look for patterns in behavior to help unravel inner conflicts and resolve neurotic angst in their patients.

Stock market investors look for patterns as well and devise a whole array of techniques in an attempt to determine if a stock price will go up or down, based on the pattern trends.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson's ninth novel, was titled Pattern Recognition. "The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization." (Wikipedia)

Pattern recognition has become a pretty hot area of new research today. The journal Pattern Recognition describes it like this:

Pattern Recognition is a mature but exciting and fast developing field, which underpins developments in cognate fields such as computer vision, image processing, text and document analysis and neural networks. It is closely akin to machine learning, and also finds applications in fast emerging areas such as biometrics, bioinformatics, multimedia data analysis and most recently data science. The journal Pattern Recognition was established some 50 years ago, as the field emerged in the early years of computer science. Over the intervening years it has expanded considerably. 

* * * *

A pattern within a pattern. Captured at Art on the Planet n Superior.

Paul Simon's "Patterns" is a precisely crafted piece of poetry infused with its own patterns. When we studied it in Mr. Harris' class, we learned about various devices like assonance ("when you don't get the rhyme right" as Rita says in Educating Rita), and onomatopoeia. Note the ominous "shivering shadows" and repetition of "s" and "sh" sounds in this first stanza.

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child's uneven scrawl

Simon continues to describe the setting, amplifying his gloom with the description of this cramped space he is in. The word "impaled" is a haunting image and we sense the central character's isolation and sense of hopelessness. What he sees is the pattern of his life, with the word "puzzle" repeated from the first verse.

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me

In the final stanza we find his "aha" moment. This pattern began when he entered the world, and will continue unaltered until he leaves it.

From the moment of my birth
To the instant of my death
There are patterns I must follow
Just as I must breathe each breath
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies

* * * *

Fractals are themselves a form of pattern within a seeming non-pattern.

The message is bleak, but is it true? Are our lives really so scripted that we can never deviate from who we appear to be?

Behaviorism was a popular philosophical view in the mid-20th century. It used science to affirm that we internally are wired to be who we are, both by genetic design and the nurturing of our early childhood. Though we're psychologically more complicated than pigeons, like pigeons we are essentially "programmed" by forces that lock us in, that we do not have a free will at all.

French attorney/philosopher/theologian Jacques Ellul wrote about these matters as well, though he approached it differently. He stated that we are enslaved more than we realize--for the reasons cited by Skinner and Freud--but that in the very center of our being have do have the ability to make choices, our basis for hope. It's just not easy due to the multiple forces, internal and external, that bear down upon us.

In an essay on the thought and writings of Ellul, James Fowler writes: Ellul's thesis is that the natural man is incapable of seeing the spiritual reality in which he is struggling (cf. I Cor. 2;14). He only sees the surface issues of social, political and economic problems, and he attempts to work and find solutions with the methods of technique, and in accord with moral standards. The world of modern society is not capable of preserving itself or of finding remedies for its spiritual situation. The more so-called "progress" man makes, the more he is aware of the inadequacy of human solutions, which all fail, one after another, and only increase the difficulties in which he lives.

The end result is the sense of futility and despair described by Paul Simon. How we respond to this emotional/psychological space has a bearing on who we become. Existentialists see this as the foundational starting point for creating meaning for our lives. We choose whom we will become. For those who find salvation in faith, it's from this place of despondency and desperation that many people reach out to, and find, God.

Zentangle pattern courtesy Esther Piszczek.

Hemingway had contempt for what many called "foxhole religion" in which soldiers only reached out to God when they were at the end of their rope. "Oh God, don't let me die and I will do anything you ask!" He no doubt saw first hand this kind of religion--may have experienced it himself--and wrote a cynical story about it in his classic In Our Time.

How we choose to live says more than all the promises we make. What we value is revealed in our choices. I disagree with the fatalists who say we are so programmed that we have no choice, no free will. On the other hand, habit can be a very harsh taskmaster. Gaining our freedom requires determination and persistence. We don't and won't drift into it if we're passive like jellyfish.

Paul Simon is a poet, and his effort to capture a feeling, a feeling most of us have experienced, is not necessarily a conclusion about the meaning of life. He captures the feeling well, however. And in other songs he captures other feelings, such as, "Life I love you, all is groovy."

Of all these things much more can be said. For the moment, let's save it for another space in time. The song may have a somewhat bitter end, but that doesn't mean our lives have to.

Sounds of Silence

"Kathy I'm lost," I said, but I knew she was sleeping.
~Paul Simon, America

The other night while rifling through some old LPs I came across Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence, put it on and drifted back to high school art class. There was a record player in the art room and there were two girls who seemed to own the right to decide what everyone else should listen to because I don't recall ever seeing anyone else ever even touch that record player except them. They were juniors and I was a senior.

The reason Sounds of Silence brought me back to that class is that it was one of the only records they played all year. The other two albums they played were Wednesday Morning 3 a.m., Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bookends. The net result is that by year's end the lyrics to nearly every Simon & Garfunkel song had become permanently etched within my cranium.

As I listened to Side II it dawned on me how dark their music really was. On one level their vocal harmonizations and acoustical sound provided a musicality that was sweet and pleasing to the ear. But getting to the lyrics themselves brings shadows across this landscape and a density that is almost unexpected when juxtaposed with the melodic voices.

The first song is a re-telling of the story of Richard Cory, which was originally a poem by E.A. Robinson about a wealthy factory owner who "owned half of this whole town, with political connections to spread his wealth around," as told from the point of view of an envious man who is at the bottom rung in his factory, looking up from the dust. "My mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read, 'Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head.'" It's a song about suicide.

And the second song is the same, only this time is the suicide of a man who is a social misfit. He lives alone, isolated... ...and all the people said, "What a shame that he's dead, but wasn't he a most peculiar man."

The side concludes with another song of alienation by a man who has given up on love, who is now shut off. "I am a rock, I am an island," is his refrain.

The opening cut on their Bookends album picks up on the same theme. A boy standing on a ledge, preparing to leap to his death as a gathering crowd below reacts.

What strikes me is the context of all this heart-wrenching drama and its contrast with the writers of the Lost Generation. In the 1920's a generation of writers and artists had seen first hand the horrors of war, captured the pain and challenge of fitting into society after having suffered physical and emotional wounds "over there." In the 1960's, we see a generation of song writers emerge who grew up in an age of modest abundance, yet reflecting the empty soul of this abundance. They had money, but something inside remained hollow.

This was Paul Simon's legacy, the ability to tap into that painful hollow space and make it vivid so we could better understand ourselves and our times.

Bookends: The Trivia Quiz & Art Class Memories

My junior year in high school I took my first art class since grade school. It proved to be a significant decision. The night before that first day of school my best friend had been hit by a car and was killed twenty minutes after I had seen him and said, "I'll see you tomorrow."

Art took on a significant role for me that year. It became a way in which I dealt with my internal wrestlings with significant life issues and a form of escape. It simultaneously became intertwined with my search for meaning.

So it was that art class with Mr. Sebes was a meaningful safe harbor in the midst of the tedium of high school studies, reports and other stresses. This was the late sixties, and there was a record player in the art class room. And there were a couple girls in our class who brought Simon Garfunkel albums to that class, playing them endlessly. In fact, I believe it's possible we went two full years listening to nothing but the same Simon and Garfunkel albums, over and over and over.

In English class, Mr. Harris used contemporary music to teach us about poetry, elevating it to cultural explorations about the angst of our time, which was especially conveyed in many of the songs Simon & Garfunkel wrote and sang, such as Richard Cory and A Most Peculiar Man or the Beatles' She's Leaving Home.

So it is that last night I was thinking about how these songs were played so frequently I could actually remember nearly every line and tonal inflection. From this, I decided to make a quiz for you. Maybe you remember those songs as well. Here are twelve questions based on the album Bookends. See how well you perform. Ten or better is an A. Answer below.

At the Zoo
1. Which animal is kindly but dumb?
2. Which animal is skeptical of changes in their cages?
3. This animal stands for honesty. What is it?
4. Which animal plots in secrecy?
5. And which is insincere?

And more...
6. What was the name of the draft dodger living downstairs in Punky’s Dilemma?
7. What was the name of the famous baseball player in Mrs. Robinson?
8. In the song Fakin’ It, what occupation did the narrator have in another lifetime?
9. Who was the officer in Save the Life of My Child?
10. What happened when the spotlight hit the boy?
11. What was the narrator drinking while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme in A Hazy Shade of Winter?
12. In the song America, what did the narrator say when Kathy was sleeping?

ANSWERS
1. Elephants
2. Orangutans
3. Monkeys
4. Pigeons
5. Giraffes
6. Old Roger draft-dodger
7. Joe DiMaggio
8. A Tailor
9. Officer McDougal
10. He flew away
11. Vodka and lime
12. “Kathy, I’m lost.”

How did you do?

The Boxer

While the Fifties Beat poets howled against the machinery of Moloch, the current corroded state of the industrial complex that was America, a great mass of popular culture was emerging, led by network television, but also supported by the pervasiveness of radio driven primarily by the music industry. The broken, disenfranchised characters that populated Howl and other writings of the Beats were at polar opposites with the bubble gum chewing bobbysoxers at sock hops, the Cleavers, baseball loving, apple pie chortling Americans who spread like moist butter into the crannies surrounding all our big cities to become Suburbia. These were those who bought into the American Dream and had begun spreading their wings.

Most of the kids of these families, the Boomer generation, listened to Top 40 radio for at least a portion of their young lives. People like Murray the K and Cousin Brucie on WABC, the top rock station on the AM dial, owned the airwaves, slinging out the super hits one after another from sea to shining sea. Consider the contrast between I Want To Hold Your Hand (#1 song of 1964) and the opening line of Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

But during the Sixties the dark themes were seeping into popular music through various channels. The Animals took House of the Rising Sun to #38 that same year. And the songs of Simon & Garfunkel dealt with territory the Beat poets dredged like alienation (I Am A Rock, Fakin' It), suicide (Most Peculiar Man, Richard Cory), adultery (Mrs. Robinison) and brokenness (America, Over).

Which is why The Boxer was such a powerful song of that time, one of those songs which takes you places you don't expect....

The Boxer

I am just a poor boy
though my story's seldom told,
I have squandered my existence for a pocketful of mumbles,
such are promises;
All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest,
mh -- hmm.

When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
in the company of strangers
in the quiet of a railway station
runnin' scared,
laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
where the ragged people go,
looking for the places only they would know.

Lie-la-lie ...

Asking only workman's wages I come looking for a job
but I get no offers,
just a come on from the whores on Seventh Avenue.
I do declare
there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.

Lie la lie...

And I'm laying out my winter clothes
and wishing I was gone,
going home,
where the New York City winters aren't bleeding me,
leading me, going home...

In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade
and he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down
or cut him till he cried out in his anger an his shame:
I am leaving, I am leaving,
but the fighter still remains

Lie la lie...

Do you think this song would have had the same impact had been called The Golfer? Make the most of your weekend. Food for thought.