A very short Sunday post

It's late, I'm tired, I go to work very early in the morning, so I should be going to bed soon, but I don't want to go to bed soon because I just got my children down and I have some quiet time to myself.  That is an extremely rare commodity these days - no, not a commodity, a luxury.  Two weeks or so ago I wrote about doing a post every Sunday, so naturally Sundays have made themselves very difficult to post here.  But I'm crawling along, and so here are these words.

This evening we all went for a walk in a local park which we like very much.  It has trails among tall trees (mostly elm, I think, with some maple and scrub oak) and on summer evenings when the golden light of the lowering sun hits those trees it creates a magical effect.  But depending on where you go in there it can also be kind of eerie: there are bits of old rusted discarded things in odd places, and there are also bits of old concrete constructions that look almost like long-abandoned war fortifications.  We explored some of the narrower trails going up the dirt slopes under the elms, and at times I was strongly reminded of the Tarkovsky film Stalker, which I haven't seen for years.

It's the sort of place I can imagine being afraid of when I was younger, or that some older people might be afraid of, the sort of place you can well imagine people gathering for all kinds of sinister purposes.  But in fact, it's a disc golf course, so the greatest dangers are: 1. falling down and 2. getting in the way of people throwing their discs and annoying them.

I like the town where we live.

Zhneshtotmatlitszeth-n'

Today I'm feeling grateful for not taking a bad path in my life.

This has to do with the kind of music I listen to. Music is such an important part of life for so many of us that it's important to be mindful of what music we're listening to and why. I feel good about the music I listen to, which gives my life more richness than I can know. I know I take it for granted most of the time, especially now with the internet.

When I was young I was in danger of going down a wrong path with my music, allowing other people to shape my listening choices in regrettable ways.

I'm talking about rock and roll.

Specifically, I'm talking about how some people tried to stop me from listening to rock and roll, and for a while I was in danger of following their misguided warnings.

I was young and impressionable when I first heard scandalized reports of the evils of rock music: bands with names like Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead – horrors! It wasn't quite like the movie Footloose – I didn't live in a small town and the church had no problem with dancing (of the right kind), but the knee-jerk fear of the strange and different was just as strong at home and at church. I remember telling my younger sister that rock and roll was devil worship and that I wasn't going to listen to it.

I didn't keep that resolution for very long, for two reasons: my older sister's discovery of MTV and my older brothers' record collection that they left behind when they went away to college. It was a treasure trove, full of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes and the like. And as my sister continued to sneak views of MTV at night, she started buying more records of the bands she was hearing: mid-80s stars like Ratt, Cinderella, Poison, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses . . . my parents were very worried. I could tell that there was illicit subject matter in some of the stuff, but I had no clue that “Pour some sugar on me” was supposed to be a sexual metaphor, and I thought that Van Halen must be heavenly messengers after I watched the video of the Blue Angels stunt flying to “Dreams.”

This went on for some years, and as adolescence eroded my innocence I did sometimes suffer pangs of conscience for listening to some of the music that I did. Every once in a while I had to confront some explicit warnings from the authorities. Some I could shrug off without too much guilt, like my youth leader who thought that Queensrÿche's nifty logo looked Satanic. Others were harder to ignore.

One Sunday when I was 17, the Priests' Quorum lesson consisted of a recorded talk by some minor general authority about the perils of inappropriate music. I don't remember the who or when or where the talk had been recorded, but I had heard plenty of this kind of thing over the years, and progressing through my youth I had developed quite a selective ear for the rock music I liked so much. I knew the Rolling Stones were right out, of course, because of the story of Gene R. Cook talking to Mick Jagger on an airplane and hearing out of Mick's own mouth that their music was calculated to drive teens to have sex. (You can read about this in several places, for example here and here.)

In truth, I've always found the Rolling Stones a bit boring, so that wasn't really a problem. I had put aside a lot of rock and especially pop music that I decided was not worth my time – in fact, my 18^th year of life was when I was most heavily into Rush and Queensrÿche, and had decided that a lot of other rock music just didn't measure up to those standards. Not to mention that I could see how many of my youth leaders, in being worried about heavy metal, completely missed the more blatant sexual messages in the more mild-sounding pop music they listened to.

So I was feeling pleased with myself as I listened to this talk, and allowed myself a bit of arch amusement at this old guy's immoderate hysteria about rock music, and then he dropped the bomb. He mentioned a song that everybody knew about which had the hidden lyric “Here's to my sweet Satan.” He mentioned this as an example of the really dangerous rock music out there that we just couldn't afford to dabble with.

But he didn't name the song or the group!

I was seized by doubt. Who was it? I didn't ask if anyone in the room knew; I wasn't that outspoken. Besides, I was truly afraid of finding out: what if it was a band I really liked? What if it was Rush? I could already tell that Neil Peart was skeptical about God, and there was that 2112 album cover with the pentagram. I had come to terms with Neil's expression of his beliefs in his lyrics, and I didn't listen to "Ghost of a Chance" or "Anthem."  I could forgive Neil for not believing in God, I could even forgive him from preaching selfishness in his youth, but what if . . .

No, it couldn't be Rush. Could it? Well then who? Maybe it was Black Sabbath? I didn't listen to them, only “Iron Man” when it came on the radio.

The question sat at the back of my mind for years. I wanted to know who had done it, but at the same time I didn't, just in case I might find out that I really had been dangling from the devil's hook unknowing for years. So over 20+ years of the World Wide Web I've never looked it up online – until just a few days ago.

Actually, I stumbled across it, as I was reading about something else, viz: the recent lawsuit brought against - and won by - Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement, for the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.”  (I won't discuss that in this post.)

I feel like I'm late to the party in discovering this weird little nugget in The Greatest Song in the World, but, it's sad to admit, I have a history of unease with “Stairway to Heaven” and Led Zeppelin generally. The first time I heard it (I was young and impressionable) was with a family member who was analyzing the lyrics and mentioned the possibility that instead of being a song with a Good Message, as seemed plain to me, it might actually be a song with a Bad Message. In other words, what if that “piper” were really the Devil? She never said anything about the supposed hidden message in the recording; I don't think she had heard about it.

And that album cover – well, it was certainly mysterious, wasn't it? Kind of spooky, with those arcane-looking sigils. My due respect for Led Zeppelin was retarded by that initial suspicion, so that the timeless wonder and quality of their music took a long time to erode my wary defenses. On the way, of course I heard a bit of schoolyard and lunchroom rumors (though never the one about the backmasked message): “dude, they wrote the song while they were high on some drug.” “Isn't that song about the devil or something?” “Didn't they sell their souls to the devil?” In the pre-internet information-scarce environment of public schools, any scandalous rumor seemed as likely to be true as the next. It didn't help that I saw a record-burning on the news with Led Zeppelin albums prominently displayed.

By the time I was 17, I had shed almost all of my unease or guilt at listening to Led Zeppelin – I had taped just about all of their songs that got regular radio airplay, and I spent my senior skip day listening to my brothers' old Zep LPs (including #4) on a friend's turntable. Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I had been told at that age that “Stairway to Heaven” had the hidden message “Here's to my sweet Satan” in it, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I might not have been able to play it backwards for myself to check, but knowing how credulous I was I might have believed it. And that might have caused me even more psychic retardation. As it was, I got rid of a CD I bought of symphonic arrangements of Led Zeppelin songs when I was in my early 20s partly because the artwork made me uncomfortable. It was too . . . magical. I regret getting rid of that CD, partly because of my silly squeamishness, partly because the crushing rendition of “Kashmir” was worth the price alone.

Because the thing is, of course, Led Zeppelin is magical! Good British lads, they tapped into the same rich soil of Faerie that J.R.R. Tolkien did in their own way – after all, Tolkien was one of their big inspirations. I've written already about how much I loved fantasy fiction and role-playing as a teenager, and during that time I vehemently defended these hobbies against the accusations of Satanism that came from “ignorance andprejudice and fear.” I assuaged my feelings of guilt at listening to “Stairway to Heaven” with the thought that a new day dawning with laughter echoing in the forests could be understood not only as an image of the Millennium but also sounded like Bilbo and his buddies having a great time in the Shire (I'd be willing to bet my lunch tomorrow that Plant was thinking of something out of Tolkien when he wrote that line). Forests echoing with laughter sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in.  I want to pack my bags for the Misty Mountains!

If I had had cause to believe seriously that all of this was really tainted by an earnest profession of allegiance to Satan I might have turned decisively and ventured too far down the path away from all that: away from the color, vitality and wonder found in so many creative expressions influenced by or alluding to magic, whether labeled as fantasy or otherwise. I might never have picked up Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung; I might have decided to really sever my relationship with fantasy fiction for good and all, I might have never started listening to King Crimson . . . who knows, I might have even decided that Harry Potter was of the Devil.

I don't like to think of myself in such a state.

Fortunately, my exposure to this strange and amusing sonic coincidence has come at a stage in my life where I'm more skeptical than I've ever been and also seldom shocked or offended by anything I see, hear or read. And I had already been inoculated against taking backmasking seriously. When I first heard about the “my sweet Satan” hidden message I thought the man was talking about a subliminal message that you might have to turn the sound up or speed up or slow down to hear, not a silly backwards thing. I don't know if I misheard or misremembered, or if the speaker was misinformed and simply took his bad information as a reliable report not needing any questions. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

Being curious, I've still done my own investigation. I've heard the section of “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, listened to it slowed down, made phonetic transcriptions, heard multiple versions and gotten to the bottom of how that vocal line can sound like “my sweet Satan” backwards. Because I do have to admit: hearing it for the first time was unnerving. After all, hearing any human speech backwards gives an uncanny effect (as David Lynch exploited to hair-raising effect in Twin Peaks). If your mind is primed to hear “Satan” it's possible to assign that word to three utterances in the clip. This whole thing has been a good chance for me to reflect on what I learned in Linguistics about the brain's way of picking meaning out of sound, and the weird things that can result when we impose our need for pattern recognition on random stuff (think of A Beautiful Mind, for example). For years I've enjoyed reading mis-heard song lyrics, and the other day I just about wet my pants laughing to this video of Orff's “O Fortuna.”

Back to "Stairway."  Listening closely and repeatedly – as digital technology makes possible – shows that only the first utterance that you might parse as “Satan” really comes close to having all the right sounds. The others are really just “say” - reversed from “yes” and “fiy” reversed from “if” pronounced with a diphthong. But the glottal stop that Robert Plant started each does sound like a hasty N in reverse, giving those backwards utterances a resemblance to the Standard American pronunciation of “Satan.” In the first (or the last) Robert Plant led off from the glottal stop with a little nasal hum before articulating the dental fricative in “there's still time.” On the reversal that sounds like an N, giving the backwards “there's” a really close resemblance to “Satan,” priming the ear for the “yes” and “if.” Since he pronounces “time” more like “tom” the vowel keeps its purity in reverse and can sound like “my” or “mah” instead of “miah.” That makes it easier to hear “sweet” instead of the “tleet” that's really going on. The L is slightly rounded too, and with some aspiration (the common leaky articulation) of T forwards, there's your SW resemblance backwards. Also the background instruments obscure the vocal sounds, giving an even more vague input for the mind to try to process into something. With such mushy uncertainty, the pattern-making mind could fill in all sorts of weird things – like the nonsense of the rest of the supposed hidden message.

If it had been recorded today, someone might have parsed the reversal as “jest my tweet Satan.” Whatever meaning anyone might extract from that could make as much sense as that silly toolshed. (Now if it had been seeing something nasty in the woodshed, we might have a case here. Though I can't think of any lyrics that would make any sense to backmask “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” The closest I can get is “the stove and tea, it's on, meat sauce, yeah.”)

Now why anyone would think that the mind's desperate attempts to make sense of backwards singing should mean that those improvised meanings are actually assimilated unconsciously going forward is hard to imagine . . . until you remember that people who come up with these kinds of scenarios aren't generally in the habit of thinking scientifically or even critically.

I feel silly admitting a need to have done so, but feels good to fully debunk this rumor through my own sonic/linguistic analysis. Like a Hogwarts wizard dispelling a boggart, I say “Riddikulus!” and laugh.

And I play the song for my children, glad that they are hearing it in its glory, without prejudice.

Quillcast: checking in

Sticks!

Another of my articles has appeared on the Jung Society of Utah blog today.  Since I always have limited space on the blog there, I decided I'd write a little bit more about my sticks here.

I've finished two sticks in the past year: a sort of baton or wand of apricot for myself, and a walking stick of plum for my sweetie.

 

Part of the apricot baton . . .

. . . and part of the plum walking stick.

I'm particularly pleased with the plum: it came out looking like a walking stick I might see at a gift shop in a park (except that I finished it with oil and beeswax instead of polyurethane or something like that).  It wasn't complicated to make at all: just took some time and care.  That's the best thing about working with sticks, I think: you don't have to be a master craftsman, you just have to take time and care, and I think it especially helps to be in tune with your inner child.

 

The wide tip of the baton, showing the piece of sodalite that I mounted in it.

When I was a boy, I loved whittling sticks.  That was part of their appeal: with a pocket knife I could not only shave away outer layers of bark and grime to let the beauty of the wood shine through, I could also sharpen a stick to a crude spear point, and I had a weapon that has cost me nothing. When you're a child on a camping trip, in woods that might be full of cougars, bears or (especially) monsters, this gives a tremendous sense of security.

I think it would be a cheap and nasty dismissal to assign some kind of crude phallic meaning to this fascination with sticks (although I'm open to the idea of symbolic resonance of that sort in wands and scepters). I don't want to get into a rationalistic picking apart of this fascination with sticks in an attempt to explain it. There are some things that it is well to explain, but others it does your soul more good to just do.

The Provo City Center Temple

This afternoon my sweetie and I attended the dedication of the new Provo City Center Temple.  It was done in three sessions and we attended the third, broadcast into a meetinghouse in the town where we live that isn't Provo: I don't think there were regular church meetings anywhere in Utah today, at least not along the Wasatch Front.

They made such an effort to let as many take part in the dedication because this temple has a unique history.  It was built in the shell of an old building that used to be a tabernacle.

The old Mormon pioneer tabernacles are some of my favorite things.  I don't know how many survive now, but for years I've thought I'd like to take a tour of them.  They're essentially large meeting halls, with two levels of seats, and are often used for cultural events as well as church meetings.  The big dome-topped Tabernacle on Temple Square is probably the most famous, and the biggest (at least before the humongous conference center was built).  But the buildings I'm talking about are more like the smaller Assembly Hall on Temple Square.  Several of them were built with Gothic Revival architectural style or influence.

I loved the Provo Tabernacle, ever since moving back to Provo in 1994 and attending various concerts there.  When I heard the news of the fire that gutted it in 2010 I was devastated, as were countless others.  And I thought: the Church should restore it, but it probably won't.  So I was also glad with countless others when the plans were announced the following year to not only restore it, but to turn it into a Temple.

We went through it during the open house, and I have never been in another Temple that I have found as beautiful or moving.  The stained glass windows, the decorative motif of four-petaled flowers, quartered circles . . . dare we even say, crosses?  And all the wood!  There's wood everywhere, stained a rich warm homey brown.  We call Temples the House of the Lord, and this one really does feel like God's living room.  The pictures linked above don't really do it justice.

I can't deny feeling a certain sense of loss at this beauty - flawless and immaculate, but cozy - being reserved for a Temple instead of in a building kept open to public access.  I comfort myself with the thought of the other tabernacles still standing.  And it's also comforting to see a Temple displaying more hobbit-like charm than the cold white-on-white austerity that has been the norm for so long.  I like to think that it's a sign that the culture of the Church is changing for the better.

It's slow though.  There are complex meanings and signals I see in a place like this.  Mormons love luxury, even when they're indulging in pioneer fantasies, and I see a perfect example of that in the interior of this building.  I believe in comfort, in abundance, in wealth, even - but I believe in it as an ideal to be socially made and shared.  And as I see it, that was the ideology that drove those pioneers to make such improbable structures in their frontier settlements.  For a group of people in a place with no infrastructure to speak of to pool their resources and coordinate their labor to raise the most beautiful buildings they could, in brick or even granite, instead of slapping up cheap board facades . . . I understand and share the indignation that Mormons felt when the railroads brought the Gentile rabble from the east with their piddly, trashy saloons.

The tabernacles stand to me as a signal of hope in the promise of collective and cooperative enterprise, an ideal that our culture has for the most part turned away from with a multitude of blindly individualistic sneers, simultaneously gentrifying and uglifying what was supposed to be a Zion society.  To see those empty brick walls held up and filled with something that is so obviously a tribute to the spirit of those early days (even if the work of building was done by hirelings instead of by community effort), and offered up to God, is another sign of hope in my eyes.

Typecast: a musical fantasy, Baroque this time

I wrote this while looking after a toddler, so if it's disjointed and ends hastily, you'll know why.

My latest post for the Jung Society of Utah

I've got more posts lined up for this blog, coming soon.  But right now I want to share a link to the latest post I contributed for the Jung Society of Utah:

Pop Psychology? Jungian Concepts in Popular Music: The Shadow

This is the first in a series of posts I've got planned for the Jung Society.  In this post I look briefly at a song by Death, and in the next one I'll look at Nick Cave.