Moonstruck

My previous blog entry, “The Sentimental Lunatic,” on the song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," prompted my friend Tim Lucas to post an interesting comment, which can be found at the end of that blog (portions of it are reproduced below). His response prompted me to reflect on some issues I raised in that blog, which I’d like to expand on, briefly, with this post. For the sake of convenience I’ve reproduced Tim’s response below, splitting it into two parts in order to discuss two distinct issues. I reproduce the first half of his comment here:

... My own take on it [“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”] is quite different, and simpler, than yours. To my thinking, the song sketches a moment in Swinging London’s history when the scene began to darken as harder drugs than marijuana, like cocaine and heroin, came into fashion. Consequently the lyrics are organized to depict various pleasures in contrast with their own cancellation or contradiction, painting a world of plenty that still exists but is beyond the reach of people who are perpetually zonked (e.g., “gone to the moon”), with strength enough only to “lift a spoon.”

His notion that the song is a response or reaction to the darker side of the “Swinging London” scene is very plausible. In my own discussion of the song, I explored the way the song corresponded, in a rather remarkable way, to what Louis A. Sass, in his book Madness and Modernism, calls the schizophrenic Stimmung, or the onset of the radically altered perception of reality that accompanies a schizophrenic break. My own view is that while the song ostensibly offers itself as a quasi-mystical insight into the nature of reality, on closer inspection it is actually closer to an anti-epiphany, an insight into reality that may be true, but one that is terrible or nightmarish rather than positive. I therefore included some image files of paintings by the severely schizoid painter, Giorgio de Chirico, in order to provide a sort of visual equivalent of the perceptual alteration of the world that characterizes the anti-epiphany (supported musically, incidentally, by the song fading out to the discordant sounds of violins being played out of tune).

It seems to me, though, that Tim’s view and my view are not incompatible, just focused differently, his narrowly on the immediate social context in which the song was made, and mine more broadly, on the subjective response to a rapidly changing world of ever-increasing complexity, a response that Alvin Toffler would characterize in the title of a book, published only a few years later, as “future shock”:

Streets full of people all alone
Roads full of houses never home
Church full of singing out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon

Eyes full of sorrow never wet
Hands full of money all in debt
Sun coming out in the middle of June
Everyone’s gone to the moon

Long time ago, life had begun
Everyone went to the sun

Cars full of motors painted green
Mouths full of chocolate covered cream
Arms that can only lift a spoon
Everyone’s gone to the moon

My best estimate is that the song was recorded ca. April 1965, thus making it a bit too early to be considered psychedelia, although lyrically speaking it shares features with that form of music. Still, most psychedelia is more benign, more epiphanic, than “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” (as evidenced by psychedelia’s transformation, as I’ve argued in previous posts on this blog, into bubblegum music). The last set of lyrics, beginning with “Cars full of motors painted green...,” seems especially directed toward a certain “social type” (following Tim’s interpretation), one whose life is composed of affected pretensions and effete mannerisms, and also one of privileged self-indulgence. Indeed, the “Swinging London” of the 60s has been characterized as an unusual mélange of slumming aristocrats and posturing hippies. Along these lines, the aforementioned lyric referring to “Cars...painted green” struck me as a possible oblique reference to John Lennon’s Rolls-Royce Phantom V which Lennon had re-painted in psychedelic colors, but according to this website, Lennon didn’t acquire the Roller until 3 June 1965, and it wasn’t repainted in psychedelic fashion until April 1967—long after “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” was recorded.

Speaking of historical dating, I’ll return to Tim’s response. Here is most of the second half:

It could even be a criticism of then-fashionable acid rock, given the lines about how “long time ago, life had begun/everyone went to the sun,” which reads to me as an allusion to Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and their fun- and life-affirming brand of rock. Indeed, given the fact that The Beach Boys were contemporaneously releasing their masterpiece Pet Sounds, criticized at the time as too downbeat by some, the song could almost be interpreted as a direct criticism of the “moon” music emerging from Brian Wilson's withdrawal into coke and LSD.

Appropriately, Tim brought up a lyric of the song I hadn’t discussed, but allow me to correct him on one factual point before I continue: Pet Sounds wasn’t released until May 1966, almost a year after “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” had charted in the UK. However, and more importantly, I think he’s correct to associate the reference, “everyone went to the sun,” with American West Coast (“surf”) music such as that played by the Beach Boys, and with California in general. For me, the song that immediately comes to mind in this context, though, and which preceded “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” is The Rivieras’ 1964 hit, California Sun. According to this source, “California Sun,” which appeared on the pop charts early in 1964, was one of the last chart-topping songs by an American band on the Billboard Hot 100 chart before the so-called “British Invasion.” And according to another source, "California Sun" would have reached the No. 1 spot on the pop charts if it hadn't been displaced by the Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." If this information is correct, then the lyric, “long time ago, life had begun/everyone went to the sun,” can be understood as referring to a time prior to the “British invasion,” the time of the popularization of rock 'n' roll by Elvis (“sun” as in Sun Records, Elvis’s first record label) and American rock ‘n’ rollers such as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, The Rivieras, and of course the Beach Boys, displaced by (among others) the Beatles—and even, ironically, “British invasion” songs such as “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.”

When I set out to discuss "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," I hadn't expected to encounter the richly allusive density of the lyrics. However, thanks to comments such as the one by Tim Lucas, the song is vastly richer than I had ever imagined. Although I frequently curse the amount of time it takes to maintain a blog, it's frequently the case that because I took the time to sit down and write about a particular topic, I end up learning a great deal, much more than I'd imagined, as I did in this case, when writing about the aforementioned song.

The Sentimental Lunatic

I think Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which reached the Top 4 spot in the UK pop charts in late July 1965, is a beautiful song; its aching melancholy has haunted me for decades. I must have been around eleven years old when I first heard it, and I simply can't shake it off. But what is it about? Like a startling image from a strange dream, it remains firmly lodged in my memory, because its strangeness is precisely what makes it so difficult to forget. Many people, I’ve found, have had an odd or unusual dream that they’ve never been able to forget, primarily because they’ve never been able to explain it satisfactorily, if at all.

And yet, while the song is dream-like by virtue of its apparently stubborn resistance to interpretation, it also gives one the strong impression of being a quasi-mystical insight into the nature of modern life. In addition, its writer seems distinctly modern as well, self-consciously aware of his own mode of awareness, a representative of Schiller’s “sentimental” or “reflective” poet, the kind of writer who is “self-divided because self-conscious, and so composes in an awareness of multiple alternatives, and characteristically represents not the object in itself, but the object in the subject.” (See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, Norton, 1971, pp. 213-14.) In his discussion of literary scholar Joseph Frank’s classic essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), Louis A. Sass, in his brilliant book, Madness and Modernism (Basic Books, 1992), writes:

...Joseph Frank describes some of the ways modernist fiction attempts to deny its own temporality and approach the condition of the poetic image, defined by Ezra Pound as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” To achieve this sense of encompassing experiential stasis, writers use a number of devices to draw attention away from both the inherent temporality of language (which by its very nature can only represent one word after another, in a temporal sequence) and the implicit temporality of human action itself, with its purposes and causes. These include: the overwhelming of plot by mythic structures used as organizing devices (as in Joyce’s Ulysses), the movement from perspective to perspective instead of from event to event (for example, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), and the use of metaphoric images as recurring leitmotifs to stitch together separate moments and thereby efface the time elapsed between them (for example, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood). (34)

At least two of the features of modernist fiction as described above are employed in the lyrics to “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”: the movement from one subjective perspective to another ("the object in the subject"), and the use of the recurring, metaphorical leitmotiv--the title itself. I reproduce here the lyrics in what I believe to be the accurate form:

Streets full of people all alone
Roads full of houses never home
Church full of singing out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon

Eyes full of sorrow never wet
Hands full of money all in debt
Sun coming out in the middle of June
Everyone’s gone to the moon

Long time ago, life had begun
Everyone went to the sun

Cars full of motors painted green
Mouths full of chocolate covered cream
Arms that can only lift a spoon
Everyone’s gone to the moon

It is necessary to go about living in the world, wrote the severely schizoid painter Giorgio de Chirico, “as if in an immense museum of strangeness.” Earlier I described “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as suggesting “a quasi-mystical insight,” but perhaps it is more accurately described as an anti-epiphany, which Louis A. Sass defines as, “an experience in which the familiar has turned strange and the unfamiliar familiar, often giving the person the sense of déjà vu and jamais vu, either in quick succession or even simultaneously.” (44) Sass observes that de Chirico took from Nietzsche the untranslatable German word Stimmung to describe the schizophrenic anti-epiphany, which he sees so evocatively captured in de Chirico’s painting Gare Montparnasse (Melancholy of Departure) (1914, pictured above at the top of this entry). “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” seems very much like the experience of the schizophrenic Stimmung as described by Sass:

Unreality—“a universe of uniform precision and clarity but devoid of the dynamism, emotional resonance, and sense of human purpose that are characteristic of everyday life” (47). In order to illustrate the experience of Unreality, Sass cites the memoir of a schizophrenic named “Renee” to sufficiently capture the disturbing nature of the changed world: “It was...a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow; an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat; a mineral, lunar country, cold as the wastes of the North Pole” (47).

Roads full of houses never home
Church full of singing out of tune
...
Eyes full of sorrow never wet
Hands full of money all in debt

Renee’s use of “lunar country” is provocative in this context, since the Latin word for “moon” is “luna,” the root of the word “lunatic” (slang: “loonies”), one who is crazy, insane, mad (moonstruck), suffering from “moon madness.” The association of moon and madness is, of course, invoked in Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” from Dark Side of the Moon (“The lunatic is on the grass”). Thus we are invited to interpret “everyone’s gone [to the moon]” as “everyone’s gone [mad],” everyone has gone “looney.”


Mere Being—Sass again refers to the memoir of “Renee,” observing: “At other times what astonished Renee...was not so much the absence of a normal sense of authenticity, emotional resonance, or functional meanings, but the very fact that objects existed at all—their Mere Being. Here we encounter an experience so very general in nature, yet at the same time so inherently concrete, so rooted in the mute thereness of the world, as nearly to defy description....such experiences can be akin . . . to the exalting feeling of wonder, mystery, and terror....” (48) (See the de Chirico painting above, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914.)

Streets, Roads, Church, Eyes, Hands, Sun, Cars...painted green, Mouths, Arms, Motors, Spoon

Fragmentation—“Objects normally perceived as parts of larger complexes may seem strangely isolated, disconnected from each other and devoid of encompassing context; or a single object may lose its perceptual integrity and disintegrate into a disunity of parts.... Another schizophrenic likened his vision of Fragmentation to being ‘surrounded by a multitude of meaningless details.’ ‘I did not see things as a whole,’ he said, ‘I only saw fragments: a few people, a dairy, a dreary house’ (49-50).

Streets full of people all alone
...
Cars full of motors painted green
Mouths full of chocolate covered cream
Arms that can only lift a spoon

Apophany—From the Greek word apophany, meaning “to become manifest.” “Once conventional meanings have faded away (Unreality) and new details or aspects of the world have been thrust into awareness (Fragmentation, Mere Being), there often emerges an inchoate sense of the as yet unarticulated significances of these newly emergent phenomena. In this “mood,” so eerily captured in both the writings and the paintings of de Chirico, the world resonates with a fugitive significance. Every detail and event takes on an excrutiating distinctness, specialness, and peculiarity—some definite meaning that always lies just out of reach, however, where it eludes all attempts to grasp or specify it” (52). In short, every single image implies an elusive “meaning” that lies "just out of reach."

E.g., Arms that can only life a spoon

What is the peculiar specialness, elusiveness, meaning of the utterance, Arms that can only lift a spoon? Decadent, effete behavior? An effect of life in zero-gravity, of living in outer space? The arm of a drug addict (the spoon associated with the intravenous administration of heroin)? Infantile behavior, in the sense that the spoon is the first utensil employed by humans ("spoon-fed")?

Additionally, Sass argues that in modernist art "the post-Kantian awareness of the limitedness of perspective engenders contradictory urges and futile yearnings, cravings to explore unimaginable viewpoints, uninhabitable mental climes," resulting in what he calls a "crossfade technique," in which "two objects or domains [are] so interfused that they seem to have merged, creating a single object that could exist nowhere but in some mental or inner universe...." (137). The entire song works this way, but is exemplified by lyrics such as:

Eyes full of sorrow never wet
Hands full of money all in debt
Sun coming out in the middle of June

Hence "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" might be best understood as a sort of cubist or futurist collage, a heteroclite mélange of "perspectival fluctuations" very similar, as Sass would argue, "to what occurs with schizophrenia" (138).