THE SONGWRITER AS POET:
IAN MCCULLOCH AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRADITION
Kristin F. Smith
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[Notes and sources are at the end. Notes are
hyperlinked in the text]
Some things never die. Certain strains of thought, ideals and
principles exist so deeply within the human psyche they will never cease to be
part of what defines us. As do inhabitants at various points along a riverbank,
like-minded people through different times and cultures draw from the same
stream, be it philosophical, political – or literary and artistic. An outside
observer, tasting the water they have drawn, will recognize a common source. So
it is with that group of 19th Century British painters and poets
known collectively as the Pre-Raphaelites and a present-day British
singer/songwriter named Ian McCulloch.
PART I: WHO ARE ALL THESE
PEOPLE?
“If you think [U2’s] I Will Follow is an anthem,” Ian McCulloch once remarked to an
interviewer, “‘I Will Lead’ is the song I would have written” [Zach]. Best
known as the frontman for Liverpool rock band Echo and the Bunnymen, McCulloch
began writing songs (and provoking thought, if not hostility) in the late
1970s. Strong statements of principle, often coupled with biting references to
his less exacting compeers, largely define the McCulloch/Bunnymen ethos.
Along with Will Sergeant, a man who can make a
guitar do anything he wants it to, McCulloch formed the Bunnymen in 1978, when
he was nineteen. Bassist Les Pattinson and drummer Pete de Freitas completed
the original line-up. After a saga with enough twists and turns, heartbreak and
expectation to make Charles Dickens proud (amply chronicled in three
biographies), the Bunnymen are now back to the songwriting duo of McCulloch and
Sergeant. And over the course of eight Bunnymen albums, two solo albums, and a
non-Bunnymen project with Sergeant called Electrafixion, lyricist McCulloch has
amassed a body of work worthy of a serious poet.
One of many bands generated in post-punk Britain’s heady ‘Everyone can
make music; everyone should be in a band’ atmosphere, Echo and the Bunnymen
quickly set themselves apart. "We never had any goals particularly,”
McCulloch reminisced years later, “other than to be seen as the coolest and the
best, and the group that never sold out” [Jenkins].
Their songs – some hard-driving, straight-out rock and roll; some
ethereal, moody concoctions as fragile as dreams; some sprawling, majestic
epics; some plaintive and personal -- defied efforts to classify them as
‘alternative’, ‘new wave’, ‘new romantic’, ‘surreal romantic’ or ‘psychedelic’
(which they were not). “People ask us what sort of band we are, and I always
say 'we're a rock band'. Because I'm proud of that....” McCulloch said simply
[Reynolds].
McCulloch’s lyrics on the first three albums [CROCODILES (1980); HEAVEN
UP HERE (1981); PORCUPINE (1983)], though far from ‘meaningless’ or
‘indecipherable’, as some reviewers found them, were abstruse. They reveal an
ambitious, quirkily brilliant young writer seeking his voice. Sometimes his
images and phrases gleam like light on water; sometimes they run aground on the
treacherous shoals of Metaphysics. They never bore.
Nor did the Bunnymen. Known for their fierce independence of spirit and
determination to do things their own way, they created music with an equally
strong point of view. At 1982’s WOMAD (World of Music Art & Dance)
festival, the Bunnymen’s All My Colours (Zimbo), stood out as an
unconventional song of mystical atmosphere and strange beauty. Evocative and
enigmatic, both words and music speak more of inner vision than popular
predilections. The Bunnymen were also the only festival participants to team
with musicians from another culture -- the Royal Drummers of Burundi.
McCulloch/Bunnymen songs offer layers of rich musical textures and
shades of lyrical meaning. Detail is everywhere – a particular guitar sound
here; a bit of xylophone there; always the fresh and unexpected. “I think
somebody had to fly the flag of taste with some dignity….We [did], and I'm
proud that we did”, said McCulloch with his usual candor [Powell]. Their work
shows respect for the art of songwriting, and concern for craftsmanship. “In
the '80s, we didn't want to use loads of synths that we knew would date very
quickly”, McCulloch recalled. “We went to Paris to do strings with a proper
orchestra. That was what we had always felt was best.” [Zach]
The result was OCEAN RAIN [1984], Echo and the Bunnymen’s signature
album, and the benchmark of McCulloch’s lyrical maturity. Powerful, dramatic
and significant, the album stakes out coherently and cohesively the thematic
territory McCulloch has explored ever since: love, Fate and the soul’s journey.
Having scaled the heights, the Bunnymen promptly fell off the cliff.
Their 1987 eponymous album proved bland and disjointed. Despite some good lyrics
by McCulloch (and some jumbled ones as well, it should be noted), the band
sound as if they have been beaten into submission by their producer. Smoothly
varnished surfaces, pretty riffs and tinkly little bells abound. Ironically (or
perhaps not), the album became their most commercially successful. Echo and the
Bunnymen stood at the brink of major stardom.
But McCulloch, apparently deciding he did not wish to make another such
album, however successful, left the band in 1988. The next year, he released
the quietly beautiful CANDLELAND, arguably his best lyrical work.
CANDLELAND paints on a smaller canvas, with a finer brush and delicate
colors. Lyrically, it is more transparent. It is watercolor, not oils.
McCulloch’s second solo album, MYSTERIO [1992], is watercolor a little blotchy,
the composition a bit confused, the lines more harshly drawn. But McCulloch
finds himself as a writer in these two albums. Continuing along the path he
chose in OCEAN RAIN, he moves from the abstract concept to the personal
point-of-view. “Songwriting isn't hard work,” he later noted, “but you have to
commit to more than just words that rhyme and chords that sound OK. You have to
imbue it with some personal longing or sorrow or whatever” [Jae-Ha].
In 1994, McCulloch re-teamed with Sergeant as Electrafixion, releasing
one album, BURNED [1995] and several singles. Electrafixion marries the
Bunnymen love of oblique beauty, complexity and detail with a sound reminiscent
of Nirvana and McCulloch’s darkest lyrics. Painful, uncompromising and vivid in
their imagery, they combine defiance and poignancy. McCulloch writes deftly,
but with the genuine feeling which had come to characterize his work.
McCulloch and Sergeant, joined for a time by Pattinson (de Freitas died
in 1989), reformed the Bunnymen in 1996 and have released three subsequent
studio albums: EVERGREEN [1997], WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?
[1999] and FLOWERS [2001]. The second of these, and the most significant from a
lyrical standpoint, forms a set with OCEAN RAIN and CANDLELAND; a progressively
plain-spoken journey into private worlds demarcated by a love relationship.
EVERGREEN and FLOWERS convey similar themes, but set them upon the Bunnymen’s
mystically evocative, sometimes quirky, sometimes majestic song landscapes.
“All I ever try to do”, McCulloch has said, “is write timeless music….” [ADHOC]
Led by the mercurial and passionate painter poet Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites stirred up a ruckus in mid-Victorian London.
Their purpose: to restore integrity to British Art, which they believed had
become banal and corrupt.
Headstrong and young
(Rossetti was twenty when the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood came together in
1848), they scorned conventionality -- in their case, the ‘Rules for Painting’
promulgated by the Royal Academy of Art and its founder, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Sir Joshua had been dead since 1792, but his ‘Rules’ lived on. Based on the
work of Sir Joshua’s hero, the Renaissance painter Raphael, they specified
every detail of picture creation. Young artists were thus relieved of the need
to think at all. As William Blake, little read in 1848 except by the
Pre-Raphaelites, noted in a scathing critique, “On the Foundation of the
Royal Academy”:
“You say their pictures well-painted be,
And yet they are blockheads you all agree:
-----------------------------------------------------
The errors of a wise man make your rule
Rather than the perfections of a fool.” [WB; On Art and Artists;
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE]
Inspired by the great Victorian critic John Ruskin and his book MODERN
PAINTERS, as well as some engravings they saw in another book, the
Pre-Raphaelites wanted to bring Art back to the 14th Century, to the
time before Raphael, when everyone painted honestly and with meaning, and life
was good. (They knew little of the 14th Century.)
Their own tenets were few, fiercely held, and interpreted in the same
way by none of them:
·
Truth
to Nature: Ruskin extolled this, and the Pre-Raphaelites carried it out
enthusiastically – in two divergent directions. They did agree that Nature
intended colors to be clear and bright, not brown tones swathed in shadows as
the Academy dictated. But what else constituted being ‘true’? For William
Holman Hunt, sternly moral, resolute and unbending, even at twenty-one, ‘Truth
to Nature’ meant the meticulous rendition of everything exactly as Nature made
it (never mind that some things look best when seen fuzzily.) Hunt had a reason
for this. He held the Tractarian (and Ruskinian) view that God speaks to man through
Nature, a symbolic language. Realism, while necessary to transmit meaning
accurately, was not an end in itself. For nineteen-year-old
John Everett MillIais, boy wonder of the Academy before his friend Hunt drafted
him into the Pre-Raphaelites, it was all a grand game. Painting came so easily
to him, he could take up any style -- and rebellion was fun. For Rossetti, the
Pre-Raphaelite of most interest to us here, ‘Truth’ meant staying true to the
visions in his own head, his own heart. He was interested in communicating
emotional states and hidden meanings, not making a tree look exactly like a
tree, however symbolic.
·
Detail
and Complexity: Pre-Raphaelite works brim with ‘stuff’’ (to employ a fine old
Shakespearean word) -- a mouse
scuttling across the floor of a castle room; a beautifully ornate little wooden
screen set casually upon a table; a weed pushing through a crack in a rock
wall; a ‘damozel’ carefully outfitted with seven stars, three lilies and a
single white rose. Many details are symbolic, put in to add layers of meaning.
The Pre-Raphaelites were also craftsmen, who valued completeness. They did not
just decorate canvases with pleasing combinations of color, or put rhymes upon
a page. They opened windows to other worlds. These are small windows, giving
only glimpses of what lies beyond them, and they capture only brief moments in
time. The rest is left to the imagination.
·
Love
of Beauty: “I have no politics and no Party and no particular hope,” wrote
Edward Coley Burne-Jones to his friend William Morris; “only this is true: that
beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and rouses
and lifts up, and never fails.” [EBJ to WM; letter; 1894] Burne-Jones, a
painter, and Morris, poet, designer, Socialist leader and founder of the arts
and crafts movement, were second generation Pre-Raphaelites, disciples of Rossetti.
Like their mentor, they wrought beauty from moody atmospheres and strange,
inner landscapes of their own creation. Pre-Raphaelite beauty, especially in
the work of Rossetti and his followers, is often fragile, ethereal, a wash of
pure color somehow not faded by time. It holds a melancholy quality, and yet it
comforts. Jane Morris’s dark, somber eyes still gaze down at the museum visitor
just as they did in the 1870s when Rossetti painted her. And Lizzie Siddal’s
vibrant, red-gold hair remains, as he wrote in a sonnet, “undimmed in death.”
[DGR; Life-in-Love; 1870]
·
Honesty
and Feeling: these burn to the very core of Pre-Raphaelite thought. John Ruskin
excoriated what he termed “picture-manufacturing....a little bit of all that is
pretty, a little sun and a little shade, a touch of pink, and a touch of
blue….” [MODERN PAINTERS II]. For Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, when British
Art began catering to popular taste and convention at the expense of the
artist’s own vision, it lost its heart, its passion, its true beauty. Today we
use the word ‘soul’. The best Pre-Raphaelite works practically vibrate with it,
and may bring tears to the eyes of the tenderhearted. An often disparate group
of artists and writers united around these principles, and they believed in
them strongly enough to put their careers and their reputations on the line.
Strong similarities exist between the Pre-Raphaelites and Ian
McCulloch, particularly between McCulloch and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. We must
distinguish between theme and subject matter; attitude and expression; thought
and vocabulary. The kinship lies on the broader canvas, and in the realm of
ideals, and that elusive-to-define word, ‘heart’.
He was stunningly unlucky in love. The London-born
son of an Italian political refugee and Dante scholar, the young Rossetti took
as his own Dante’s La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”). The great poet’s
story of his love for the idealized, doomed Beatrice sent Rossetti in search of
his own Beatrice. In 1850, at the age of twenty-two, he found her in the person
of a London shop girl.
Lizzie Siddal began dying of some nonspecific
Victorian malady soon after Rossetti met her, and continued to be dying of it
through years of tempestuous courtship and a twenty-month marriage which
produced a stillborn daughter [Note 1]. Lizzie killed herself with a drug overdose in 1862.
Overwhelmed by grief and guilt, Rossetti buried with her the manuscript volume
of his poems, but at the urging of his friends had the poems retrieved for
publication seven years later.
Rossetti’s second great love, Jane Morris, was the
wife of his friend and protégé William Morris. She eventually ended the
relationship when the emotionally erratic Rossetti became too troublesome.
Nightmares and insomnia led him to take chloral hydrate, a highly addictive and
dangerous drug which contributed to his death in 1882, at the age of
fifty-three.
But similar minds move in similar directions. Such
McCulloch songs as The Cutter, A Promise, The Killing Moon,
Ocean Rain, Ship Of Fools, The Holy Grail, Nothing
Lasts Forever and Supermellow Man are strongly Pre-Raphaelitic. Many
of the same patterns of thought, ideals and values which defined the
Pre-Raphaelites run throughout his works. Should he and Rossetti ever meet, in
some poet’s Valhalla, they will find much to talk about. And they will
understand one another.
[Note:
one must not confuse the writer with the ‘I’ character in his works. They may
not be the same. That is for the biographer to sort out. Accordingly, I refer
to McCulloch’s ‘I’ characters as “the Poet”. In Rossetti’s case, the
biographers have sorted it out, but for consistency, I use the phrase “Rossetti’s
Poet”. The woman figure in works by both men I term “the Beloved”].
PART II: MCCULLOCH AND
ROSSETTI
THE THEMATIC BACKDROP
Both Rossetti and McCulloch
work out particular ideas against a broader thematic canvas. Rossetti
deliberately imposed this unifying structure upon his major work, The House of Life [1870/1881], forging a
large collection of sonnets written over many years into a coherent narrative.
For McCulloch, structure seems innate, and defines the parameters of a moral
and spiritual worldview. Both Rossetti and McCulloch write much of man’s
problems in a mutable, indifferent, even hostile world. Both seek, if we may
phrase it in the grandiose Victorian manner, to define man’s place in the
universe. For Rossetti, self-described “bondman” of “Lady Beauty” [DGR; Soul’s Beauty; 1866] and songster of the
god Love, this meant primarily the place of man as artist. For McCulloch, also
a troubadour of the human heart, it means the place of man as man. Both
McCulloch and Rossetti chronicle the journey of one human soul, not all
humanity. And for both, the key to surviving this journey is human love.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti found
his painter’s eye in depictions of idealized Woman, and his poet’s voice in
themes of love and loss, moral and spiritual uncertainty, salvation through
romantic love, and the fragility of the creative spark. “I should wish,” he
wrote, “to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions; and in carrying
out my scheme of the House of Life [his collection of sonnets]... shall
try to put in action a complete 'dramatis personae' of the soul” [Doughty/Wahl;
LETTERS II; 850]. Rossetti’s House of Life is indeed a Victorian maze of
his own soul, the poems arranged by him not according to their dates of
composition, but as a way of telling us his story.
Just what that story is has
been hotly debated for over a century. We may read it as almost entirely about
Rossetti’s Poet, the Poet’s Beloved, and the Unnamed Lady he also loves. Or,
much of it may tell of the Poet and his two great loves, painting and poetry –
which apparently gave him as much trouble as the women. The poems interconnect
with one another in various ways, and reading them in different contexts may
alter the meanings. Taken as a whole, the House of Life sonnets
constitute a moving statement of Rossetti’s major theme: the soul’s difficult
pilgrimage.
In telling his tales, Rossetti much preferred
concreteness to abstraction, real people to allegory (and the god Love was as
real to him as a turnip.) He usually deals with abstract moral issues – for
example, the terrible price of hatred and revenge in the ballad Sister Helen [1852] – by writing about
individuals who find themselves caught in webs of their own devising.
He was a master of elaborate poetic conceits, and
frequently personified even such abstract concepts as “the little outcast hour”
in which a love comes to naught:
“Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,
It somewhere sighs and
serves, and mute before
The house of Love, hears through the echoing door
His hours elect in choral consonancy.” [DGR; Stillborn
Love; 1870]
Lest
we be overcome by pity for this poor little thing, we should note that at the
end of the poem the parents show up.
Rossetti cared mainly for Love and Art. Almost every
piece of work he did comes back to one or both of these. In Love, he found both
great joy and overwhelming sorrow, and he wrote unsparingly of both. In Art, he
sought after ideals he knew he could never reach, and many of his poems speak
painfully of goals not met. He was always aware of time and transience.
He once described himself as “[Love’s] singer” [DGR;
Love’s Last Gift; 1871], and he wore
the mantle well. Rossetti’s poetic universe hinges upon romantic love. It was a
religion to him. His depictions of Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, and
everything in between generally center around how this will affect the lovers.
(Rossetti’s work teems with lovers.) In The
Blessed Damozel [1847-1870], his best-known ballad poem, a couple is
separated by forces beyond their control. She is in Heaven, he is still on
earth. They yearn for reunion. Rossetti relates their plight as simply one of
love; of two hearts in pain because they are not together. The larger moral and
spiritual issues, even the vividly-described metaphysical realm itself,
constrict into the man’s plaintive question:
“But
shall God lift
To
endless unity
The soul
whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its
love for thee?” [DGR; The Blessed Damozel; 1847-1870]
Ian McCulloch explores much the same thematic
territory as Rossetti, though with less artifice and a much looser design. Like
Rossetti, he builds his tales around the manifold ways of love, the anguish of
loss, the need for redemption, and the pain and uncertainty which dwell within
the human soul. McCulloch’s 'dramatis personae' consist of characters both
human and metaphysical, and some are allegorical. But his abstract concepts
remain abstract (no little orphaned hours). Instead, he gives us concise
word portraits of all-too-human characters:
“Knows what she
feels but he's never felt her
McCulloch is a moral writer, though not a moralistic
one. Like Rossetti, he remains nonjudgmental. He is not given to lecturing. He
offers advice only sporadically, some version of ‘Don’t look down’, ‘Stay true’
and ‘Everything is going to be all right’ being his standard counsels. Like
Rossetti, he often seems uncertain. But inherent in his work are concepts of right
and wrong, Good and Evil:
“All the simple stuff never
understood
Like right from bad and wrong from good” [IM; Never
Stop; single; 1983]
His central question is, how does one live with
grace and dignity when, though there are “angels in the thunderclouds” [IM; Supermellow
Man; FLOWERS; 2001] there is also a “[devil on your] shoulder” [IM; Angels
and Devils; single; 1984]? How do you maintain your soul?
In McCulloch’s lyrical universe, the angel and the
devil coexist – and conflict -- within each human being. Many of his characters
are themselves ‘lost’, at least temporarily. They must pick their way through
minefields, and sometimes they make wrong choices. But even if they choose (and
some choose deliberately) to do wrong, they usually know what right is:
“Ancient rules
wrong from right
Wish I'd found you when you could save me” [IM; Supermellow
Man; FLOWERS; 2001]
McCulloch is at his core a love poet. Like Rossetti, he finds salvation
in romantic love, and nearly everything he has written touches upon this. In a
song from 1989, McCulloch’s Poet tells us simply:
That was all I ever wanted”
[IM; Toad; single; 1989]
McCulloch’s defining work must be his transcendent
love song, Ocean Rain, a chronicle of the soul’s perilous voyage through
all the storms and rough seas life holds in store:
“All at sea again
And now my hurricanes
Have brought down this ocean rain….” [IM; Ocean Rain; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
Confused, bewildered (“at sea”), drenched in
troubles perhaps self-generated (“my hurricanes”) and, he tells us, “Sailing to
sadder shores”, this individual is in dire need of a protective dry-dock. He
finds one true refuge, the understanding soul of the Beloved:
“Your port in my heavy
storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts” [IM; Ocean Rain;
OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
THE IDEALIZED WOMAN
In Too Young to Kneel, a song from 1997, Ian McCulloch poses the
question:
His answer is simple and unequivocal: Woman,
primarily in the person of the Beloved (though these lines have a good deal of
the Mother figure in them as well). Dante Gabriel Rossetti agrees
wholeheartedly:
“Not in thy body is thy life
at all
But in this lady's lips and
hands and eyes;
Through these she
yields thee life that vivifies
What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.”
[DGR; Life-in-Love; 1870]
In other words: ‘you would be worse than nothing
without her’. For both Rossetti and McCulloch, the Beloved stands as a figure
of selfless benevolence, generosity of heart and encompassing power. She can
not only “cure” the unhealable, but “yield” life when the spirit lies moribund.
She is the compassionate intercessor between man and all the ills that beset
him. In sum, she is Idealized Woman.
Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites did not originate the concept of the
Idealized Woman. In western tradition, she comes to us from as far back as
Mary, Mother of Jesus. The corollary notions of salvation through romantic
love, and one’s Beloved as savior have filled many a poet’s pages from Medieval
times onward. The Pre-Raphaelites embraced these themes as articles of faith.
So does Ian McCulloch.
‘Woman, come save me’ might serve as his Poet’s motto, for some
variation of this plea turns up on nearly every album McCulloch has made, from
CROCODILES [1980] to FLOWERS [2001]. Two exceptions, the drunken HEAVEN UP HERE
and the starkly painful BURNED, hint at love as an anodyne. An early song, Rescue,
offers a straightforward statement of the theme:
“If I said I'd lost my way
Would you sympathize?
Could you sympathize?
---------------------------------
Won't you come on
down to my
Rescue” [IM; Rescue;
CROCODILES; 1980]
Three years later, In Bluer Skies [1983] expands on this idea,
endowing the Beloved with a power both sexual and spiritual and linking
romantic/physical love to spiritual growth:
“Will we evolve
tonight
Sparkle of brittle stars?
Held by your hungry arms?
I’m counting on your heavy
heart
Could it keep me from falling apart?” [IM; In Bluer Skies; PORCUPINE;
1983]
“Heavy” in these lines takes on shades of meaning to be found near the
bottom of its dictionary definition: perhaps some combination of ‘profound’ and
‘of great capacity’. In Bluer Skies
prefigures Ocean Rain [1984],
McCulloch’s fullest realization of the theme. Rossetti paints this concept in La
Donna della Finestra [1879].
Taken from the scene in La Vita Nuova in which a bereft Dante wanders the desolate streets of
Florence, the painting depicts the lines:
“I lifted mine eyes to look; and then perceived a young and very
beautiful lady, who was gazing upon me from a window with a gaze full of pity,
so that the very sum of pity appeared gathered together in her.” [Dante
Alighieri; La Vita Nuova; 1295; DGR’s
translation; 1861]
Rossetti, in a note to his translation of these lines, identifies this
‘beautiful lady at the window’ as Gemma Donati, the woman Dante married. This
is probably more wishful thinking than historical fact.
For both Rossetti and McCulloch, the curative powers of Woman extend
beyond body, mind and heart to the soul itself, even to the gates of Heaven.
Rossetti speaks of the Beloved as a potential intercessor there, her grace
acting upon her lover’s soul:
“And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes
Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!” [DGR; Love’s
Testament; 1869]
‘When
you go to Heaven,’ he is saying, ‘maybe you can pull me in too.’
Minus the elaborate Victorian syntax, McCulloch expresses the same idea
in Heaven’s Gate:
“Weak and weaker will
You deliver me?
And turn me into someone
That I want to be?” [IM; Heaven’s Gate; MYSTERIO;
1992]
Like Rossetti, McCulloch makes frequent use of wordplays. There is a
nice one here on “will”, which works as a phrase with either “weak and weaker”
or “you deliver me”. In honor of this, we shall give the final word on Woman as
savior to McCulloch’s Poet in I’ll Fly Tonight:
“I'm gonna mess you up
I'm gonna let you down
I'm gonna cut you to the
bone
You're gonna learn
to hate
You'll have a love you've
never known
Into your light” [IM; I’ll Fly Tonight;
EVERGREEN; 1997]
The gist of these alarming sentiments is, ‘I am
going to be a lot of trouble’. McCulloch makes this plain a few lines down,
also softening the harshness of the lyric:
Clearly, the way to traverse this world of moral and
mortal peril is with your Beloved at your side, ready to pick you up and dust
you off.
THE EVIL WOMAN
Before we leave the subject of Woman, we should mention that poetical
staple, the Evil Woman. Like the dog who did not bark in the night in the
Sherlock Holmes story, we note her mostly for her absence in McCulloch's work.
She does come out in force in the Keatsian-flavored Lips Like Sugar [1987]. Graceful as a swan, this mysterious
creature haunts the waters of her lake on moonlit nights, summoning unwary men
to her side:
“She'll ask and you'll give
her
Lips like sugar….” [IM; Lips Like Sugar; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
But,
like the lady of Keats’ poem, her purpose is to ensnare, not delight. The man
who falls victim to her charms finds only pain and disillusionment:
“Just when you think she's
yours
She's flown to other shores
To laugh at how you break
And melt into her lake....” [IM; Lips Like Sugar;
ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
She
is la belle dame sans merci, with a vengeance. But the Poet thinks he
can tame her:
“She knows what she knows
I know what she's thinking....” [IM; Lips Like Sugar; ECHO AND
THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
Sexual
overtones are rife. The Poet, however, has another sort of particularly close
relationship in mind:
“She'll be my
mirror
--------------------------
And my Siamese twin
Alone on the river
Mirror kisses....” [IM; Lips Like Sugar; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN;
1987]
Perhaps the “mirror kisses” are best left unexplored. McCulloch reveals
his Lady of the Lake to be no mere temptress, but a figure of Allegory. She
personifies a sought-after quality or goal – something the Poet desires, but
which eludes him. The “mirror” and “Siamese twin” images suggest that she
embodies as well a part of the Poet’s own nature and his longings. Maybe, as he
hints (“I know what she's thinking”), the key to escaping her snares lies
within himself.
The mysterious woman (if woman she be) of The Killing Moon [IM;
OCEAN RAIN; 1984] makes moonlight boat trips with the Lady of the Lake seem
downright safe. The Poet encounters her “Under blue moon”, an immediate tip-off
that we have left the world of ordinary perception. Danger looms:
“So soon you'll take me up
in your arms
Too late to beg you….” [IM; The Killing Moon; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
Two things stand out here: transience (“so soon”)
and inevitability. She will have him, and there is nothing the Poet can do
about it. He foresees this as “the killing time/Unwillingly mine”, and yet it
will come. There is a strong erotic element here, which McCulloch elaborates in
the next lines:
“In star-lit nights I saw
you
So cruelly you kissed me
Your lips a magic world
Your sky all hung with jewels” [IM; The Killing Moon; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
The magnificent setting (“star-lit”, “magic”,
“jewels”) evokes a goddess or other elevated being. She stands, beyond all
doubt, outside the realm of womankind. McCulloch’s Poet never speaks of women
kissing “cruelly”. The most straightforward reading of the lyrics is as a drug
allegory, but the song transcends any such tawdry interpretation. The refrain
hints of forces beyond human ken:
“Fate up against your will
Through the thick and thin
He will wait until you give yourself to him....”
[IM; The Killing Moon; OCEAN RAIN;
1984]
Patient and inexorable, he waits. The woman may
stand for all those things we grasp after – wealth, love, fame, achievement –
which so often fail us. The Poet’s pronouncement of “the killing
time/Unwillingly mine” suggests man’s own nature may lead to his downfall. Or,
perhaps the woman is Life itself. When we embrace its sweetness, we make
ourselves hostages to Fate, for all life is transient.
Like McCulloch’s, Rossetti’s work does not abound
with evil women. But the ones he does present us with are humdingers. An early
poem, The Card Dealer [1849],
bears striking resemblance to The Killing Moon in both theme and
imagery. An entrancingly beautiful woman plays her cards of life and death with
the souls of men:
“Could you not drink her
gaze like wine?
-------------------------------------------------
Those eyes unravel the
coiled night
And know the stars at noon.” [DGR; The Card
Dealer; 1849]
The lady sits at her table beside the dance floor,
the dance itself a symbol of transience. Rather than a “sky all hung with
jewels” as in The Killing Moon, her
jewels – “Blood-red and purple, green and blue” -- adorn her fingers,
reflecting on the polished surfaces of the cards as she lets them slip, one by one onto the table:
“The heart, that
doth but crave
More, having fed; the
diamond,
Skilled to make base seem
brave;
The club, for smiting in the
dark;
The spade, to dig a grave.” [DGR; The Card Dealer;
1849]
The cards represent aspects of life, and she
controls them. Men find her as fatally irresistible as McCulloch’s mystical
woman of The Killing Moon.
She plays, Rossetti tells us:
“…. With thee, who lov'st
Those gems upon her hand;
With me, who search her secret brows;
With all men, bless'd or bann'd.” [DGR; The Card
Dealer; 1849]
Like the patient but implacable Fate, “she knows/The
card that followeth”. And, like him, she will ultimately win:
“Her game in thy tongue is
called Life,
--------------------------------------------------
When she shall speak, thou'lt learn her tongue
And know she calls it Death.” [DGR; The Card
Dealer; 1849]
Rossetti’s card dealer, though he describes her in
painterly detail, remains as firmly confined to her allegorical tethers as McCulloch’s
danger-wielding females. Generally, however, Rossetti gives his femme fatales free rein to flourish as
personalities.
“Lady Lilith”, in ballad, sonnet and oils, remains
wonderfully bad to the bone, and stands as Rossetti’s triumph in the Evil Woman
genre. According to ancient mythology, Lilith was the first wife God gave to
Adam, created from a snake, not a rib:
“Not a drop of her blood was human,
But she was made like a soft sweet woman.” [DGR; Eden
Bower; 1869]
She was also the first person cast out of the Garden
of Eden, the first woman scorned, and the first to ‘fix his wagon’ (as we
phrase it today). Rossetti, who clearly admires her spunk, gives her story a
robust telling in Eden Bower [1869].
This ballad of humanity’s first episode of domestic discord defies description
or condensation and must be read in its entirety.
The Lilith of Rossetti’s sonnet, Lady Lilith
(Body’s Beauty) [1866],
seems almost sedate by comparison, though every bit as hazardous to the male
population:
“And still she sits, young
while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself
contemplative,
Draws men to watch the
bright net she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.” [DGR;
Lady Lilith (Body’s Beauty); 1866]
Finally, we should note a remarkable, little-appreciated
Rossetti oil, Helen of Troy [1863]. Rossetti’s portrait of Sparta’s
erstwhile queen brilliantly conveys a reckless petulance, a wanton arrogance
that is perhaps the essence of evil. We can truly believe she relished having
the Trojan War fought over her.
SALVATION THROUGH ROMANTIC LOVE
Rossetti and McCulloch, like most poets who believe
in Woman as savior, put their faith as well in what Rossetti refers to as
Love’s “sovereign counter-charms” [DGR; Heart’s Haven; 1871]. They view romantic love as a
means of maintaining one’s soul, one’s integrity; of survival in what McCulloch
calls “a world of wire” [IM; Nocturnal Me; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]. Both
Rossetti and McCulloch write of love as a shield and a shelter against the
stupidities and perils of the larger world. Their lyrical lovers make a
separate peace, and establish their own small world. McCulloch’s Poet describes
his earthly paradise as:
“A world that’s
true
Through our clean eyes” [IM; Silver; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
The Beloved is the sine
qua non of this happy state. “You’re living proof/At my fingertips”, the Poet tells her [IM; Silver;
OCEAN RAIN; 1984]. The love world offers its inhabitants opportunity for
redemption (“Through our clean eyes”),
a place in which to work out their spirits’ growth and their own destinies.
McCulloch expands on this in another song from OCEAN RAIN, the joyously
optimistic Crystal Days. The Poet
says that he and the Beloved have come to this place:
“Tattered and torn and born
to be
Building a world where we
can
And magnify our crystal days” [IM; Crystal Days;
OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
These last lines sound more like the Pre-Raphaelitism of Holman Hunt
than of Rossetti, who seemed to expect the Beloved to carry out all the
purification work, but the difference is one of emphasis. We have the lovers
together in a setting made idyllic by their love – a very Rossettian concept.
Rossetti’s love world is sequestered, inward-looking. It seems fragile
and ephemeral:
“When
do I see thee most, beloved one?
When
in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy
face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through
thee made known?
Or when in
the dusk hours (we two alone),
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul
its own?” [DGR; Lovesight; 1869]
This is like a scene from his watercolors of the
1850s -- medieval lovers tucked away in cozy little castle rooms, a hint of
angels in the background, and the rich
detail of an occasional dragon’s head left forgotten in a box behind a chair.
Painter James Smetham described one of these pictures as “one of the grandest
things, like a golden dim dream.” [UT]. This poem is the same, and seems apt to
shatter if we touch it.
Rossetti’s poems written during the years of his
involvement with Jane Morris [Note 2] often
express defensiveness, as though the inhabitants of the love world feel
besieged:
“Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,
Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,--
---------------------------------------------------
I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,--
Against all ills the
fortified strong place
And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.”
[DGR; Heart’s Haven 1871]
The love world includes physical as well as
spiritual union, each being an integral part of the other, as both men make
clear, Rossetti perhaps more graphically:
“I was
a child beneath her touch, a man
When breast to
breast we clung, even I and she,
A spirit when
her spirit looked through me,
A god
when all our life-breath met to fan
Our
life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
Fire within
fire, desire in deity.” [DGR; The Kiss; 1869]
McCulloch is generally more circumspect than this,
going for lushly erotic romanticism (Burn For Me; FLOWERS; 2001), with
an occasional foray into the raunchy (Feel My Pulse; BURNED; 1995). He
has written one song which is overtly about sex. Nocturnal Me features
some clever word usage (“what’s won is one”), and stands as the explicitly
physical counterpart to Silver and Crystal Days:
In a world of wire
Ignites our dreams of starry
skies
Take me internally
Forever yours
Nocturnal me” [IM; Nocturnal
Me; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
This
manages to be both explicit in meaning and symbolic in language – a nice trick.
In Ship of Fools [1987], McCulloch employs some fairly blunt imagery in a joyous
commemoration of love, physical love in particular:
“In the bedroom you will
find her
All your life returned
She sucked you in and lit the fire
Struck you up and watched you burn....
Hark the herald angels
singing
All the holy bells are ringing” [IM; Ship of
Fools; single; 1987]
Again, McCulloch presents us with an image of the
Beloved as a powerful, healing figure. She stands as a bestower of spiritual
life itself (“All your life returned”). And even the angels in Heaven above
celebrate the lovers’ union. Rossetti would have painted them in, trumpets,
bells and all.
We may sail on a “ship of fools” [Note
3], the song concludes, but with love we can set our own
course along the rivers and through the seas of life and find our own stars to steer
by, as we head for “home” – in all its connotations:
“Head in the stars you’re
heading for home
Rossetti expresses the same concept in Paolo and
Francesca da Rimini [1855], one of those jewel-like watercolors in which
the lovers, rapt in each other, never notice what the outside world is doing.
For Paolo and Francesca, it is
just as well. They are the illicit lovers encountered by Dante and Virgil in
the second circle of the Inferno. Rossetti depicts the doomed pair
swirling through a Dantean Hell, arms clasped around each other and looking not
overly disheartened by the situation. Perhaps Rossetti is telling us that
wherever you are is all right, so long as you like the company.
RELIGIOUS AMBIGUITY
Both McCulloch and Rossetti draw heavily upon Judeo-Christian religious
themes and imagery. An innate spirituality runs throughout their works. Good
and evil, right and wrong, sin and redemption structure their worldviews. Yet
each man expresses strong ambivalence about religion itself. Each has clearly
struggled with the problem of a desire for faith set against his own doubts
(which apparently stem from reasons particular to each.) The writings of both
men show changes in thought throughout their working lives. For each, religion
has its own purpose and meaning outside of the eschatological goals of the
religion itself.
The Holy Grail [1995] makes McCulloch’s most explicitly
positive statement concerning traditional western religious faith. In Start Again [CANDLELAND; 1989], he tells
us, simply: “Nothing dies/Nothing ever dies”. The chorus of a 1997 song, Don’t Let It Get You Down, also seems
unequivocal in its declaration that:
But McCulloch often casts statements relating to God and the Hereafter
in the subjunctive. And sometimes the Poet expresses more doubt than uncertainty,
and not a little resentment [italics mine]:
“Fingers crossed that there’s a heaven” [IM; Horse’s Head;
CANDLELAND; 1989]
“Father forget us
Or Father forgive us” [IM; An Eternity Turns;
FLOWERS; 2001]
“God’s on high and so am I
My truth just goes to prove the lie” [IM; Never; BURNED; 1995]
“I'm torn between
What you know and what I've seen” [IM; Moses; GORGEOUS (808 State album); 1992]
We have here the dilemma of every thinking human
being: the need to believe in something larger than ourselves set against our
own rational thought processes and personal experience.
McCulloch makes several attempts to sort through
these issues on the eponymous 1987 Bunnymen album. Bomber’s Bay and All
My Life, a pair of songs with a shared line, debate how “God’s one
miracle”, the human soul, can still maintain itself and grow in the midst of a
world often gone astray. Bomber’s Bay, one of McCulloch’s rare
commentaries on the world situation, takes the larger perspective. The song
opens by lamenting humanity’s endless cycles of militarism and war:
And laid the ground
We built upon
And spun around
God's one miracle
Lost in circles....” [IM; Bomber’s Bay; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
“The planes”, as impersonal as a force of nature,
rain devastation, heedless of the human misery they create below. Thus the
troubles of the outside world intrude upon – and sometimes destroy – individual
lives. We may all be drawn in, whether we wish it or not:
“Cannon fire came to call
Stood us up and watched us
fall
---------------------------------------
Our costumes changed to uniforms” [IM; Bomber’s
Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
This
periodic march to destruction has gone on throughout history, and McCulloch,
employing a few lines of a song from World War I [Note 4],
advises turning to one’s own smaller world for comfort:
“Pack up your troubles and
you'll all get by
Smile boys, that's the style....” [IM; Bomber’s
Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
This is the camaraderie of the soldiers in the
trenches. Stick together (“you'll all get by”), and maintain a positive
outlook. The world, McCulloch concludes, has its own ways of dealing with its
problems. Religion serves a protective function. Evolution and change come
about in the world because we believe they can, and we base that belief around
some higher power:
“They give us hope and teach
us well
With magic moons
that cast a spell
And hypnotise, and draw us in
I believe
I'm believing
God's one miracle
Moves in circles....” [IM; Bomber’s Bay; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
The first part of this
suggests cynicism – religion promoted by the state as a panacea for the masses
-- but the concluding couplet pulls us away from that interpretation. These
“circles” are the dichotomous counterparts to the destructive “circles” of the
planes. Nothing has been truly “lost”.
All My Life picks up on this theme, from the perspective of
individual men and women faced with their own particular moral dilemmas in a
fallen and confused world:
“Men not devils have claimed
us
Purity deserting
God's one miracle
Lost in circles....” [IM; All My Life; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
McCulloch replaces the cycles of war with “laughter
and crying”, the joys and sorrows around which our lives revolve. The larger
world of Bomber’s Bay does come briefly into focus, making explicit the
link between the two songs:
“Cannon fire burning
On the hillside....” [IM; All My Life; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
The faceless automatons of war (which McCulloch
refers to slightingly as “tin soldiers”) are heard in the distance. Forces
beyond our control hover over our lives. We are besieged from within and without.
All seems “Lost in circles”.
As it so often does for both Rossetti and McCulloch,
the answer lies (pun intended) in the love world. All My Life gives a
subtle but clear indication of the interconnectedness of romantic/physical love
and spirituality:
“Songs for life's
lost lovers
Bittersweet their healing
Need not kneeling
God's one miracle
Moves in circles....” [IM; All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
Both Bomber’s Bay
and All My Life speak out strongly for the individual in an indifferent,
dehumanized world. Machines (“the planes”) destroy what men have built. States
make pawns of their citizens in games of war and death. Evil, once comfortably
embodied in the “devils” of old (so everyone knew where it was), has now garbed
itself in mufti (“Men
not devils have claimed us”). “Purity”
has fallen by the way. All of this sounds like a Pre-Raphaelite manifesto from
1848. The Pre-Raphaelites were reacting against the industrial movement and its
effects on 19th Century society. Our own age poses its own dangers
to “God’s one miracle”, as McCulloch has noted. “Oh how the times have
changed us”, his Poet sighs [IM;
All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]. The Pre-Raphaelite solution
involved a return to an older, simpler, more ‘pure’ time. McCulloch usually
does not go so far as that. Nor does his strain of anti-modernity run so deep.
He does counsel a turn inward, to the love world and the individual self, and
the nurturing of the soul’s innate spirituality.
McCulloch habitually distinguishes between religious
doctrines and dogmas, which his Poet views with suspicion if not contempt, and
this natural, inborn spirituality, an agent of growth and cohesiveness. Seven
Seas, a jubilant celebration of life and the freedom of spirit found within
the love world, suggests the soul’s renewal through a return to a simpler and
more ancient form of religiosity:
“Hear the cavemen singing
Good news they're bringing
----------------------------------
A longing for some fresher feeling
Belonging or just forever
kneeling
Where's the sense in stealing
Without the grace to be it?” [IM; Seven Seas;
OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
The inhabitants of this regenerate world strike out
upon their own spiritual path, “Burning the witches with mother religious” –
and though these “witches” are not identified, one suspects they bear such
names as ‘Dogma’ and ‘Doctrine’. Religious feeling, in McCulloch’s worldview,
should come from within, not be dictated by outside authority:
“You say belief
Is in our eyes
But how can I believe
In blind lies?” [IM; In
Bluer Skies; PORCUPINE; 1983]
Nor should man’s inherent capacity for intelligent,
rational thought be rejected in favor of unquestioning faith – a particular
point of contention for McCulloch’s Poet:
“I pray
And nothing happens
Jesus
It's all in my mind
You say
And reasons
They're all in your mind” [IM; All in Your Mind;
ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
All In Your Mind and New Direction pull in the focus
from abstract doctrines to those who preach them. McCulloch apparently follows
the old maxim that all priests and shamen should be presumed guilty unless
proven innocent. The Poet declares, with studied contempt:
“You've learned to speak and
you're professing
The right to teach us our
direction
True imperfection” [IM; New Direction; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
McCulloch reserves his strongest venom for those
religious proselytizers who not only presume to dictate morality and belief,
but mislead or take advantage of their followers, “Counting the flock while
collecting their pounds” [IM; All in Your Mind; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN;
1987]. “Pounds” is a pun, referring to both the British monetary unit and
pounds of wool. Things boil over as the Poet, to use the vernacular, pitches a
mad-fit:
“All you thieving
wheeler-dealers in the healing zone
Giving me fever fever
fever fever
Down to my bones” [IM; All in Your Mind; ECHO
AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
Hypocrisy, and the fleecing of the gullible, draw
McCulloch’s ire much more than any doctrines themselves, though he clearly
prefers reasoned doubt to blind belief. Since Christian (specifically Catholic)
references appear throughout his work, employed with apparent sincerity, it
seems his quarrel is not with the idealized concept of the Church, but with
those who corrupt it in reality. Again, there is an analogy with the
Pre-Raphaelite desire for a return to a (nonexistent) time of purity and honest
feeling in both art and religion. This is of course an unattainable goal, and
the idealist who seeks it is left to contend with all-too-human forces. The
biting (and far superior) original version of McCulloch’s 1987 song New
Direction ends with a scathing commentary, culminating in one of his few
truly cynical lines:
“I was told when I
was seven
If to God I did confess
Ate the bread and
drank the wine
Just grab a bottle and start confessing” [IM; New
Direction (original version); CRYSTAL DAYS (retrospective box set); 2001]
McCulloch, a spiritual man who expresses distrust of
the structures and forms of religion (he does seem to like the trappings), uses
religious ideas and imagery extensively in his work. Rossetti, a professed
(albeit very superstitious) agnostic, loved the formalities of traditional
western religion. His mother and both his sisters believed devoutly, and the
Rossetti household reverberated with high Anglican and Tractarian sentiments [Note 5]. But the greatest influence
was Dante. The young Rossetti’s carefully-wrought translations of La
Vita Nuova and works by other medieval Italian poets [1861] (begun
perhaps as early as 1845, when Rossetti was only seventeen) drenched him in the
culture of a world in which the Church stood at the immovable center, a world
he regarded as his heritage. Though not sure if he believed in God, he did
believe in Dante. Hand and Soul, a short story written when he was
twenty-one, amounts to a medieval artist’s mission statement:
“But who bade thee strike the point betwixt love and faith? Wouldst
thou sift the warm breeze from the sun that quickens it?....Give thou to God no
more than He asketh of thee; but to man also, that which is man's....
Know that there is but this means whereby thou
mayest serve God with man:--Set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with God”
[DGR; Hand and Soul; 1850]
Substitute the word ‘Nature’ for “God” and we have a
Pre-Raphaelite mission statement. The idealistic young Rossetti no doubt
believed wholeheartedly in every word. And a slightly older Rossetti changed
the word to ‘Love’ and never lost his faith.
This religious historicism shines forth in The Blessed Damozel, Rossetti’s best
known -- and arguably his most intrinsically Rossettian -- poem. Set upon a
Heavenly stage, its themes of woman as savior and the undying power of love
play out in what Rossetti described as a counterpart to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. Instead of the bereaved lover
on earth, we see the Damozel [‘damsel’] in Heaven:
“It was the rampart
of God's house
That she was standing on;
---------------------------------------
It lies in Heaven,
across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
The void, as low as
where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge” [DGR; The Blessed
Damozel; 1847-1870].
This stunning bit of imagery gives Heaven
concreteness, placing it firmly in real space. Rossetti’s vision of Heaven is
unique; Dante and his more fleshly early Italian poet brethren intermingled
with Rossetti’s own vivid imagination and desires, heartily seasoned with
Tractarian symbolism and a good dash of Poe. One aspect stands out. Dante’s
Heavenly denizens do not yearn for earthly pleasures, nor even for their
Beloveds. Rossetti’s clearly do. As the Damozel leans upon “the gold bar of
Heaven”, thinking of her lover, we are told that:
“Around her, lovers, newly
met
'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remembered names
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.” [DGR; The Blessed
Damozel; 1847-1870]
Rossetti’s Heaven startles in the very human
physicality of those souls who dwell there. The Damozel, though she be
“blessed”, remains a beautiful and desirable woman. Rossetti tells us of her
deep, calm eyes, “Like waters stilled at even”, her golden hair, her voice,
“like the voice the stars/Had when they sang together”. He even suggests “her
bosom must have made/The bar she leaned on warm” -- certainly a comment Dante
never made about his Beatrice.
The Damozel longs for her lover’s arrival, and has
but one heartfelt, very Rossettian desire:
“There will I ask of Christ
the Lord
Thus much for him and me:--
Only to live as once on earth
With Love,--only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he….” [DGR; The Blessed Damozel;
1847-1870]
In other words, she is going to ask Jesus if she can
have earthly love in Heaven. Moreover, she is not happy in Heaven without her
lover. All the glories of the Hereafter, Mary, Jesus and all the saints are not
enough without him. The poem ends with her weeping.
The Damozel’s plight is simple, touching, and highly
subversive to most religious teaching. Never conventional in his thought,
Rossetti began moving away from personal religious faith in his early twenties.
Though he held on to his idiosyncratic vision of what Heaven should be, he
clearly felt no assurance of its reality:
“Cling heart to heart; nor of this hour demand
Whether in very truth, when we are dead,
Our hearts shall wake to know Love's golden head
Sole sunshine of the imperishable land;
Or but discern, through night's unfeatured scope,
Scorn-fired at length the illusive eyes of Hope.”
[DGR; Love and Hope; 1871]
For Rossetti, God was always the god Love, and
Heaven the love world. The Dark Glass, another sonnet from 1871, may stand
as his definitive statement on religion:
“...what am I to Love, the lord of all?
One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,--
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand.
Yet through thine [the Beloved’s] eyes he grants me
clearest call
And veriest touch of powers
primordial
That any hour-girt life may understand.” [DGR; The
Dark Glass; 1871]
Not being a medieval Italian acolyte (and preferring
to leave abstract concepts in the abstract), McCulloch offers no dramatically
detailed Heavenly tableaux. The closest he comes to any description of the
Hereafter is in the Poet’s adjuration to someone unnamed but apparently
departed:
McCulloch presents us with uncertainties, not
definitions. Rossetti questioned as well, but often filled in answers from his
medieval models. His artistic vision drew upon religion in an
historical/cultural context, not as theology. McCulloch looks inward and offers
a poignant contemplation of questions no human being can truly claim to have
answers for:
“Don't want to know when
Don't wanna know why
Don't wanna believe that life is just to die
--------------------------------------------------
I wanna go out, the way I
came in
My flame blowing out
In the Summer wind….” [IM; Buried Alive; FLOWERS; 2001]
TRANSIENCE AND RESILIENCE
Everything changes, always. The world goes on, and our individual lives
do not. We all grapple with these basic contradictions, some of us more
eloquently than others. The Pre-Raphaelites were very eloquent. So is Ian
McCulloch.
How do we live in the ‘now’ without being overwhelmed by foreboding of
the future? More to the point, how do we find peace in love, pleasure in
success, satisfaction in achievement? All are ours for only a brief space. For
the Holman Hunts among us, the answer is obvious: unquestioning faith in God
and a firm expectation of Heaven. Those who come to the issue with more
uncertainty and less didacticism probably speak for the vast majority of their
fellow humans. The struggle to reconcile what we know with what we want to
believe, what we feel with what we fear, yields some of the best works of both
McCulloch and Rossetti.
An early McCulloch work, Turquoise Days, puts it bluntly: “the smell of the fields never lasts” [IM; Turquoise
Days; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]. “Fields”, as any farmer can testify, represent
the essence of transience. They are sown and nurtured, their crops grow and
flourish, and they are harvested and plowed under – all within a season. We may
also note the Biblical reference [Genesis
27], in which “the smell of the fields” proves illusory and deceptive.
Thus, man lives a brief existence in a mutable and
untrustworthy world, and must find what joy he can in that. The artist who
takes on this theme has a difficult row to hoe, and the tendency is to get
sanctimonious. McCulloch does not. Foregoing any poetically elevated talk about
the meaning and purpose of life, he opts instead for a simple, moving
declaration of what it means to be human:
“It's not for glory
It's not for honour
Just something someone said
It's not for love
It's not for war
Just hands clasped together” [IM; Turquoise Days; HEAVEN UP
HERE; 1981]
This is somewhat reminiscent of Yeats’ poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death [Note 6]. We base our lives not around
grand concepts, but prosaic details (“Just something someone said”) and our own
private feelings. We have each other, McCulloch notes, advising a combination
of the love world and carpe diem, in a pair of painterly, very
Pre-Raphaelitic images:
“Put your faith in those
crimson nights
Set sail in those turquoise days” [IM; Turquoise
Days; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
This first brings to mind – given McCulloch’s
penchant for sea-faring imagery – the old mariners’ adage: ‘red sky at night,
sailor’s delight; red in the morning, sailor take warning’. It seems he is
recommending the best conditions for hitting the seas of life. “Crimson nights”
also suggests the erotic romanticism of the love world, and those beautiful,
clear “turquoise days” are there to be seized upon. We must put our faith in
Love and lift anchor.
CANDLELAND, McCulloch’s 1989 watershed album, speaks
powerfully of growing older, of opportunities missed, and of the resilience of
the human spirit in a world where human life is ephemeral. In Bloom puts
life’s impermanence in metaphorical terms:
“Rice fields
Feet soaking
Minefields
Here's hoping
-------------------
So soon
Vanishing days
Of dead bouquets....” [IM; In Bloom;
CANDLELAND; 1989]
This series of strong, suggestive images
encapsulates a human life: we wade through the muck, hoping to avoid disaster,
and “so soon” we reach the end, left with only distant memories of the time we
were “in bloom”. (For Americans of a certain age, these images call up
particular memories of a war half a world away which shaped and scarred our
lives. It seems improbable that McCulloch, who was born in 1959, had this in
mind. Good poetry takes on a life of its own and yields a diversity of
meanings.)
CANDLELAND does not end in futility. The album’s
last song, Start Again, holds out the
promise of hope and renewal:
“One day
I'll come around
Wonder when
I'll turn around
And start again” [IM; Start Again; CANDLELAND; 1989]
The human spirit, McCulloch tells us, is resilient.
Even within our limited time, we can still “start again”.
Nothing Lasts Forever [1997] stands as
McCulloch’s definitive statement on change, Fate and life’s transience. A more
personal exploration of ideas developed in The
Killing Moon [1984], it replaces the abstract with the particular; the
world at large with the self; the mind with the heart. A vibrantly romantic
song, Nothing Lasts Forever is conversely bleak in outlook, as though by
its very richness McCulloch seeks to convey the pain of inevitable loss.
The song opens upon the Poet’s declaration that: “I want it now”. What he wants is every good
thing he can wrest from life. Vague hopes of better tomorrows do not suffice:
“I need to live in dreams today”. Foremost among these dreams is the Beloved. In
one of McCulloch’s strongest statements on love, the Poet lays it all on the
line:
But never let you
know the way I feel
Under skin is where
I hide
A love that always gets me on my knees” [IM; Nothing
Lasts Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
This requires no further exposition, and the Poet moves on, compressing
into one phrase all of life’s other desirables: “Don’t tell me that my ship is
coming in”. He seeks what he knows he can never attain (“more than I can get”),
as though the act of seeking may somehow allay his certain knowledge that all
will be taken in the end. He is, he tells us:
“Just trying to,
trying to, trying to
Forget
Nothing ever lasts forever....” [IM; Nothing
Lasts Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
McCulloch does not undercut the power of his song by
offering solutions – for there are none. He holds out instead the idea of
consolation; for his listeners, a richly beautiful song. For the Poet, a
conclusion harking back to Ocean Rain:
“All the shadows and the
pain
Are coming to you ....” [IM; Nothing Lasts
Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
Rossetti knew, better than most, that “nothing lasts
forever”, and he understood resilience. We see this in those gorgeous
watercolors of the 1850s – the medieval lovers and the lovingly-rendered scenes
from La Vita Nuova. Each is by its very substance -- delicate color upon
paper – a testament to the fragility of beauty, life and art. Rossetti tended
to treat watercolor paints like oils, and he developed his own techniques.
These little paintings are intricate, crafted. It is as if he is saying, ‘I
know this cannot last, but it is beautiful, and precious to me, and I will take
care with it’.
This ‘be here now’ quality luminates his innumerable
pencil drawings of Lizzie Siddal. Done one after another (biographers have said
‘obsessively’), they capture fleeting moments of time: Lizzie curled up in a
chair; Lizzie standing beside an easel; Lizzie reading a book. These drawings
comprise some of Rossetti’s finest work, and their bitter-sweet poignancy calls
to us across the years.
Beata Beatrix [1864] is Nothing Lasts Forever
rendered in oils on canvas. This painting stands as Rossetti’s masterpiece and
defines Pre-Raphaelite ‘feeling’.
It is the climactic scene from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Beatrice sits on a
balcony overlooking Florence; we see in the background a vague cityscape, and a
bridge spanning the Arno. A red bird, the color of Love, and the counterpart of
the white dove of the Annunciation, drops a poppy into her opened hands. On the
street below, Dante and the god Love pass one another for the last time. A
sundial shows the hour of nine. Beatrice’s eyes are closed, her face upturned,
her body trembling with a tension both sexual and devout. It is the moment in La
Vita Nuova when, as Dante tells us, “the Lord God of Justice called my most
gracious lady unto Himself” [DGR’s translation; 1861].
The painting works on several levels. It is a
memorial to Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti. It is an interpretation of a key episode
from Dante. And it is a statement of Rossetti’s core beliefs about the undying
power of love, beauty and art.
The autobiographical elements are clear. We need
only substitute London for Florence, the Thames for the Arno and, for the Ponte
Vecchio, Blackfriars Bridge, which the Rossettis could see from their flat in
Chatham Place. Even the poppy, traditional symbol of sleep and death -- and
peace -- takes on special significance; Lizzie Siddal Rossetti died of opiate
poisoning.
But the painting’s true meaning lies below the
surface. We must not overlook this Dantean subtext, because it was central to
Rossetti. Dante does not relate the circumstances of Beatrice’s death. He makes
a big show of not doing so, citing three reasons, none of which holds water. In
fact, Beatrice does not ‘die’ – particularly not in Rossetti’s painting. She is
‘rapt up’ to Heaven. Behind those closed eyelids she is seeing a new reality,
and we are witnessing that revelation.
Evelyn Waugh pronounced Beata Beatrix “the most purely devotional and spiritual work of
European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire” [Waugh]. This grand accolade
seems at first startling, if not over the top. But it gets to the heart of Beata Beatrix -- and of Rossetti’s
female portraiture in general. The painting serves as a bridge between our
world of ordinary perception and higher realities where, for Rossetti, Love and
Beauty reign. Beata Beatrix is about
that, not death.
Like McCulloch, Rossetti offers no solutions, only
consolation – the beauty of his painting. And all these years later, that
painting is still very beautiful.
Politicians have a maxim: the more you broaden your base, the more you
dilute your message. If you displease no one, you stand for nothing. The same
holds true of the arts. How do you reconcile your inner vision of mystical,
erotic medieval women with a collective public desire for nice pictures of
children and dogs? The Pre-Raphaelites confronted the issue in their own lives
in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Ian McCulloch holds the
need to remain true to one’s vision as a major tenet, and has explored the
ramifications of this attitude throughout his career.
John Millais could have been the greatest painter of
the 19th Century. His technical skills far outstripped those of
Rossetti (genius to the contrary, Rossetti never quite mastered certain basics,
most notably perspective.) Millais understood what it meant to be a
Pre-Raphaelite, and he believed in it. His works of the late 1840s and 1850s
attest to that. Beautifully colored, carefully detailed scenes from Tennyson,
Keats or the Bible, or semi-mystical visions of his own stand among the finest
Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Autumn Leaves [1856], arguably Millais’ best
picture, haunts. Four young girls stand in a perfectly-painted twilight with
their rakes and baskets of leaves, a captured moment in time. The painting’s
suggestions of ephemeral beauty, sweet melancholy and hidden meanings could
serve as a definition of Pre-Raphaelitism.
In 1850, when the critics finally noted the
Pre-Raphaelite ‘conspiracy’ – and reacted as if they had uncovered a last
outpost of heathenism in their midst -- Millais took the brunt of the attack.
He withstood it stoically. Hunt’s and Rossetti’s paintings (Rossetti’s a
startling version of The Annunciation)
also garnered scorn and derision. Things looked very dark.
Then John Ruskin, the most influential voice of his
time in matters cultural, came to the aid of the struggling young painters. In
two letters to the London Times, he deplored the vicious attacks, urged
tolerance for the young and the innovative, and gave the Pre-Raphaelites
credibility. Already their chief defender, he soon became a close friend and
generous mentor, taking a particular interest in Millais. For his part, Millais
successfully wooed and won Mrs. Ruskin in one of the great scandals of the
Victorian Age.
Millais had remarked that people would do well to
buy his pictures before he had a family to provide for, while he was painting
for the love of his art, not the money it brought in. This proved unfortunately
prophetic; he drifted into Victorian genre painting, often featuring
rosy-cheeked, simpering children or sentimentalized lovers. He did quite a
number of portraits of the rich and famous. Some of these paintings are very
fine and very beautiful. But they are the work of an artist who has chosen the
easier, more conventional path.
Hunt, a very stubborn, very focused man who regarded
his paintings as his form of service to God [Note 7], never swerved from his chosen course. Rossetti
stopped exhibiting in public but, after lean years in the 1850s, managed to
gather around him a group of loyal patrons – newly rich industrialists who
might lack ‘classical’ education but knew genius when they saw it, and would
buy what he wanted to paint. Burne-Jones, mild and gentle in his nature but
steely in his convictions about art, resigned from the prestigious Old
Watercolour Society in a dispute over nudity in one of his paintings.
Millais became a member of the Royal Academy, and
was made its President in 1896, the last year of his life. In later years, he
spoke ambivalently of his Pre-Raphaelite pictures, sometimes deriding them as
the work of a ‘boy’. He died a baronet and a very wealthy man, mourned by a
nation. But perhaps he knew what he had given up. At an 1886 retrospective
exhibition of his work, he admitted, “I have so far failed in my maturity to
fulfill the full forecast of my youth” [Hardin, pg. 70]. According to Holman
Hunt (not an impartial witness), Millais left the exhibition in tears.
In Start Again [CANDLELAND;
1989], Ian McCulloch writes, “I had it in my hands; lost my nerve”. John
Millais never lost his nerve. He simply cared so little about his artistic
principles, he let them slip away.
IMPEDIMENTS TO THE CREATIVE DRIVE
Threats to creativity do not all stem from the marketplace or the
public forum. Forces within the artist himself may prove every bit as
corrosive. Chiaro dell’ Erma, Rossetti’s young painter hero in Hand and Soul, suffers his first crisis
of creativity after meeting a famous artist and discovering that the man has
less talent than he does:
“But the lesson which he had now learned, of how small a greatness
might win fame, and how little there was to strive against, served to make him
torpid…. Also, Pisa was a larger and more luxurious city than Arezzo….”[DGR; Hand and Soul; 1850]
Distracted by beautiful women, music and “gardens laid out for
pleasure”, Chiaro regains his course only when he learns he has a rival of true
ability, who may surpass him. Thus challenged, Rossetti reports, Chiaro “now
took to work diligently….” [DGR; Hand and
Soul; 1850]
The young McCulloch’s Poet encounters a character similarly afflicted
by procrastination in Crocodiles:
“Met someone just the other
day
He said wait until tomorrow
I said hey, whatcha doing today?
He said I'm gonna do it tomorrow” [IM; Crocodiles; CROCODILES; 1980]
For the Poet, as for Chiaro, the answer to such loss
of focus, lack of will or failure of nerve lies in personal challenge, however
impolitely expressed:
“Don't be scared when it
gets loud
When your skin begins to
shake
'Cos you don't wanna look back
You gotta look tall
Gotta see those creeps crawl” [IM; Crocodiles; CROCODILES; 1980]
McCulloch reiterates this point and celebrates the
challenge a few songs later in Pictures
on My Wall:
“Ooh, we should have
Should have got it right tonight
People come, I count everyone
Faces burning
Hearts beating
Nowhere left for us to run
--------------------------------
Don't you just love it
All?” [IM; Pictures
on My Wall; CROCODILES; 1980]
There is something wonderfully vibrant about
these lines. They are the work of youth, and they speak of adventure ahead and
a world to be engaged with every fiber of nerve and sinew.
But challenge is as likely to come from inner demons
as the world outside. McCulloch has written often of these inborn destroyers of
the self. An early and significant work, Over
the Wall [1981] gives us two vivid depictions of the demons at their craft.
In the first, primal impulses push to the surface and interfere with reasoned
“solutions” as the Poet complains: “the monkey on my back/Won't stop laughing”
[IM; Over the Wall; HEAVEN UP HERE]. Monkeys
appear with some regularity in McCulloch’s earlier work, signifying ideas of
mental and spiritual evolution.
The metaphor becomes
more visceral a few lines later:
“There's something to be
said for you
And your hopes of higher
ruling
But the slug on my neck
Won't stop chewing” [IM; Over the Wall; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
The studied detachment of the first two lines gives added force to the
shocking image that follows. Whatever man’s potential, McCulloch tells us, he
is held back by those things which drain his will, his energy and his
aspirations.
Rossetti understood this quite well. Though he expressed the idea with
different metaphors, he too recognized the inner forces which eat away at
resolve and innervate the soul:
“The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they
be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squandered…
---------------------------------------------------------
I do not see them here; but
after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self….” [DGR; Lost
Days; 1862]
Both Rossetti and McCulloch write much of missed
opportunities, wrong-turnings, and the need to ‘start again’. In CANDLELAND
[1989], McCulloch sorts through these themes in the context of creativity and
will, the conflict between public success and individual vision and the desire
to recapture things which have been lost. The World is Flat, an
enigmatic and interesting song from this period, recounts a dialog between the
Poet and the Beloved. Like Rossetti, McCulloch inclines toward pronoun
ambiguity, rendering unclear who is speaking and who is being addressed in the
last stanza:
Nothings gonna
change your mind
You know the only way is
back
To gather what you've left behind” [IM; The World
is Flat; single; 1989]
Whether this refers to the creative world or some
other aspect of life, it speaks of the need to return to one’s true vision, to
find again those ideals and principles which have perhaps fallen by the way.
Rossetti uses a similar image in The
Landmark [1854], a sonnet about his own creative journey. His Poet realizes
he has missed his way and must return, to begin again:
“Was that the landmark? What,--the foolish well
Whose wave, low down, I did not stoop to drink,
--------------------------------------------------------
Was that my point of turning?--I had thought
The stations of my course should rise unsought,
As altar-stone or ensigned citadel.
But lo! the path is missed, I must go back,
And thirst to drink when next I reach the spring
Which once I stained, which since may have grown
black.
Yet though no light be left
nor bird now sing
As here I turn, I'll thank God, hastening,
That the same goal is still on the same track” [DGR;
The Landmark; 1854]
But no artist truly attains his goals. The
creative mind always reaches for more than it can grasp, to paraphrase
Browning. And the world sets traps for us all. Pre-Raphaelite poetry is prone
to self-abnegation. Rossetti, more than does McCulloch, writes of ultimate
failure, of things which have not and never will be achieved. His personified
images of abstract qualities give these poems immediacy. They draw us in. Lost
On Both Sides [1854] describes
his Poet's unrealized hopes in poetry and painting. These are, he tells us,
like two men, bitter rivals over the same woman, who realize upon her death
that:
“Nor other than dear friends
to death may fleet
The two lives left that most of her can tell” [DGR; Lost
On Both Sides; 1854]
This depiction of hopeless rivalry reconciled is
carried into his Poet’s own soul, as Rossetti changes the imagery, creating a
metaphor complicated in concept, yet simple to visualize:
“So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed
The one same Peace, strove with each other long,
And Peace before their faces perished since:
So through that soul, in restless brotherhood,
They roam together now, and
wind among
Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns.” [DGR; Lost
On Both Sides; 1854]
This elaborate little drama has a
detached, intellectual quality. We admire the imagery more than we feel it. Fourteen
years later, A Superscription [1868]
presents a more direct -- and terrifying – portrait of lost
aspirations:
“Look in my face; my name is
Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell….” [DGR: A Superscription; 1868]
Rossetti does not tell us just what this thing looks like. Instead, he
describes concrete actions – the apparition holds out to the Poet two symbols
of Art -- a shell and a mirror:
“…where that is seen
Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen” [DGR: A Superscription; 1868]
This abstract concept has transformed itself into a very real, demonic
presence, seemingly inscribed (‘superscripted’) upon the Poet’s very soul. The
sonnet ends with what is arguably the most chilling -- and memorable – line
ever written by Rossetti:
“Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of
sighs,
Then shalt thou see me
smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.” [DGR: A Superscription; 1868]
McCulloch engages the demons of might-have-been most
notably in the bleak and chilly Never [BURNED;
1995]. Rather than a confrontation with abstractions incarnate, we find his
Poet all by himself and shivering in the midst of McCulloch’s one and only
lyrical blizzard. He has fallen into a “spell” and lost himself – in several
senses. Worst of all, he sees “No way home”. ‘Home’ carries strong connotations
in McCulloch’s lexicon, and estrangement from it is akin to Dorothy’s exile
from Kansas.
“Everything is gone/And I'm alone”, the Poet tells
us, simply, of this devastating development. He acknowledges his troubles are
of his own making, confessing that:
“I thought I had the answers
Now I don't know” [IM; Never; BURNED; 1995]
In
other words, he has led himself into a very biting Dantean pickle.
Like the demons of
Rossetti’s A Superscription, ‘might-have-been’, ‘no-more’,
‘too-late’ and ‘farewell’ hang heavily over the Poet as he laments
opportunities forever gone: “All the things we'll never do”. With glum resignation,
he declares:
“So mister you
And mister me
Both are people
We'll never be” [IM; Never; BURNED; 1995]
There is much to praise in this song, including the
uncompromising ending:
“I feel like going straight,
but then again
No” [IM; Never;
BURNED; 1995]
Never exemplifies the essential
honesty of McCulloch’s work. His characters do not always choose correctly, and
he is tough enough not to contrive a happy ending. This parallels
Pre-Raphaelite notions of ‘truth’: painting a thing exactly as it is, without
adding a rosy glow. It is also analogous to Rossetti’s key doctrine of the
“inner standing-point” [Note 8]: a story should be told from the viewpoint of
someone with a visceral comprehension of it, not an outside observer.
McCulloch is an optimistic writer (unlike Rossetti),
and he rarely touches the level of futility evident in Never. Razor’s Edge, from
the same period, covers similar ground (“Lost my way at the water's edge”), but
with a cheerily jaunty attitude (“You really had to be there“). Rather than the
despair of Never, we get a carefully
balanced assessment:
“These are the things that
are gone
These are the dreams that can still be mine
Seeking that sun going down on the fire” [Razor’s
Edge; single; 1995]
The last line bespeaks transience; the sun moves
ever closer to the western horizon. The “fire” could be either the creative
flame or the life force. McCulloch uses the word in both senses, and in artists
the two meanings often intermingle.
Flowers [2001] continues the
analysis begun in Razor’s Edge. The
mood is reflective. “I've been laying down the flowers”, the Poet tells
us in the opening line; “I've been waiting in the sun” [IM; Flowers; FLOWERS; 2001]. He is, he
remarks with nice ambiguity, “Still perfecting imperfection”. He remains
equally ambiguous regarding what brought him to this pass, though not about its
end result:
“I even saw it come….
-------------------------
Knew that I'd lost
everything
Everything I'd won” [IM; Flowers; FLOWERS; 2001]
In the years between Never and Flowers, the
Poet has learned how to take a hit. He contemplates his failures – and his own
role in them -- with detachment, offering a sardonic toast:
“Here's to all the things
we'll never
Here's to all we could have
done
Here's to what became whatever
Whatever web we spun….” [IM; Flowers; FLOWERS; 2001]
These lines hold
recognition of botched aspirations, world-weariness, sadness and regret. But
McCulloch does not end with a catalog of losses. Unlike Never, Flowers tenders
the bare hope of better days to come, and suggests that there are still things
to strive for. The Poet reiterates his opening statement:
“I've been laying down the
flowers
I've been waiting in the sun
I've been counting down the hours….” [IM; Flowers; FLOWERS; 2001]
Two interpretations come to mind, and
McCulloch probably intends both. We plant flowers – or, with a greater leap of
faith, bulbs -- because we expect them to grow and bloom. The Poet is not
‘sitting’ in the sun, or collapsed into a hammock; he is “waiting….counting down the hours”.
Future action seems anticipated. Perhaps he is going to ‘start again’ and
redeem his losses. Or, perhaps he is simply making a philosophical statement:
whatever happens, this Poet is not troubled. He is
cultivating his garden.
MAINTAINING THE CREATIVE FLAME
Creativity involves more than working at it and staying true to one’s
principles. Nor is it enough to work at it and avoid the pitfalls and
wrong-turnings of the creative life. Creativity is not something to be ‘worked
at’. It stands apart from other traits the artist must possess, within the
realm of the mystical. The artist draws from within himself, from the force
both Rossetti and McCulloch identify as “fire” or “flame”. As McCulloch writes:
A few never worry about losing their creative powers. “Well, if this is
poetry, it is very easy to write,” William Morris remarked cheerfully [Mackail;
pg. 52]. Edward Burne-Jones found painting as natural as breathing. For these
two men, the creative flame never gave a sputter. Nearly everyone else has to
struggle with it. McCulloch writes of this, perhaps, in All My Colours
(Zimbo), an enigmatic song
from 1981:
“Flying
You're trying
But you know you must soon
go down
All my colours turn to clouds....” [IM; All My
Colours (Zimbo); HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
The chemical possibilities of this should not be
overlooked (“That box you gave me burned nicely”, reads a subsequent line), but
something speaks plaintively of larger themes. “Colours” turning to “clouds”
suggests the muting of special attributes and abilities. “Flying”, in
McCulloch’s lexicon, appears on the same page as “creativity”,
“accomplishment”, “power” and “success”. He almost invariably uses the image to
express something positive. The sadder ambiance here implies awareness of
transience, and acknowledgement of the tenuousness of hope. Loss, or potential
loss, hangs heavy. Of what, we are not told. The Poet asks:
“What d'you say
When your heart's in pieces....” [IM; All My
Colours (Zimbo); HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
Rossetti uses the image of flame turning to cloud to
relate his own difficult creative journey:
“Oh! what is this that knows
the road I came,
The flame turned cloud, the
cloud returned to flame,
The lifted shifted steeps
and all the way?--
That draws round me at last
this wind-warm space,
And in regenerate
rapture turns my face
Upon the devious coverts of dismay?” [DGR; The
Monochord; 1870]
Though the poem is often given a broader
interpretation, both Christina and William Michael Rossetti associated it with
their brother’s creative life. [WMR; FAMILY LETTERS OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI;
173]. “Draws” is a frequent Rossetti wordplay, referring to his art. Thus read,
it becomes an affirmation of the power of the Creative Force, which runs through
all life, and from which man’s individual spark derives. McCulloch also hints
at such a force; perhaps he is calling upon it in All My Colours (Zimbo).
THE ARTIST AND THE WORLD
Zephyr,
a big and boisterous song from McCulloch’s Electrafixion days, addresses the
Creative Muse on issues of the artist and the world. How do you reconcile
creativity and public success – get them into double harness, as it were? The
answer, in fine Pre-Raphaelite tradition, is ‘stay true’. The Muse tells the
Poet (or perhaps it is the other way around):
Aim above and out beyond
Leave the common ground
You never wanted to belong” [IM; Zephyr;
BURNED; 1995]
We have here a fine call to individuality and higher purpose in one’s
art. But how do you carry it off? How do you keep your creative torch alight
amid forces that want to douse it? McCulloch’s give-no-quarter advice:
“Shoot them down
They wanna drag you down
Got to see
They're your enemies....”
[IM; Zephyr; BURNED; 1995]
This is wise counsel for a rough and tumble world,
and might be equally well applied to inner demons, unworthy rivals or
philistine critics. Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have benefited greatly from
such a program [Note 9].
Rossetti struggled all his working life with
the problems faced by the creative artist in the larger world. He never found
his solution. His most thorough explication of the subject comes early on, in
the remarkable short story Hand and Soul [1850]. It is the work of a
very young, very idealistic man. Having met with several apparent dead ends on
his artist’s journey, the semi-autobiographical Chiaro dell’ Erma laments:
He has seen that any mediocre talent, highly touted,
may gain fame. He painted, for a time, only his ideas of religious faith, but
the paintings were without beauty and no one wanted them. He had believed in
the ability of the artist to change the world, but in the courtyard where he
painted murals of peace, warring factions have just slain one another. Chiaro,
heartsick and exhausted, falls into a waking dream. His own soul, in the guise
of a beautiful woman, comes to offer counsel:
“... seek thine own conscience (not thy mind's
conscience, but thine heart's)....In all that thou doest, work from thine own
heart, simply; for his [mankind’s] heart is as thine, when thine is wise and
humble; and he shall have understanding of thee.” [DGR; Hand and Soul;
1850]
In other words, ‘stay true’. Draw your inspiration from within, from
the heart, not the intellect. Follow your own vision. Be honest in your work.
When you portray the truest embodiment of your own heart, then man will come to
you, for you will be portraying his heart.
McCulloch also deals with the role of the artist in the world, and the
demands of the larger world upon the artist. Two songs from the late 1990s, Hurricane and See the Horizon, employ a common line in examining these themes.
“Everybody wants you now” holds a somewhat different meaning in each song, as
the same idea is looked at from different angles.
Hurricane, one of McCulloch’s more interesting and complex
lyrics, incorporates several related themes. It journeys from the sins and
hypocrisies of the larger world through the love world to the inner world of
the creative artist. The song opens
upon the larger world going about its business:
“Heading for the midnight
sun
We’ll meet on top of the
world above
Looking down on everyone
Hate in our hearts and talking love” [IM; Hurricane; single; 1997]
This apparent reference to the Oslo Peace Accords (or perhaps the ‘94
Olympics with Tonya and Nancy) speaks for itself of paradox and duplicity in
the world at large. McCulloch drops the subject, moving to the hope and
tentative promise of private worlds:
“Driving through the moonlit
rain
Two souls lost in a
downpour, we are
Looking for a hurricane
Hoping for a shot at a shooting star” [IM; Hurricane; single;
1997]
The first two lines here conjure up the romanticism
and insularity of the love world. ‘Hurricanes’ for McCulloch mean the storms of
life, but this one sounds more exciting than dreadful, evoking the “Don't you
just love it/All?” challenge of Pictures
on My Wall [CROCODILES; 1980]. “Looking for” implies a sought-after
adventure, and the “shooting star” image which follows calls to mind the ‘aim
for the stars’ adjuration of Zephyr
[1995]. It also carries Hurricane
into the creative world.
“Everybody wants to..../Everybody wants you now”,
runs the refrain, bringing out the tension between the public and private
worlds of the artist. It suggests “the crowd”, warned against in Zephyr. It hints of faddish imitators,
sycophants and hangers-on. We may even read it as ‘everybody wants a piece of
you’. Like the “tightrope show” of Horse’s
Head [IM; CANDLELAND; 1989], it puts forward a difficult and tricky passage
to negotiate.
The next lines reinforce this interpretation, as the Poet asks:
“Are we gonna chase the
storm
A silver blaze to Parthenon”
[IM; Hurricane; single; 1997]
Assuming “Parthenon” refers to the temple of Athena,
Greek goddess of wisdom, and not the town in Arizona, we have here the perilous
trek of the soul through all the snares life and the world set for it. Or, the
artist’s journey through the obstacle course outlined in Zephyr. [To respect the privacy of a living writer, I have not
utilized biographical information about McCulloch in this analysis. But it is
interesting – and harmless – to note that as a child he lived on Parthenon
Drive in Liverpool. This makes for a nice wordplay in the next line: “Spirit’s
looking for a home”.] He must, the Poet tells us, “keep the lights shining on”
-- the artist’s struggle in a nutshell.
Hurricane moves from the outer to the
inner worlds; See the Horizon [1999]
reverses the perspective, taking us from the Poet’s self-assessment and
resolution to McCulloch’s encompassing vision. The Poet opens with an
announcement:
“One of these days I’m gonna make up my mind
To crawl or take flight” [IM; See the Horizon;
single; 1999]
‘Flying’, as previously noted, holds connotations of
creativity and success for McCulloch. Since “to crawl” is still an option, it
appears what is going on here is self-appraisal, and the choices are ‘fish, or
cut bait’. Either the Poet is going to do something marvelous (“take flight”)
or he is not. Opportunities have already been missed. The song detours through
the vale of wrong-turnings as the Poet chides himself:
“You said you could see the
horizon
As you fell asleep at the wheel” [IM; See the
Horizon; single; 1999]
We find ourselves on familiar ground. Like
Rossetti’s, McCulloch’s characters tend toward self-abasement. But this is not
just about the Poet. McCulloch pulls it away from the individual to humanity in
general, observing: “We all come in dreaming and we all die young”. We all have
aspirations we will never fulfill, because time rushes by so swiftly. And while
we are here, we go through life, each according to his own nature, but with a
common human need:
“Some want it aching and
some want it numb
All of us waiting for someone to come” [IM; See
the Horizon; single; 1999]
“Someone” means a savior, though it is ambiguous
enough that we need not capitalize the word. The refrain expounds on this
theme, while retaining the ambiguity:
Everybody asks you
how
You were never broken” [IM; See the Horizon;
single; 1999]
In the immediate context of the creative/public
world (“Everybody wants you now”), the next three lines suggest the artist at
the height of his powers. On a private level, it suggests personal and
spiritual growth. But there is more to it than that. McCulloch hints at higher
meanings: “wings” calls to mind an angel, “never broken” the Crucifixion (“All
of us waiting for someone to come“).
Like every good work of art, See the Horizon transcends its proximate surroundings and touches
the universal. The central image is among McCulloch’s loveliest and most
evocative. It moves beyond the particular, beyond the Poet, to stand for every
human soul which has endured through adversity, succeeded against the odds, or
held fast to principle through the storms of life.
THE LARGER CANVAS
Both Rossetti and McCulloch play out their various themes against the
much larger canvas of their own basic ideals and principles. Like the backdrop
to a stage set, these core beliefs give a fundamental unity to their works. For
each man the backdrop is different. And, as in a play, it is rarely the focus
of attention.
Rossetti’s core thesis boils down to a testament to the power of Love
and Beauty upon the human soul, and the duty of the artist to bear witness to
that power. It is his own Dantean pilgrimage.
Three early sonnets, each titled The
Choice, explore how this pilgrimage should be conducted. Rossetti offers
his own ‘choice’ in the third: “Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die.”
[DGR; The Choice (3); 1848]. Man’s
purpose, he says, is to add to the store of human understanding, to strive
continually to touch ‘truth’, which for Rossetti meant artistic truth. This is
a journey without end, for the goal is forever not only beyond reach, but
beyond knowing:
“… From this wave-washed mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd.
Miles and miles distant though the grey line be.
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more
sea.” [DGR; The Choice (3); 1848]
‘Truth” for Rossetti was always bound up in his
artistic goals, and his artistic goals always came back to Love and Beauty. He
made a distinction between purely physical beauty (“Body’s Beauty”) and a more
high-minded variety he termed “Soul’s Beauty”, in which he found great mystical
power and the source of his inspiration:
“Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard
her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.” [DGR; Soul’s Beauty; 1866]
In other words, he discovered his artistic calling.
Note that in this visionary epiphany, Beauty’s attendants include both “terror”
and “mystery”. Rossetti regarded women as much more than ornamental, and not
altogether ‘safe’.
Rossetti’s Poet, soliloquizing, describes what it
means to glimpse the ideal and seek it ever afterward:
“This is that Lady Beauty,
in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still--long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem….” [DGR; Soul’s Beauty; 1866]
Here, Rossetti brings in both the poet Dante (“the
artist/Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles” [Paradiso; xiii, 78]) and the painter Botticelli (the “hair” and
“hem”), a double- barreled allusion reminding us that the artist is an
imperfect being in pursuit of perfection (“Lady Beauty”), and that Rossetti
himself is pursuing her with every fiber of his being in both poem and picture:
“How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!” [DGR;
Soul’s Beauty; 1866]
McCulloch, like Rossetti, is not generally given to grandiose
statements of belief. But his work does carry one overriding message against
which all his themes play out: life is to be fought through to the end, and
with principle. He rarely discusses this overall philosophy. Two songs, The Holy Grail and The Cutter, stand out as exceptions.
The Holy Grail [1995] makes McCulloch’s strongest declaration of these
tenets. Intensely Pre-Raphaelitic, down to its Tennysonian subject matter (the
Grail Quest) and its painterly use of images, it is a remarkable piece of work.
More a tableau than a narrative, the scene opens upon a breached castle:
“With blood on the battlements
You know how it’s gonna end” [IM; The Holy Grail; single; 1995]
McCulloch piles on images: a stone angel, fallen from its high perch, never
“able to soar with the gods again”; a coming plague; the sheer cliff at the
base of the castle and, below that:
“...a bottomless pit
Where all of us have to fall....
All the kings and queens
And knights in shining armor
All the holy ghosts and all our holy fathers” [IM; The Holy Grail; single; 1995]
Note that this is the idealized Middle Ages, which is the version also
favored by the Pre-Raphaelites. We find no mention of serfs, pigs or mud [Note 10]. It is just as well.
Power, beauty, gallantry, holiness – all are ultimately doomed, McCulloch tells
us. What does he counsel in the face of such bleak prospects? Chin up and forward:
“Take what’s yours and take it boldly
----------------------------------------------
Ride the wave when it comes crashing
Be the knight in a shining costume….” [IM; The Holy Grail;
single; 1995]
And
slay those dragons – especially if they get uppity and ask you to sell out.
The song’s power builds toward the last stanza, which holds out the promise
of the Grail Cup, “putting a twist in the tale”. Those who do not “hate”,
McCulloch tells us, can reach the Holy Grail (which we may interpret in a
broader sense).
The Holy Grail stands as a unique direct statement of
McCulloch’s major tenet: ‘fight to the end, and honorably, even in a fallen
world where eternity is uncertain’. The Cutter deals with the idea
obliquely, presenting life as a “free-for-all” to be fought out “with sellotape
and knives” in a world rife with scheming and ruthless ambition:
“Who's on the seventh floor
Brewing alternatives?
Waiting for things to give?” [IM; The Cutter;
PORCUPINE; 1983]
“Spare us the cutter
Couldn’t cut the mustard….” [IM; The Cutter;
PORCUPINE; 1983]
Yet despite all this, McCulloch offers hope, and
suggests the possibility of life as a purifying, redemptive experience:
“Am I the happy loss?
Will I still recoil
When the skin is lost?
Am I the worthy cross?
Will I still be soiled
When the dirt is off?” [IM; The Cutter;
PORCUPINE; 1983]
If the soul does continue “[w]hen the skin is lost”,
this immortal part of man may realize its potential; become “the worthy cross”,
no longer “soiled” by the sins of life. McCulloch here tenders the advice of The Holy Grail. Pursue life, he tells
us, with grace, courage, dignity and passion:
“Conquering myself
until
I see another hurdle
approaching
Say we can, say we will
Not just another drop in the ocean” [IM; The
Cutter; PORCUPINE; 1983]
Slay the dragons within, run the course well, have
faith in yourself and (here the metaphor moves from land to sea), make your
separate wave stand out within the great ocean of humanity. Life can have
purpose and meaning, if it is lived in a purposeful, meaningful way. It is the
individual’s choice to make, before the “cutter” puts an end to all grasping:
“Watch the fingers close
When the hands are cold” [IM; The Cutter;
PORCUPINE; 1983]
How do we find the courage and grace to face life as McCulloch counsels
in The Holy Grail and The Cutter? To pursue our ideals with
the ardor and passion demanded by Rossetti? Here, as we have seen, the
painter/poet and the singer/songwriter come into perfect confluence; we draw
our strength from human love.
PART III: MCCULLOCH AS POET
STRUCTURAL DEVICES
McCulloch often weaves complex tapestries, and the use of opposing,
concurrent or counter-punctual themes provides him with a favorite method of
adding dimensionality to his work. Baby Rain [1999], a song which runs serious risk of drowning in sweetness
and light:
“Glad to be
Alive and still believing
What you said to me
Your love was never
leaving
And it comes for free”
[IM; Baby Rain; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO
DO WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
is
rescued by the refrain:
“I've got what you want
When you gonna get me?” [IM; Baby Rain; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO
WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
which
provides a nice little naughty counterpoint to the otherwise elevated
sentiments, giving the song an edge, and lowering the glucose level. The
gritty, tense ambiance of Fish Hook Girl [1999] gains depth and
complexity from the reassuring “Hey, now” chorus and the addition of a third
voice, which asks, “what are we doing here?”, all laid over a series of
disturbing, painterly images.
Contrasting themes may form an integral part of the lyric. The dark
ambiance of A Promise [1981]
changes to exultance in the chorus and gives the song its meaning:
“Light on the waves....Light on the waves....
Light on the water; we could sail on forever....”
[IM; A Promise; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
Similarly, the whole point of The White Hotel [1989] lies in its
defiantly jubilant chorus, which through sheer force of will overcomes the
nihilistic lyrics:
“I want to be the dust
Inside a vacuum
An ice cube frozen in the
melting sea
-------------------------------
Ringing all the
bells
Down at the White Hotel tonight....” [IM; The
White Hotel; CANDLELAND; 1989]
After all, the people at THE WHITE HOTEL (a novel by D. M. Thomas)
always had the best time they could under difficult conditions.
Nor does McCulloch necessarily keep to one point of view within a song.
We may encounter various combinations of: the Poet carrying on a dialog with
himself; the Poet talking to someone else; someone else speaking to the Poet;
good and/or bad angels whispering in his ear; or the Poet addressing the motive
forces of the universe. Moreover (pronoun slippage being a common McCulloch
phenomenon), just who is speaking to whom is not always evident.
McCulloch has always been interested in dichotomies, and some of his
best work results when he combines two conflicting ideas and lets them fight. It’s
Alright [2001] begins with the Good Angel holding forth:
“Somebody wants you
Someone out there
Somebody needs you
Somebody cares....” [IM; It’s
Alright; FLOWERS; 2001]
Just
as things begin to get maudlin, the Bad Angel comes swooping in:
Whispers in my head....” [IM; It’s Alright;
FLOWERS; 2001]
The dichotomy between Good and Evil, generally not a humorous subject,
plays out like high-style slapstick.
McCulloch makes interesting variations in his use of different voices. History
Chimes [1999], an odd,
appealing little song, has the Poet telling his younger selves:
“I've seen you
And now I know better
I've been you
Now I'm someone else
Until tomorrow
But that's another time....” [IM; History Chimes;
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
Sometimes the answering voice makes it work. Buried Alive’s
[2001] reassuring refrain:
“Hey now, hey now
Don't you cry
It's just the dying of the
light
Time to say our goodbyes
I'll look for you in that goodnight” [IM; Buried
Alive; FLOWERS; 2001]
coalesces
with the pain and uncertainty of the lyric to form a gorgeous heartbreak of a
song. We should also note a nice bit of pastiche: two phrases from Dylan
Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That
Goodnight, used here with an entirely different attitude.
IMAGERY
As previously discussed, McCulloch makes heavy
use of western religious iconography, generally in context and without irony.
Like Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, he seems to find personal meaning in
this imagery. Angels, in particular, make frequent appearances in his work, but
as abstract concepts, not the carefully rendered figures of Pre-Raphaelitism.
Holman Hunt painted religious subjects as
a statement of his own strong beliefs. Rossetti was trying to recreate the
ambiance of the 14th Century. Burne-Jones painted angels because
they were beautiful. For McCulloch, religious symbols form a part of his inner
lexicon. He also has a rich array of other images which make up the symbolic
language of his songs.
FALLING/FLYING
Flying, climbing, being in a dangerously high place or falling “from
some great height” [IM; I’ll Fly Tonight; EVERGREEN; 1997]
are among McCulloch’s earliest and most persistent images. Falls – or potential
falls – appear throughout his work.
‘Falling’ is progressive, and not all falls are
equal. In McCulloch’s early work, a ‘fall’ involves embarrassment, a blow to
self esteem, loss of status or personal failure. McCulloch’s Poet views these
falls as a necessary hazard, to be taken on with gusto and a keen sense of
competitive spirit:
“I think I'm headed for a
fall
They hope I'm headed for a fall” [IM; Pride;
CROCODILES; 1980]
“Over the wall
Hand in hand
Over the wall
Watch us fall” [IM; Over the Wall; HEAVEN UP
HERE; 1981]
Going “over the wall” equates with ‘crossing the
Rubicon’ – publicly committing to a course of action which holds great risk. In
Pride [1980], the threat
to the ego stems from others: “D'ya mind if I laugh at you?/D'ya mind if I sing
with you?”. Over the Wall [1981]
introduces a new locus of danger: “the monkey on my back/Won't stop laughing”.
Not only outside forces, but inner weakness may lead to a fall. Two years
later, McCulloch ties ‘falling’ specifically to creativity and competitive
success:
“When you climbed on top
Did you fall on shadows?
When clambering off
Did you fall on rainbows?....” [IM; Ripeness; PORCUPINE; 1983]
“Did you fall” suggests not a permanent tumble (the “top” is apparently
reached), but the vicissitudes of the journey. “Shadows” for McCulloch
generally denote some inner fear, though in this context, other meanings seem
likely. They may represent those persons who have failed in their quest and
fallen by the way. They may be predecessors who have gone on to greatness. Or,
McCulloch may be suggesting an idea similar to Rossetti’s description of Chiaro
dell’ Erma and his contemporaries:
“… it is not a little thing … if they are even
remembered as the shadows of the coming of such an one [the famous painter Cimabue], and the voices which
prepared his way in the wilderness.” [DGR; Hand
and Soul; 1850]
In other words, try to be the Beatles, not the band that was playing
down the street a couple of years earlier. And, McCulloch reminds us, tread the
path back down with grace. If ‘fall’ you must, aim for a nice hopeful rainbow.
CANDLELAND [1989], a major station in McCulloch’s lyrical passage,
converts the image of ‘falling’ from public loss of face or position to an inner
loss of moral or spiritual bearings. Proud
to Fall, his key pronouncement on the subject, examines the consequences of
a journey perhaps not made with grace. ‘Falling’, we learn, can lead to more
than a sprained ego, and being proud enough to go “over the wall” has its down
side. Élan may evolve into haughtiness, a willingness to take risks into
hubris, and self confidence into that deadliest of sins, pride. McCulloch’s
Poet, in a rather acrimonious self-directed monolog, complains to his ‘other
half’’:
“Here you come again
Acting like a saviour
There you go again
Talking like a stranger” [IM; Proud to Fall; CANDLELAND; 1989]
The confident reassurances of this part of his
nature are not to be trusted, as the Poet has already discovered. The would-be “saviour”
preaches doctrines which go against the Poet’s own inner beliefs – the words of
a “stranger”. The Poet chides:
“You said we all must learn
to face
What we're becoming
And then I saw you in the distance
Off and running….” [IM; Proud to Fall; CANDLELAND;
1989]
In other words, the Poet feels he has failed others
(“we all”) and himself. At some crucial juncture he broke and ran – “I saw you
in the distance/Off and running”. This self-betrayal has led to a difficult
pilgrimage through a kind of inner Purgatory:
“Long days journey into
Long nights journey out
Knee deep so deep within you….” [IM; Proud to
Fall; CANDLELAND; 1989]
It is a journey of self-discovery. The Poet admits,
“[I] Don't remember whether/I ever really told you who I was….” Perhaps he has
not previously sorted through his convictions on certain issues. And, as he
acknowledges in the concluding lines, he must accept responsibility: “… I saw
you in the mirror/Off and running”. And yet, he remains ambivalent about his
role in what occurred, telling us – repeatedly – that:
“…from start to finish
I was proud to fall” [IM; Proud to Fall;
CANDLELAND; 1989]
“Proud” and “fall” probably both hold double
meanings. The immediate reference is to the Biblical injunction: “Pride goeth
before a fall, and a haughty air before destruction.” But the Poet may mean
exactly what he says. He was “proud” to take this fall -- proud of what he did,
proud of what he went through, proud that he got through it – proud “from start
to finish”. “Fall” may also imply falling away from ‘truth’ in the
Pre-Raphaelite sense -- a recurring issue in CANDLELAND.
Being “proud to fall” is not the province of man
alone. Angels fly – they buzz about frequently in McCulloch’s work – and they
have been known to take a tumble. McCulloch makes this point explicit in King
of Kings [2001], a parody
on the ‘rock star as savior’ motif [Note 11] which finds the Poet:
“Wearing broken wings
The world so far
below
--------------------------------
It's such a long way to fall” [IM; King of Kings;
FLOWERS; 2001]
We have here a combination of angel (the “wings”)
and an ersatz Jesus – both rather the worse for wear. The “fall” involves both
loss of place (the “crown”) and moral turpitude, outlined under the general
heading “Sought salvation in the city lights”. If we wish to look for deeper
meanings, we may hypothesize that in jeopardy is what McCulloch elsewhere [Angels
and Devils; single; 1983]
refers to as “the Jesus in me....the Jesus in you” – the Divine part of the
human spirit. A brief appearance in King of Kings by Jesus Himself
emphasizes the point:
“Saw fear eternal in His
eyes
He’s seen what happens when the soul dies” [IM; King
of Kings; FLOWERS; 2001]
King of Kings, by the way, is not Pre-Raphaelitic but wonderfully
Victorian, an Awful Warning about the perils of debauchery.
Too Far Gone [1995], gives a less
formalized, deadly serious and far more bone-chilling account of a fall from
Grace. Depending on how we read the closing lines, it may venture into the
territory of the truly lost. The song opens with a plaintive cry:
“Help me, come on
Don't try to catch me when I fall
I don't belong….” [IM; Too Far Gone; BURNED;
1995]
A writer as sensitive to word meanings as McCulloch
must note the syntactical difference between ‘Come on, help me’ and ‘Help me,
come on’. We are hearing not a plea for help, but a denial that help is
possible. The Poet claims to be past even the anticipation of aid or salvation.
He is undergoing no minor slip-up, but a full-fledged plunge into the Abyss:
“Just my spirit falling, falling….
-----------------------------------
You don't wanna hear the
things I know
Too far gone
Gone so far there's nowhere left to go” [IM; Too
Far Gone; BURNED; 1995]
This song presents itself initially as that rare McCulloch work which
offers no hint of a hopeful outcome. The bleakness and despair of the lyrics
are palpable. But, tucked away at the bottom of the lyrics transcript, almost
as an afterthought, and so deeply buried in the polyphony of the closing
refrains as to be inaudible (if it is there at all) lies this admission:
“Been down so goddamn long
That it looks like it's up to me
It looks like it's up to me, now….” [IM; Too Far
Gone; BURNED; 1995]
This may be merely a restatement of the old expression, ‘been Down so
long it looks like Up to me’, or a reference either to the Doors song Been Down So Long or to Richard Farina’s
novel of the ‘60s [see Note 4]. But McCulloch has inserted the word “it’s”,
providing an alternate reading: ‘it is up to me to change my situation’.
McCulloch has written much of right and wrong, sin and salvation. Perhaps, with
this image of an ultimate fall, he is telling us he thinks they matter.
‘Flying’ symbolizes freedom, growth, power, and becomes
prominent in McCulloch’s work beginning with the 1997 Echo and the Bunnymen
renaissance album, EVERGREEN. Only in the early and enigmatic Zimbo does the image hint of melancholy:
“Flying down…." [IM; All My Colours
(Zimbo); HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]. For McCulloch, ‘flying’ signifies an
exhilarating, even exuberant experience:
“I want to be like
you
I want to fly, fly, fly
-----------------------------
‘Flight’ is a talismanic image which encompasses not only present
reality but future possibility. Even if conditions necessary to ‘flight’ do not
yet obtain, the Poet speaks confidently:
“One of these days
I'm gonna
Do as I say and do it my way
I'm gonna grow those wings
And learn to fly and hit the
skyway” [IM; Life Goes On; FLOWERS; 2001]
This image of change and growth metamorphoses into an image of rebirth
in Scratch the Past [2001],
as McCulloch makes explicit an association between flight and renewal by
conjuring the Phoenix, that legendary bird reborn from its own ashes:
“Rising from the ashes with my head in flames
It's good to feel the fire again” [IM; Scratch
the Past; single; 2001]
For McCulloch, the reverse image of flight
is not a crash or a fall, but subsidence, diminution. Hide And Seek [2001], a song apparently about songwriting (“Come with
me and I will show….”), places this in the creative context:
“I know you know we know I'm
going down
Help me get my feet back off
the ground
I know you know we know I'm going down
Help me get my head back in the clouds” [IM; Hide And Seek; FLOWERS; 2001]
Perhaps, he suggests,
we should fear not flame-out, but ennui. To the creative impulse, the whimper
not the bang poses the greater threat and may prove ultimately just as deadly.
Razor’s
Edge [1995], otherwise a song of great swagger
(“Passed on the blindfold; I had to be there”), gains a nice touch of
vulnerability from a variation on the image:
“Will you be around
To pump me up again
Just when I'm going down for the last time?”
[IM; Razor’s Edge; single; 1995]
We should note that while several meanings may be
read into this, the song clearly places it in the context of the
creative/success drives. The image, rather reminiscent of a leaky weather
balloon, may lack the drama and verve of the Phoenix rising, but the meaning is
similar. Like Rossetti’s “regenerate rapture”, the gift of flight may always be
regained.
STARS
Stars are among McCulloch’s earliest and most
consistently used images, going back to his first album, CROCODILES [1980].
They hold a dual meaning for him. Among the attributes of the Beloved, in this
context they always appear as lovely and benign, often expressing the symbiotic
relationship between the Poet and the Beloved:
“They're falling again
And into my heart” [IM; Fools Like Us; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WIIH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
“Just let me into
your dreams
Where all the brightest jewels
glow
I'll be your ground below” [IM; The Ground Below;
single; 1992]
“You'll be the star
I'll be your satellite
Of love….” [IM; Get In the Car; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO
WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
But stars can also be cold,
distant, indifferent, or even downright dangerous:
“Stars are stars
And they shine so hard” [IM; Stars Are Stars;
CROCODILES; 1980]
“I caught that
falling star
It cut my hands to pieces” [IM; Stars Are Stars;
CROCODILES; 1980]
Beautiful
and enticing, they hold out promises that will be unfulfilled, or snatched
away:
“The sky seems full
When you're in the cradle
The rain will fall
And wash your dreams
-----------------------------
Because it's empty and hollow....” [IM; Stars Are
Stars; CROCODILES; 1980]
That's what stars are for” [IM; Magical World;
MYSTERIO; 1992]
Finally, stars provide McCulloch with one of
his finest, most Pre-Raphaelitic images:
“I can feel the stars shooting through my heart like rain....” [IM; Rust; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?;
1999]
Rossetti would have painted an exquisite little picture around that
line.
FIRE/LIGHT
McCulloch employs ‘fire’ and ‘burning’ images in
several contexts. Most are positive. His characters may ‘burn’ with sexual
desire, with an inner drive toward success or creativity, or with the life
force itself. These forces intermingle and draw from each other. At times,
connotative overlap occurs, and the source of combustion becomes unclear.
Most poets at one time or another write of ‘burning’
in love. McCulloch is no exception:
“When I'm on fire, my body
will be
Forever yours
Nocturnal me” [IM; Nocturnal
Me; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
This seems fairly straightforward. But when McCulloch revisits the
image years later in Burn For Me
[2001], he adds complexity and layers of meaning:
“I'm water… swim to me
Be my fire… burn with me
-----------------------------------
I'm water… swim to me
Be my fire… burn for me....
I'm going out….” [IM; Burn For Me; FLOWERS;
2001]
Prepositions matter here, and by switching them,
McCulloch opens the lines to multiple interpretations. We may read “burn with me” [italics mine] as either ‘let
the two of us burn in love together’ or ‘burn with your love for me’. The
second version of the phrase, “burn for
me”, may connote ‘burn in love for me’. But, considering the song’s somber
closing line, it evokes McCulloch’s concept of spiritual and creative renewal
through romantic, physical love. We should probably read it as, ‘give me the
fire I no longer have’.
The “fire” imagery in Burn For Me blends
sexual, creative and spiritual meanings. It may even stand for the life force,
which opens the song to being ‘about’ not a human love relationship, but the
union of the soul with what the Transcendentalists called the Oversoul. The
imagery in this song is among McCulloch’s most thought-provoking.
Zephyr, a song which explores the
integration of success and creativity, offers a ‘light this candle’ image which
may refer to either public success or satisfying the creative muse -- or both:
“The sky is open wide
Light the fuse and take a ride” [IM; Zephyr; BURNED; 1995]
‘Go for it’, in other words. This evokes the power and exuberance of
McCulloch’s flight imagery. But those images are organic and indicative of
inner change. They involve wings, not rocketry. In this burning fuse we have
not evolution but a cheerful call to carpe
diem. It suggests opportunity and freedom. It is a happy image. But efforts
to ‘burn’ may also fizzle and go out:
“Trynna burn
But you're melting down
You wanna be up there
But you're underground....” [IM; Lowdown; BURNED; 1995]
“Trynna” is a McCulloch word. Unrealized aspirations
smolder “underground” – which for McCulloch apparently signifies failed
potential – rather than lighting up the sky like that rocket in Zephyr.
Though McCulloch almost always portrays ‘burning’ as
a ‘good’ thing, his two most memorable uses of the image describe fire in its
destructive capacity. Proud to Fall [1989]sets the match to dynamite:
“I prayed you’d light the
fuses
And we’d burn and torch it all” [IM; Proud to
Fall; CANDLELAND; 1989]
This has a nicely reckless quality to it, indicative
of the frustration and ambivalence expressed by the character in the song. It
manages to be both combative and tentative (he does not “light the fuses”
himself). Perhaps even better is the dramatic tableau provided by the refrain
of An Eternity Turns [2001]. In a
scene reminiscent of Scarlet O’Hara’s flight from Atlanta, we find the Poet:
Kneeling at the
crossroads
All my bridges burning
Down the river my life flows
Took another wrong turning” [IM; An Eternity
Turns; FLOWERS; 2001]
This is a wonderful image, encapsulating as it does many of McCulloch’s
favorite themes. Hapless man, lost in a hostile world, disaster all around, is
brought to his knees before the powers of the universe. All that is missing is
a nice woman in a life raft.
McCulloch
sometimes uses ‘light’ in its standard literary sense as the antithesis of
darkness, the symbol of truth, beauty, knowledge and things holy. As such, it
denotes sought-after qualities within the Poet; qualities perhaps buried, but
not forever lost:
“If I could see what you can see
The
sun's still shining out of me
I'd be the boy I used to
be....” [IM; What
Are You Going to Do With Your Life; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR
LIFE?; 1999]
These images have a nostalgic quality, as if ‘light’
and all that it represents were the province of youth, to be wrestled back only
with difficulty from the snares and tares brought by time. We must, the Poet
tells us, find our way back to the days:
“When everything was coming
right
And we would run...into the sun….” [IM; Get in the Car; WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO
WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
The way back is not always easy. Forgiven [1997], a powerful song with an
ambiguous ending, acknowledges the dichotomy of light and darkness which exists
within the human – specifically the Poet’s – soul:
“What d'you want to see?
A blinding light, a blackest
night
They're both inside of me” [IM; Forgiven;
EVERGREEN; 1997]
Although he makes a point of noting the universality of his situation
(“I am just one of many”), the Poet indicates that within him, the light will
eventually triumph:
In CANDLELAND, ‘light’ becomes more than a dichotomous counterpart to
darkness. Like the “light on the waves” in A Promise [IM; HEAVEN UP
HERE; 1981], it is gentle, ethereal, and endowed with magical properties:
“The shining sea the silver
sky
A perfect world before my eyes” [IM; Faith and
Healing; CANDLELAND; 1989]
In The Flickering Wall, light represents a higher realm, which
the Poet is fortunate enough to glimpse, if only momentarily:
“When I saw the gods up in
the sky
And choked on the wonder of it all” [IM; The
Flickering Wall; CANDLELAND; 1989]
The light in Candleland itself is never directly mentioned, only
implied, as McCulloch describes another magical realm, one for the weary
pilgrim through a fallen world:
“Get your handful of
remembrance
For you to sprinkle through
your life
In between the penance
That you carry by your side
With the make belief and the
miracles
That only come
alive
In Candleland....” [IM; Candleland; CANDLELAND; 1989]
Surely, “the make belief and the miracles” are the most
important provisions for this journey. Life is a hard trek, with much need of
atonement, and only a “handful” of precious memories to carry with us for
comfort. But Candleland, like the love world, possesses curative properties for
mind and soul (“You'll know that
something's left you....”), and we must find it – or create it – for ourselves:
“They say you just know
And the knowing is the proof
Of Candleland....” [IM; Candleland;
CANDLELAND; 1989]
Candleland, it seems, is like Brigadoon, Platform Nine
and Three-Quarters, or Mark Helprin’s Lake of the Coheeries; you have to
believe in it in order to go there. And in this magical place McCulloch gives
us his version of Burne-Jones’ paean to beauty, which “...softens, and
comforts, and inspires, and rouses and lifts up, and never fails.” [EBJ; letter
to William Morris; 1894]
Beauty takes many forms. McCulloch mixes images of
light and darkness to paint – almost literally – a brooding, bleak and
disquieting lyrical landscape in Land of the Dying Sun [1995]. This
harrowing journey into the Inferno of the human soul begins with a disorienting
image from the physical world:
Headlights shine on the dark road....” [IM; Land
of the Dying Sun; single; 1995]
This land lies on the borders of light and darkness, at the edge of
concrete perception. Even in the ‘real’ world we are unsure of what we are
seeing. And then we are pulled into the inner world of mind and soul as all the
horrors that lurk in darkness gather:
“No more light and innocence
---------------------------------------
Too scared, no chance to
dream
Alone, it's you and your lost soul....” [IM; Land
of the Dying Sun; single; 1995]
Here, the soul’s light is overcome by darkness –
“all our beauty's gone”. Here, we find no dreams – for they are the province of
Light – only nightmares of the Dark. Here, the soul lies ensnared, held by
something that is perhaps partly of its own making, for, McCulloch tells us,
this “trick of night…knows your heart too well”. Even a return to the outside world brings no relief, for it
mirrors the dark world within:
“As we fall, the day keeps
on rising
A powerful and painterly composition of mood and
atmosphere, Land of the Dying Sun is
arguably McCulloch’s darkest work. Conversely, a victory of light provides one
of his most joyful, quietly triumphal images:
“Let’s walk into the light
Let’s make our every wrong
Turn out all right” [IM; Sense of Life;
single; 1999]
As befits a son of Liverpool, McCulloch’s work is rich in images of
seas, oceans, tides, ships and boats. His songs glisten with ocean rain,
regular rain, “dark and hollow” rain, moonlit rain, stars like rain, haze, fog
and “water games”. Hurricanes, “heavy storms”, downpours and tidal waves
abound. (But “pool” sometimes refers to Liverpool, not more water.) There is
even one cold and lonely blizzard.
When he writes of the ocean, he means life. These
waters are difficult to traverse and fraught with peril. In The Holy Grail [1995] he warns of the
wave which, inevitably, “comes crashing”. Ocean
Rain [1984] depicts the human soul “screaming from beneath the waves” –
perhaps McCulloch’s most memorable image. And, he tells us in Heaven’s Gate, [MYSTERIO; 1992], “You
lose your love breaking underneath the waves”. Danger lurks upon even the most
tranquil waters, as the startling panorama of Blue Blue Ocean [1987] makes plain:
“I'm swimming out on a blue
blue ocean
You're sailing out on a blue
blue sea
Silhouettes and a vulture hoping
He's gonna pick the bones of you and me” [IM; Blue Blue Ocean; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN;
1987]
An
orthinological counterpart to the dark Fate of The Killing Moon, the vulture hovers and waits – always.
Seven Seas [1984], set in the love
world, speaks not of the destructive power of life, but of the joy that can be
found in living it:
“Seven seas, swimming them
so well
Glad to see my face among
them
Kissing the tortoise shell” [IM; Seven Seas; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
Love frees the spirit -- “Burning my bridges and
smashing my mirrors”, as the Poet puts it [IM; Seven Seas; OCEAN RAIN; 1984], allowing life to
be lived with delight and purpose. With love, specifically in the person of the
Beloved, life’s oceans can be an exhilarating challenge:
“When our ship hits stormy
weather
We'll ride the tidal waves
You and me sailing seas together
In the same boat... always” [IM; Make Me Shine; FLOWERS; 2001]
In imagery evoking the Beloved, McCulloch generally
tries to create a symbiotic relationship between her and the Poet. When the
image involves stars, as we have seen, she is the sky, he “the ground below”;
she the star, he the “satellite”. On the water front, each image -- fire, air,
prayer, water -- in the strongly erotic Burn
For Me [2001], blends the ‘I’ and
the ‘you’ in the symbiotic union described in the refrain:
“One night, you'll see
The moon and stars in motion
One night, your sea
Will melt into my ocean” [IM; Burn For Me; FLOWERS; 2001]
The best thing about this image is its ambiguity. In
the context of the song, we can read the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ as representing two
lovers, or the soul and its Maker -- or both.
‘Weather’ in McCulloch’s work signifies emotional
states, and he has a wide array of climatic conditions to report, mostly in the
area of precipitation. “Will you walk through my storm?” the Poet asks in Supermellow Man [IM; FLOWERS; 2001], and
indeed McCulloch takes his listeners through many storms. But, as he also
reminds us in Supermellow Man,
“There's angels in the thunder clouds….”.
Not all rain is bad. “Moonlit rain” [IM; Hurricane; single; 1997], occurs in the presence of the Beloved,
and actually sounds nice. As ‘moon’ for McCulloch symbolizes something outside
the ordinary realm (e.g. the mystical world of The Killing Moon, the “magic moons” of Bombers Bay and the “Delvaux moon” referenced in Buried Alive) “moonlit rain” may even
have magical connotations. It certainly evokes the love world, a powerful spell
in itself.
But outside the love world, inclement weather means
trouble in mind and spirit, and is generally a lonely ordeal. The young
McCulloch paints a rather Byronic image of his Poet in the 1981 song, Over the Wall:
“I'm walking in the rain
To end this misery
I'm walking in the rain
To celebrate this misery” [IM; Over the Wall; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
Here, internal conditions are being consciously
brought to the outside as the Poet seeks an image from the larger world to
mirror his own thoughts. Thus equipped, he can explore, even “celebrate” his
emotional state -- a concept both Romantic and Pre-Raphaelitic.
When McCulloch revisits the image years later, it has
taken on much bleaker overtones:
“And I'm out of the black
empty night
Into the dark and hollow rain....” [IM; Bed of Nails; BURNED; 1995]
The adjectives applied to the “night” have
essentially the same meanings as those applied to the “rain”. Moreover, one
does not normally go “out” of night “into” rain; in the physical world, these
would be in the same location. Two interpretations suggest themselves. The Poet
may be (as in Over the Wall) moving
from his inner thoughts to their representation in the outside world. Or – a
more frightening prospect – he may be, figuratively, dissolving into the rain
itself. Note that the “dark and hollow rain” is a smaller version of the “black
empty night”. And both sets of adjectives define that state we call ‘nothingness’.
McCulloch also knows how to utilize simplicity. A
less elaborate, and less graphic, image from the same album, BURNED, paints one
of his most poignant portraits of despair:
“I'm not gonna feel the same
again
It's memories in the pouring rain” [IM; Never; BURNED; 1995]
But McCulloch is an inherently optimistic writer
with a clever sense of humor. Beyond the
Green [1999], offers up a virtual kitchen sink conglomeration of favorite
‘impending doom’ images in what amounts to a parody of his Poet’s darker
musings and a statement of eventual triumph:
“Dark clouds hanging
overhead
You keep drowning in your
bed
We’re still waiting for the sun to shine
You’ll be coming from the
haze
Someday somehow sometime” [IM; Beyond the Green;
single; 1999]
GOLD/GOLDMINES
Images of gold and goldmines in McCulloch’s work have either a
materialistic or a spiritual meaning, depending on their context. In its
simplest sense, ‘gold’ stands for wealth, and worldly gain:
“One by one goes everyone
In search of little pots of gold” [IM; Pots of
Gold; single; 1989]
“Gold” is the currency of the human marketplace,
which deals in more than dry goods: “I'll be bought and you'll be sold” [IM; Pots
of Gold; single; 1989]. We not only buy and sell our lives for material
gain and worldly success; we scramble after, and fight to possess them:
“In the goldmine lie the
buried treasures
Get a piece of what's going
down
I'll get mine and you'll wait forever
If you don't take it when it comes around” [IM; Timebomb; BURNED; 1995]
“Carpe
diem atque carpe aurum’, in other words.
McCulloch uses ‘gold’ in conjunction with ‘glitter’
to symbolize fame or public success:
“The glitter and
the gold never come your way
Your star-bound ride is still delayed” [IM; Heaven’s
Gate; MYSTERIO; 1992]
‘Gold’ is also an attribute of the Beloved, and in
association with her takes on spiritual meaning. The image is progressive, as
though McCulloch has worked it out over time. In Blue Blue Ocean [1987],
‘gold’ signifies beauty, inner as well as physical:
“Girl
I want the gold dust
In your fingers
And your Klondike touch
As it shimmers
In your solemn eyes” [IM; Blue Blue Ocean;
ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
The words are carefully chosen. “Gold dust” suggests a delicate
feminine beauty; the shimmering goldmine, the soul’s inner light. McCulloch, a
collector of clichés, surely knows the one about the eyes being the windows to
the soul. The Beloved possesses that higher order of beauty which Rossetti
termed “Soul’s Beauty”; ‘gold’ and ‘goldmine’ images in connection with her
assume spiritual qualities.
Ten years later, McCulloch revisits the image in Too Young to
Kneel [1997]. Now the
“gold dust” in the Beloved’s fingers takes on magical properties, becoming a Midas
touch for the soul:
These lines also revisit the “glitter and the gold”
image from Heaven’s Gate,
transforming its meaning. The Beloved’s touch bestows not material gain but
purity of vision, what the Pre-Raphaelites called ‘Truth’.
In its latest incarnation, the gold/goldmine image
achieves symbiosis between the Poet and the Beloved:
“Love it when you
say
And I love the way
You just make me shine” [IM; Make Me Shine;
FLOWERS; 2001]
The previous metamorphoses of the image lie within the sweet (not
sugary) simplicity of these lines, creating a song that works on more than one
level of meaning.
LANGUAGE
McCulloch is a careful wordsmith. He is interested in the meanings of
words, and the ways those meanings may be changed or put to inventive uses. He
likes to ‘play’ with language. His skills range from the conventionally clever:
"You're putting the
'no' in November
And taking all the 'bes' out of May" [IM; Everybody Knows;
FLOWERS; 2001]
to
concise, well-defined word pictures:
"I want to write the
letters of persecution
Who doesn't know me" [IM; The White Hotel; CANDLELAND;
1989]
“She’s got everything on her
mind
He’ll take anything he can find
Small horizons fill her eyes
Got his eyes on her in the sky” [IM; Antelope; single; 1997]
“I walked back inside me
I'd gone back for my youth
It must have stayed up on the roof” [IM; Candleland; CANDLELAND;
1989]
“Lucky for some
We don’t understand
Everything we hear
We just pick out the simple stuff” [IM; Simple Stuff; single; 1980]
to
verbal delights:
“Far forgone
Along with my conclusions
That came with much confusion
And led to my delusion
But got me on my way” [IM; Pomegranate;
MYSTERIO; 1992]
“Death in a basket
Left in a casket
To reflect on our story” [IM; New Direction (original version); CRYSTAL DAYS (box set); 2001]
“Smack in the middle of today
Got to find new words
Merely got to simply say
I think we all misheard” [IM; Higher Hell; PORCUPINE; 1983]
Or
my personal favorite:
“Just get me out of this jam
It's stuck to me like glue” [IM; Lost on You; WHAT ARE YOU GOING
TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
Like a painter wielding oils and brushes, he uses language to create
his setting, and establish mood, from dark and disquieting to sweetly nostalgic
(and we night note that some of McCulloch’s best work is tucked away on the
b-sides of singles):
“See the girl with the
fish-hooks in her
See the boy in another
prayer
See the cross slipping through his fingers
Going, going, gone nowhere
See the man with the necrophilia
Got boxes full of hair
The streets are God dead willing
Someone dying in the dead air....” [IM; Fish-Hook
Girl; single; 1999]
“Home is where the
house is
House where the toys stay
With the noises of
big days” [IM; Big Days; single; 1989]
“Noises”
is a wonderful choice of words.
He often employs unexpected, slightly off-kilter words to convey his
imagery [italics mine]:
“I’ll come flaking back to you” [IM; Rust; WHAT ARE YOU GOING
TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
“Are
you the wrongful half
Of
the rightful me?
“Estoy candalabarar
Obligoing brightly” [IM; Vibor Blue; MYSTERIO; 1992]
”When the moon and the stars go crashing round”
[IM; Don’t Let It Get You
Down; EVERGREEN; 1997]
“scarred with the taste of angels” [IM; Sister Pain;
BURNED; 1995]
We'll never find....” [IM; What Are You Going to do With Your Life;
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?; 1999]
This
last has some fun with the name of a famous perfume, Heaven Sent.
Conversely, McCulloch shows an odd fondness for clichés – ‘tried and
true expressions’, we shall call them here. They pop up everywhere: “couldn’t
cut the mustard”; “the razor’s edge”; “Out on a limb/Did you see what the cat
dragged in”; “do or die, what's done is done” (double headers there!); “the
blue horizon”; “the wild blue yonder”; “in the same boat”; “the salt of the
earth”; “the chips are down”; “through the thick and thin”; “nip it in the
bud”; “Spring has sprung”. One could spend a month of Sundays ferreting them
all out.
A man capable of producing lines like:
“Burning the witches with
mother religious
You'll strike the matches
and shower me
In water games” [IM; Seven Seas; OCEAN RAIN;
1984]
writes
“that’s the way the bee bumbles” because he wants to, not because he cannot
think of anything else. He uses clichés as pastiche. Either he finds them
amusing, or he simply likes these good old tried and true expressions.
He can also surprise:
“I need love, a
love without question
A clean mind and a pocket of
space
I want a map and a sense of
direction
Looking for love and the thrill of the world” [IM; Lowdown; BURNED; 1995]
By avoiding the obvious rhyming word, ‘chase’, he
neatly sidesteps the cliché. Even better, “the lies that bind and tie” [IM; Show
of Strength; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981] makes lovely hash of ‘the ties that
bind’.
PART IV: MCCULLOCH AS PRE-RAPHAELITE
McCulloch shows strong Pre-Raphaelitic tendencies in his writing, but
the lyric makes up only one component of a song. The music gets equal (and
sometimes greater) billing. We award extra points for such intangibles as
‘style’ and ‘attitude’ [Note 12]. None
of the Pre-Raphaelites were musicians, so we have no model by which to
judge the ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ of McCulloch’s and the Bunnymen’s songs as a
whole. But the ‘tenets’ of Pre-Raphaelitism laid out at the beginning of this
paper will serve:
·
Honesty
and Feeling: McCulloch is lyrically honest, as we may note in such songs as Never [1995], Proud to Fall [1989], and Forgiven
[1997]. He does not concoct pat solutions or happy endings. But it is the
genuineness of his work as a whole which pushes it into the realm of the
Pre-Raphaelitic. “Magic mirror thou hast none”, Rossetti counsels would-be
poets, “Except thy manifest heart” [DGR; The
Song-Throe; 1880]. McCulloch understands this. At his best, his songs
vibrate with a passionate, emotive quality which bypasses the intellect and
burrows straight into the soul. There is no need to explicate the lyrics of A Promise [1981]; the meaning lies in
the voice and in the music. The Killing
Moon [1984], whatever meanings we may attach to it, ‘works’ primarily on an
instinctual level. Buried Alive
[2001] unites lyric, voice and music into something which tears at the heart.
·
Love
of Beauty: Like the Pre-Raphaelites, McCulloch and the Bunnymen seek out beauty
in all its guises. “An ugly beauty was my own invention”, McCulloch sings in The Game [IM; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN;
1987]. Indeed, songs such as the dark, sinister and painful Land of the Dying Sun [1995] or the
quirkily majestic The Yo-Yo Man
[1984] are not ‘beautiful’ in the conventional sense. But they draw us in, and
we recognize in them something beyond the ordinary. Rossetti listed the
guardians of the shrine of Beauty as “love and death/Terror and mystery” [DGR; Soul’s Beauty; 1866]. McCulloch might
add a fifth member to the pantheon: oddity. Atmosphere and mood give
McCulloch’s work its true, Pre-Raphaelite beauty. The poignant, melancholy
loveliness of Burn for Me [2001],
like Millais’ Autumn Leaves [1856],
hints of darker meanings. Empire State
Halo [1997] conjures a lushly evocative romanticism as fragile and
ephemeral as a remembered dream. And Vibor
Blue [1992], like snowdrops and butterflies, needs no justification for
being.
·
Detail
and Complexity: In The White Hotel [1989],
McCulloch presents us with the lake, the “white capped mountain peak”, the
train station, the “letters of persecution” and the indomitable “ringing all
the bells” spirit: the essence of the novel on which the song is based. The Holy Grail [1995] lays on details
like paint on canvas – and fills in more of the picture than is McCulloch’s
usual wont. The Pre-Raphaelites opened little windows onto worlds of their own
devising, leaving much hidden or unexplained. McCulloch sets out pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle; just enough to give us the ambiance of the place, and a handful
of relevant details. We must figure the rest out for ourselves. Multiple
meanings are probable [Note 13]. Musically, he and the Bunnymen serve up dense,
richly textured song landscapes, which yield new details with repeated
listening: the sudden, sharp clatter of a metal triangle on All I Want [1981]; the Spanish interlude
in Ship of Fools [1987]; a hint of a
flute in Hide and Seek [2001]. We
might even use the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite detail’.
·
A
General Preference For Significant Themes: McCulloch has never hesitated to
tackle subjects of Dantean (or perhaps we should say ‘Boschian’) proportions in
his lyrics. The Cutter; The Holy Grail; Ocean Rain; The Killing Moon;
Nothing Lasts Forever; An Eternity Turns -- all are ‘big’ songs with ‘big’ themes. Songs
of less epic scope – The Flickering Wall;
Stars Are Stars; Get in the Car; Bed of Nails;
In My Time -- are written with
intelligence and sensibility. Similarly, McCulloch/Bunnymen music is never just
a pleasant background noise. It asserts itself; takes off in unexpected
directions; blends (figuratively speaking) different colors, shapes and
textures. It is fearless. The opening songs on OCEAN RAIN [1984] pit the band
against an entire orchestral string section. The orchestra, like some gigantic
and powerful beast, strains at its harness. Excitement and tension build. The
Bunnymen hold their own.
·
‘Truth
to Nature’: Synthetic strings would not do. McCulloch and the Bunnymen insisted
on a real orchestra. Holman Hunt would have approved.
The Pre-Raphaelites sought to marry literature and painting in their
works. McCulloch and the Bunnymen are doing the same with lyric and music. The
lyrics and the music reinforce one another. In King of Kings [2001], the melody takes off and swoops and soars
along with the song’s winged protagonist. Hurricane
[1997], a microcosm of worlds within worlds, brings in snatches of an
adrenalized music box melody reminiscent of a snow globe. And the epic Over the Wall [1981], as meandering,
powerful and inexorable as the Mississippi River, gains its force from the
synergy of elements.
McCulloch is the only lyricist, but he shares songwriting credits on
the five original Bunnymen albums with guitarist Will Sergeant, bassist Les
Pattinson and drummer Pete de Freitas. The participation of these three strong
musicians should not be ignored. Sergeant has co-written every McCulloch album
except CANDLELAND and MYSTERIO, and his contributions to the musical side of
things are particularly worthy of further study.
“Rossetti,” said John Millais’ mother disapprovingly, “provokes the
common sense of the world” [Hunt]. Sometimes, of course, it is the artist’s
plain duty to do exactly that. When the Pre-Raphaelites stormed the Academic
barricades in those heady days of 1848, they stood alone. They took on the
Royal Academy, the ghost of Sir Joshua (“Sir Sloshua”) Reynolds and anyone else
who stood in the way of their artistic vision. They understood:
“Guts and passion
---------------------------
All those things you think
might count
You can't ever set them down
Don't ever set them down” [IM; Show of Strength;
HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
McCulloch has never been averse to provoking the
conventional wisdom either. With a conviction worthy of Hunt and Rossetti, he
proclaimed:”I refuse to need your approval” [IM; The Game; ECHO AND THE
BUNNYMEN; 1987]. “We’ve got a lot in common with The Velvet Underground or The
Beatles,” McCulloch said of the Bunnymen, “because we do it for real. That’s
why we could never go massive, which isn’t to say that we couldn’t now, but
things have changed. In the 80’s there were rules you either followed or you
didn’t” [Walsh]. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, McCulloch and the Bunnymen have
followed their own course. And whatever this may have cost them in the short
term, as artists, they are probably much the better for it.
What of the original Pre-Raphaelites? Holman Hunt
stayed true. To the end of his days, he kept steadfastly to the doctrines of
‘Truth to Nature’ and high moral purpose he laid out for himself in 1848.
Today, his approach seems narrow and flawed, and we little note his works. But
his best-known painting, The Light
of the World (“Christ at the Door”) [1853], remains beloved of Sunday
school children all over the world.
John Millais, that facile prodigy who could paint
anything in what we now call ‘Pre-Raphaelite detail’, threw it all away for
John Ruskin’s wife and the letters PRA after his name. Bubbles [1886], his painting of an adorable
young lad blowing soap bubbles, won fame on both sides of the Atlantic as a Pear’s Soap advertisement [Note 14].
Edward Burne-Jones, painter of dreamy visions and
acolyte of Beauty, would have felt right at home in Candleland. He said that if
he could live a thousand years, he would spend it all painting, and that would
not be time enough. He died in 1898.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was broken beneath the waves.
Events surrounding the publication of his 1870 volume, POEMS, led him to a
mental breakdown, complete with hallucinations and a suicide attempt. But he
fought his way back, facing stoically what may have been the greatest sorrow of
his life:
“You are the noblest and dearest thing that the
world has had to show me; and if no lesser loss than the loss of you could have
brought me so much bitterness, I would still rather have had this to endure
than have missed the fullness of wonder and worship which nothing else could
have made known to me.” [DGR; letter to Jane Morris; 1870]
Though both activities became increasingly difficult
for him, he continued painting and writing to the end, and produced some of his
finest work in the last decade of his life. He died on Easter Sunday, 1882,
believing that he had failed in both his arts [Note 15].
But he never lost his Pre-Raphaelite spirit or
his faith in Love. He still dreamed of eternal union with his Beloved:
“The sunrise blooms and
withers on the hill
Like any hillflower; and the
noblest troth
Dies here to dust. Yet shall Heaven's promise clothe
Even yet those lovers who have cherished still
This test for love:--in
every kiss sealed fast
To feel the first kiss and forebode the last.” [DGR;
True Woman: Her Heaven; 1881]
Ian McCulloch, as of this writing, is running like a
horse on the backstretch. 2001 saw the release of the latest Bunnymen album,
FLOWERS, as well as their retrospective box set, CRYSTAL DAYS. The band toured
extensively, and made a live album and DVD of their two nights at the Liverpool
Institute of Performing Arts. McCulloch currently has a solo album in the
works, and another Bunnymen album is on the horizon.
His writing skills have become stronger, more
consistent with the years. Maturity serves him well. But unlike many artists,
whose best work falls within a particular period of their lives, McCulloch’s
finest songs go all the way back to The Pictures On My Wall [1979] and are fairly evenly distributed over his career. He is a complex
writer, his works yielding more detail and meaning upon further contemplation.
Like the Pre-Raphaelites, he remains undervalued by the public – but of what
value is public opinion when it ranks Bubbles above Beata Beatrix,
the latest canned love song above Ocean Rain? More than any other
quality, McCulloch and the Pre-Raphaelites share the gift of the true artist:
the ability to know beauty – and to show it to others.
This
paper is offered respectfully as a tribute to two artists whose works have
enriched my life.
Kristin F. Smith
August
7th, 2002
NOTES AND SOURCES Back
to top
NOTES
Note 1: “Saw Miss Siddal,” noted Rossetti’s friend Ford Madox Brown in his
diary on October 6th, 1853, “looking thinner and more deathlike and
more beautiful and more ragged than ever.” In April, 1860, Rossetti wrote to
Brown from a health resort where he and Lizzie were staying: “She has seemed
ready to die daily and more than once a day…. It makes me feel as if I’d been
dug out of a vault.” Just what ailed the lady is entirely unclear. Ruskin’s
doctor, who examined her in 1856, found no serious disease. Georgiana
Burne-Jones, a very perceptive woman, noted that she could never understand how
“poor dear Lizzie” could be so ill for so long and never develop any particular
symptoms. Back to text
Note 2:
It is difficult to date many of Rossetti’s earlier poems. Some existed only in
the notebook he buried with Lizzie Siddal Rossetti in 1862. When he recovered
the manuscript in 1869, he revised it extensively, giving all the poems the
skill and polish of his mature style. Lovesight
has the delicate, dream quality suggestive of Lizzie Siddal, and the second
part of the sonnet forebodes the loss of the Beloved:
“O love, my love! if I no
more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring….” [DGR; Lovesight; 1869] Back to text
Note 3: The Ship of Fools [1500] is the title of a
painting by Hieronymous Bosch. It has been interpreted variously, most often as
a commentary on humanity or, more specifically, on the corrupt Church of
Bosch’s time. That McCulloch has the former interpretation in mind is suggested
by another song from the same period as Ship
of Fools. In Lover I Love [1986],
the Poet remarks to the Beloved: “You and I bought a ticket on a floating zoo”
[IM; Lover I Love; CRYSTAL DAYS
(retrospective box set); 2001]. Early McCulloch inspiration Jim Morrison was
much influenced by Bosch and also did a song titled Ship of Fools. It bears little relation to the McCulloch song.
McCulloch has mentioned Bosch in interviews. Back to text
Note 4:
This may also reference the Richard Farina song, Pack Up Your Sorrows, which bears similarities in theme to In Bluer Skies, Ocean Rain, and the closing refrain of Nothing Lasts Forever. Farina wrote a novel, BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT
SEEMS LIKE UP TO ME, which is (possibly) referenced in Too Far Gone. Back to text
Note 5: Rossetti’s older sister, Maria, herself a Dante scholar, became an
Anglican nun. The younger, Christina, was a poet whose fame rivals his. Much of
her poetry was devotional, and her secular, Pre-Raphaelite works show strong
religious influences. Back to text
Note 6: The relevant lines are:
“My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring
them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds” [William Butler
Yeats; An Irish Airman Foresees His Death]
Back to text
Note 7: But Hunt was no proselytizer. Far from being Jerry Falwell with a
paintbrush, he acknowledged that there are many roads to the truth, and
disapproved of efforts to convert Jews, Muslims and others. This attitude
hardened after a bad experience in the 1850s with the missionary community in
Jerusalem. See George P. Landow, William
Holman Hunt and the Missionaries [THE PRE-RAPHAELITE REVIEW, 1 (1977),
27--33.]: http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/painting/whh/whhmission.html
Note 8: “But the motive powers of art … demand first of all an inner
standing-point. The heart of such a mystery as this must be plucked from the
very world in which it beats or bleeds; and the beauty and pity, the
self-questionings and all-questionings which it brings with it, can come with
full force only from the mouth of one alive to its whole appeal….” [DGR; The Stealthy School of Criticism; 1871].
Rossetti is here defending his poem Jenny
[1848/1869], which deals with prostitution. See Note 9 below. Back to text
Note 9: A strong case may be made that Rossetti was ultimately destroyed by a
vicious and personal critical attack, The
Fleshly School of Poetry [1871]. Evelyn Waugh gives a good account of these
events and their consequences in ROSSETTI: HIS LIFE AND WORKS [1928]. Yes, this
is Evelyn Waugh the famous novelist. Back to text
Note 10: For an excellent version of the Middle Ages which does contain serfs,
pigs and mud, see Ken Follett’s novel, THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH. Back to text
Note 11: McCulloch has toyed with this conceit a number of times over the years,
most famously in Thorn of Crowns
[OCEAN RAIN; 1984]. This work is referenced in at least two later songs:
“And the world fell down
When the moon was blue
And you wore a crown
And the word was true” [IM; Pomegranate; MYSTERIO; 1992]
“Charlie clown wore a crown
In my town” [IM; Antelope;
single; 1997]
McCulloch
has also been known to strike crucifixion poses on stage. Electrafixion, the
name under which McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant initially worked after
reuniting in 1994, combines the words ‘electrocution’ and ‘crucifixion’. They
said it came from a dream Sergeant had in which McCulloch was being crucified
on an electric, barbed-wire fence. Apparently, McCulloch is not the only member
of the duo with imaginative capability. Back to text
Note 12: This has long been the case. Prime examples from the 19th
Century are Franz Liszt and Lord Byron (whom Lady Caroline Lamb famously
described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.) Back to
text
Note 13: Empire State Halo for me conjures images of
Mark Helprin’s wonderful WINTER’S TALE: old-time New York blanketed in winter
snow; angels flying around the Empire State building; romance and magic and
mystery in the air. This is probably not the scenario McCulloch had in mind,
but I like this vision, and I am going to keep it. Back
to text
Note 14: Pear’s bought the rights to the picture without Millais’ permission,
and he did strongly protest the ad. But apparently Bubbles was just what the soap company wanted. Back
to text
Note 15: One need only glance over the complete lists of Rossetti’s paintings,
drawings, poems, prose works and translations to realize the tragic absurdity
of this notion: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:2020/archive.html
Special accolades should be given The Rossetti
Archive: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:2020/archive.html
This
incredible website (still a work in progress) will contain texts of all
Rossetti’s written work, and images of all his visual works, as well as full
texts of some biographies and other secondary sources. The quotations from
Rossetti’s works which I have used here come from the Archive’s on-line texts.
Chief sources of current information about Ian
McCulloch and Echo and the Bunnymen are their “official website”: Bunnymen.com, and Bunnymen.info - The (Unofficial) News Source. An Annotated Discography and Villiers Terrace both provide
extensive discography listings. All of McCulloch’s lyrics are posted online in
the Villiers Terrace lyrics
section.
SECONDARY
SOURCES
ADHOC MAGAZINE: Ian McCulloch: Still Cool After
All These Years February, 2002
Barlow, Paul (author of a forthcoming biography of
Millais to be published by Ashgate Press): e-mail to Kristin F. Smith
Brown, Ford Madox; Madox, Ford B.; Surtees, Virginia
(Editor): THE DIARY OF MADOX BROWN (Yale University Press, 1981)
Bryson, John (editor): DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND
JANE MORRIS: THE CORRESPONDENCE; (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976)
Burne-Jones, Lady Georgiana: MEMORIALS OF EDWARD
BURNE-JONES (New York: Macmillan, 1906)
Doughty, Oswald and Wahl, John Robert (editors):
LETTERS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1828-1882; 4 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon,
1965-67)
Doughty, Oswald: A VICTORIAN ROMANTIC: DANTE GABRIEL
ROSSETTI. London, Oxford University Press, 1960; 2nd edition)
Fletcher, Tony: NEVER STOP: THE ECHO & THE
BUNNYMEN STORY (Omnibus Press, 1987).
Hardin, James: THE
PRE-RAPHAELITES; (London, Academy edition, 1977)
Harrison, Anthony
H.: Pre-Raphaelitism and Tractarianism (Chapter 3 of the author's
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI IN CONTEXT; University of North Carolina Press, 1988): http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/harrison2/3.3.html
Hunt, William Holman; PRE-RAPHAELITISM AND THE
PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD (1905)
Jae-Ha Kim; Echoes of glory: Bunnymen take it
from top; CHICAGO SUN-TIMES; May 23rd, 1997; pg. 7
Jenkins, Mark; Reflecting on Echo and the
Bunnymen; THE WASHINGTON POST; July 6th, 2001
Mackail, J. W.; LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS; (Dover
edition, 1995).
Powell, Alison; A whale of a band (interview with
Echo & the Bunnymen lead singer Ian McCulloch); INTERVIEW; August 1st,
1997; (v27 n8); p38
Reynolds, Simon: Independents Day:
Post-Punk 1979-81;
http://hometown.aol.com/blissout/postpunk.htm
Ripley, Paul: VICTORIAN ART IN BRITAIN: http://www.victorianartinbritain.co.uk/biog/millais.htm
Rossetti, William Michael: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI;
HIS FAMILY-LETTERS WITH A MEMOIR (Boston, Robert Brothers, 1895)
Stratton, Jeff: Echoes of the Past; THE ONION
(Volume 32 Issue 19, December 17 th, 1997)
Ruskin, John: MODERN PAINTERS (volume II); 1846
University of Toronto English Department: The
Pre-Raphaelites; http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/English/ENGB02Y/Pre-Raphaelites.html
Walsh, Nick Paton: Never say ever again
(interview with IM); THE LONDON STUDENT; issue #9: http://www.londonstudent.org.uk/9issue/music/echo.htm
Waugh, Evelyn: ROSSETTI: HIS LIFE AND WORKS (London:
Duckworth, 1928)
Zach,
Paul: Bunnymen Still Hop To '80s Beat: Ian McCulloch Says Electronica Will
Date Fast; interview with Ian McCulloch on ZACH’S SHACK website, October 24th,
1997
An Annotated Discography: Works by
Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, Electrafixion and Glide
(off-site link)
Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian
McCulloch and Electrafixion: Album Reviews (off-site link)
Bunnymen.info - The (Unofficial) News Source
(off-site link, run by Charles Pham)
Aldems' Political
Quotations: Apt and Otherwise
BlindFool and Scruffy Dog:
Dilettantes-at-Large
