Posted By BillHeise on June 16, 2010

As you must know, I didn’t get my whole list of things to accomplish this week done this week. I got tired (which I expected) and busy (with things that came up unexpectedly). But I will get to them eventually. But I think I got enough done to make it clear why I have been listening to Creed’s ‘Higher’ all week:

It has to do with the lyrics, which are about dreaming of another world:

When dreaming I’m guided to another world
Time and time again

Okay, that’s fine. My thought about this is the lines “Time and time again” make it sound like time’s forward (horizontal) progress is exchanged for a dream world, which exists on a vertical plane.

And then, Creed doesn’t want to wake up. Instead, Creed fights to stay asleep because of a ‘hunger’ to escape the actual world of life as we live it:

At sunrise I fight to stay asleep
‘Cause I don’t want to leave the comfort of this place
‘Cause there’s a hunger, a longing to escape
From the life I live when I’m awake
So let’s go there
Let’s make our escape
Come on, let’s go there
Let’s ask can we stay?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want the escape into my dreams. I want to actually accomplish my dreams in reality. Because anybody can dream of doing things. But doing stuff is significantly more difficult. So Creed, it seems to me, is dreaming things that cannot come true in reality.

Now, I recognize that Creed has accomplished a rare feat in the pop music world. According to Wikipedia, the band had “seven consecutive chart-topping hits on rock radio.” Not bad.

So what does Creed want aside from chart-topping success? They want it all. The whole tomato. The whole basket of tomatoes. Or perhaps the whole truckload of tomatoes. Or even the whole national tomatoes crop. Or even the world’s supply of tomatoes.

I joke. In fact, they’re not interested in tomatoes at all. Tomatoes are a metaphor for what Creed wants. And as a metaphor, Creed would give up the scientific content of their metaphor (the vehicle we called it if college) for the tenor. Vehicles aren’t important. Creed wants to be taken up to the tenor of Heaven, “where blind men see” (and what do the blind see in Creed’s dreams? ‘golden streets,’ of course):

Can you take me Higher?
To a place where blind men see
Can you take me Higher?
To a place with golden streets

This sounds slightly ridiculous to me if Creed is talking about something real. But if Creed is thinking about the poetic tradition, then Creed’s dreams make sense. Creed is referencing Yeat’s Sailing to Byzantium. I have talked about this poem before, and it is the poem that my favorite movie of the decade takes its name (No Country for Old Men). It is one of my favorite poems of all time (though, to be fair, I have a lot of favorite poems).

The poem starts with the immortal lines:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Yeats was distinguishing the young and foolish lives lived by the young with the the old men:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;

Therefore, Yeats will exchange the world of time for a world which doesn’t age. In his mind, this means sailing to Byzantium, where the ordinary world of real birds singing in trees is exchanged for a ‘sacred city’ where death is stopped and old men can live forever:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

That sounds great. Of course, if Creed is taking Yeats’ poem as their own and not acknowledging their debt, it does lessen the impact of their telling me about their dreams. It is not Creed’s dream at all. Instead, it is a stolen dream from a greater poet. But, of course, that poet is relying on other poets than himself. He is traveling to Byzantium. It’s almost as if no one individual person can hold such a dream together in him or herself.

I suspect that Creed (and perhaps Yeats himself) has not thought of all the implications of what they are saying. But I’m notr sure. Perhaps they have and they just don’t care. In any case, Creed now adopts this as their creed as they skip from this bad and fallen world in which they have had so much of what we who inhabit the world of time think of as success to the better next:

Although I would like our world to change
It helps me to appreciate
Those nights and those dreams

And Creed has declared that…well I’ll let Creed tell you what they think:

But, my friend, I’d sacrifice all those nights
If I could make the Earth and my dreams the same

Nice! They want to make their life on earth coincide with the world they dream about (you know, the one with golden streets and seeing blind men). The problem that occurs (to me) is that the coincidence is impossible. As a metaphor, it is fine. As reality, it is, well, unrealistic. But that is not what Creed thinks. They think the only difference is that people are not loving each other enough. They even say this:

The only difference is
To let love replace all our hate

After Creed has declared their belief—a belief that I hope you don’t hold in the scientific world in which you and I live—Creed asks to be allowed to stay there:

So let’s go there
Let’s make our escape
Come on, let’s go there
Let’s ask can we stay?

Then they start repeating the chorus (as if that will help). After this repetition of their utterly unrealistic dream, Creed feels that they alive for the very first time. And Creed feels strong enough feel it is in their power to ask again. Only from the perspective of (Where? Heaven? the poet’s corner? Where?) wherever they are can they ask for such things:

Up high I feel like I’m alive for the very first time
Set up high I’m strong enough to take these dreams
And make them mine

This is, in my experience in graduate school, is an instance of the elusiveness of the individual experience, which has been displaced from the center of experience as a foundation on which all other things in our lives are built (something a priori) to something that Creed is questing after after the fact (something a posteriori). They can only find it in their dreams but not in their real lives.

What’s more, this, if I am not mistaken, is not a state of life at all but is a state akin to death. (Help me out here, readers). This, too, has a long tradition in the world of literature and literary experience, but is utterly unrealistic in the world of science (you know, the one where you and I live). Shouldn’t we explore the reality if Creed’s dream if in fact it is an invitation to death and not to life life at all? I think so. (But who am I?)

But then, like Yeats, Creed doesn’t really believe what Creed is saying. The metaphor is entirely detached from the scientific content of the vehicle. They use the world of life to transcend life, just as Yeats does at the end of his poem:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Creed repeats the chorus again, this time twice just to make sure God (or if not God, whoever Creed thinks makes Creed’s utterly ridiculous dreams real) is listening. The sad fact is that God (or whoever) is not listening. Creed must live in the world with all their monetary success, rare accomplishments, and gorgeous women huddling around them when the dream is over. Damn, their life sucks.

I’m not complaining about Creed’s lyrics. Creed can say anything they want about their experience. And I will listen to them, because lyrics don’t matter all that much to me. I’m all about the rhythm and the beat. And I think the world at large agrees with me (but I would be willing to admit that the world at large doesn’t agree with me at all if someone wanted to argue with me here).

But what I am saying is that because lyrics don’t mean that much to me (and possibly to the public at large) that the lyrics don’t reflect the reality of what we believe and how we act. No one really wants to be a golden bird sitting on a drowsy emperor’s shoulder outside of time singing lyrics to put him to sleep. (Help me out here, dear readers. Do they?) That’s like death, isn’t it? Doesn’t such a move outside time leave a lot of life behind, including the youthful romps and careless sexual encounters with bikini clad women that are so integral a part of modern American culture? More importantly, doesn’t such a move outside of time integrate experience at the cost of falsifying reality? And isn’t it better to face even the reality of an imperfect existence than it is to live in a dream world in which your life is integrated but which you can never encounter in reality? I think so.

Marx is a man who integrates the individual’s experience outside of time and who believes because he has transcended time that time has been defeated and so he doesn’t need to worry about time. Man Ray is a Modern artist who forgoes the world of time for the world of spacial rearrangement of objects in subjective space. I like both Marx and Man Ray as thinkers, but they are both operating on an intellectual construct that has been challenged in poetry by Frank O’Hara in his ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed‘ and by Louise Brooks in the conduct of her life.

I prefer to take the whole view of life, and this includes views of life that don’t integrate very well with the intellectual view of life. I prefer to life in an imperfect world and encounter the obstacles that life holds in the way to activating my dreams, which I hold in my mind only in potential. Dreams are easy; life is hard.

This is my serious point in my otherwise silly book (Poker Tales). There I try to represent and reflect the actual practices of people who dream in the world. This is restricted in my book to people who dream about winning a poker game, but I think we can generalize to humanity from the dreams of a individual poker player. Anyway, that was my goal in writing the book. We’ll see just how successful I have been. But that is not up to me (the individual author). It’s up to you, my readers.

Categories: Poker Tales, What I'm Listening to This Week
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