"High as Hope": Album or Anthology?

Florence + the Machine's most recent album "High as Hope" is the first album she has created since she took to sobriety. In an interview with The New York Times, she said her new album "created a creative bravery" and in an act of vulnerability, she "made a step away from the metaphoric."

According to Laurence Perrine, author of Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, a true poet uses language resources and "the materials of life" to create a poem. Throughout Florence Welch's 2018 release, she draws on past experiences to inspire her lyrics. Most notably in her song "The End of Love"

The first experience she reflects on is the telling of a potentially spurious story about her family's history:

We were a family pulled from the flood
You tore the floorboards up
And let the river rush in
Not wash away, wash away

In an interview with Belfast Telegraph, she recalls how her great-great-grandfather, a sailor, saved her family from a flood by pulling up the floorboards in the house so the water would rush through and wouldn't wash the house away. When writing the chorus, she considered the symbolic value of extreme weather and decided the story symbolizes the impact the past has on the future and the weight of cleaning up the past's destruction.

She goes on to write about her grandmother's suicide in the song's second verse:

In a moment of joy and fury I threw myself
From the balcony like my grandmother so many years before me

These lines bank directly on "the materials of life" and employ simile as a language resource. She compares her present condition to that of her grandmother when she fell. Furthermore, Welch illuminates a pattern in the way the women in her family love, each having learned from her mother, a "trickle-down" that is comparable to the succession of the feeling of tragedy following her grandmother's death.

We then see allusion and connotation at play in the song's bridge:

And Joshua came down from the mountain
With a tablet in his hands
Told me that he loved me, yeah
And then ghosted me again

This stanza alludes to a passage in the Old Testament in which Moses receives the Ten Commandments. Then, Welch plays with the 21st-century connotation of the term "ghosted" referring to when a person's love-interest suddenly ceases communication without explanation. With this idea introduced, the tablet she references may have a more modern implication as an electronic device.

Despite making reference to specific events and stories, Florence Welch's song is still accessible to her audience. She creates a foundation that is personally significant but also encourages the listener to contribute their own experiences to the text, thus through the application of their imagination, senses, and emotions the song "enlighten[s] and move[s]" the listener.

Animalism in Exit West

"...in these trees now were dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like, though that has been and was being and will long be slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them..."

Throughout Exit West animal analogies are prevalent. From comparing Saeed and Nadia's love to a fox or migrants to hunted animals, Mohsin Hamid relies on a comparison between humans and animals. On the one hand, comparisons to animals dehumanize characters perhaps reflecting the way in which they are received by natives after arriving through the doors. However, often Hamid uses animals in order to demonstrate a greater depth of the human experience.

This seemingly contradictory function of animal analogies in fact provides the key to a theme of the story. Rather than dehumanizing people like the traditional usage, it instead provides readers a greater understanding of the characters as human beings. In the response of the natives to the migrants is the lack of recognition of them as human beings in need of help but rather an unwelcome threat. This fundamental lack of compassion in the response of natives to migrants must be solved through a recognition of humanity. For example, as Saeed and the preacher's daughter grow closer, or Nadia and the cook, we can see the power of developing relationships and recognition. In the same way by turning the purpose of animal analogies on its head, Hamid supplies readers with an element of human connection otherwise missing from the story.

When Was the Last Time You Thought About a Lighthouse?

“Doce Segundos de Oscuridad” by Jorge Drexler is one of the most poetic songs on my regular playlist. Jorge Drexler is a Uruguayan musician, doctor, poet and actor. I have been listening to him since I was about six years old, when I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My parents introduced me to him and unknowingly, I sang along to some of the most thoughtfully mundane and poetic lyrics ever written. It took me until I hit puberty for these lyrics to strike a certain “mature art nerve” that made them mean something to me.

This song, “Doce Segundos de Oscuridad” is the title song for the album he made in 2006. He wrote this album while living in Cabo Polonia, Uruguay, a town by the ocean with no electricity. He had just received an Oscar for Original Song for “Al Otro Lado del Rio” featured in the film Motorcycle Diaries and had subsequently gone through a difficult divorce.

“Doce Segundos de Oscuridad” means “Twelve Seconds of Darkness”, which is the time between each flash of a lighthouse. The darkness between the flashes of light symbolize his feelings of loss and being lost in his life. The song is about him finding his way in a difficult time, like a ship finding its way in the night with only a lighthouse as a guide. He says “Pie detrás de pie/ Iba tras el pulso de claridad/ La noche cerrada apenas se abría/Se volvía a cerrar”, “Foot after foot/ I followed the pulse of clarity/ The night closed as soon as it opened/ It closed again.” In these lines he is using multidimensional language as he speaks of the night opening and closing with the flashes of light, to him the night comes in and out of existence. In this case the night is his sense of being lost and the light is a symbol of him working through and understanding his problems. In this lonely place, he finds his meaning in the darkness: “No es la luz lo que importa en verdad/ Son los 12 segundos de oscuridad”, “Truthfully it is not light what matters/ It is the 12 seconds of darkness.” To him the light guides but does not take him along, it is his way of coping with the darkness that allows him to learn and move forward. “Pie detrás de pie/ No hay otra manera de caminar/ La noche del Cabo/ Revelada en un inmenso radar”, “Foot after foot/ There is no other way of walking/ The night of Cabo/ Revealed in an immense radar.” He is indicating the burden of living in pain but he is also showing signs of hope by saying that marching along is the only way out. In these lines, he shows that the light reveals what seems not to exist without it. By naming the song “Doce Segundos de Oscuridad”, he is playing with the idea of taking a time of silence to mourn someone who has passed. His song could have also been named “Doce Segundos de Silencio” to show he is taking his time to mourn a failed relationship.

This song has helped many people move past difficult times. It takes a mundane, neglected and lonely object, a lighthouse, to give a certain haunting beauty to pain and hope.

Spanish: https://www.vagalume.com.br/jorge-drexler/12-segundos-de-oscuridad.html

English: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/12-segundos-de-oscuridad-12-seconds-darkness.html

He Loved That Tub

This line of dialogue confused me for a while. It interrupts the serious conversation on page 85, where Paul D reveals to Sethe that Halle was in the barn when she was violated and that he felt less free than the roosters at Sweet Home when he had the iron muzzle on.

Then Sethe starts smiling: “He loved that tub,” she says about Mister the rooster’s perching habits.

In that serious moment, there’s still room for a respite of humor. That’s how it always is isn’t it? There’s always something funny, something beautifully real to reflect on mixed in with even the most horrible memories.

But that sweet moment still has really dark undertones. The rooster sits on the tub “like a throne.” Mister is free to perch on a tub and talk; he has a personality, a name, a title. The text gives that rooster so much power as a the human being watching it can’t speak or relax.

Then Halle reflects on when he helped that rooster out of its shell and its aggressive behavior towards the other animals later on. “He was always hateful,” he says. He has to be a hateful rooster. He was born into a world of inherent evil. He lords over Paul D on his throne, living comfortably and wreaking havoc on others. Mister is just like a slave owner. In a small way, he's part of the power structure at Sweet Home.

The Sun's Role in The Stranger

I think we've all heard Meursault say it over and over again, "the sun made me do it!" Unless I read the wrong book, I'm pretty sure that the sun didn't physically force Meursault to kill an Arab, so what is the point of the sun anyways? After a close encounter with the Arabs the first time around, Meursault walked along the beach by himself, when a black dot caught the corner of his eye: "I hadn't stopped watching the Arab"..."all I had to do was turn around and that would be the end of it. But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back" (Camus 58).
It was as simple as walking away, and yet Meursault chose to stay at the beach.

The pressing on Meursault's back was almost like his conscious is saying he had left something behind. After Meursault stayed he said that it looked as if the Arab was laughing. "The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows" (99).Through Camus' diction, we can see that Meursault is getting aggravated with the Arab. Meursault felt a rush of humiliation rush over his body, and his cheeks began to blush, a common human emotion. Although we all know Meursault denies to feel human emotion, Meursault's human tendencies are parallel to Camus' description of the sun.

At the end of the Novel, prior to Meursault's death, Meursault says, "I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself --so like a brother, really --." Meursault's reference to his close relationship to the earth almost makes me think of the solar system, comparing Meursault's role (the sun) to his surroundings (the earth). Although Meursault feels different from the earth for nearly the whole book, it isn't until moments before his death that he is not a living being of society, but a part of nature, and simply subject to his surroundings, and should be treated as such.

Have a Smoke?

Often, when people smoke, they do it for comfort. It's warm and feels good and gives you something to think about. They continue their habits and soon get addicted. It's a physical connection that is extremely hard to break. While the physical aspect of smoking is present in The Stranger, it has a deeper meaning than addiction. Meursault smokes for a majority of the book, but once he is imprisoned he is forced to stop.

"There were the cigarettes, too... Once I was in my cell, I asked to have them back. But I was told I wasn't allowed. The first few days were really rough... Later on I realized that that too was a part of the punishment. But by then I had gotten used to not smoking and it wasn't a punishment anymore." (78)

He stops smoking, understands the punishment, and becomes accustomed to the cig-abstinence. He is later offered a cigarette before his trial. "The policemen told me we had to wait for the judges and one of them offered me a cigarette, which I turned down." (82)

He turns it down but doesn't even sound tempted. It seems as if he doesn't have an ounce of desire for the cigarette. Which is strange because most ex-smokers would be physically attracted to the thought of having a smoke. He is not. I believe that he might actually be tearing off the last social fetters that remained from the outside world. He sees the problems with the society he lived in and realized he didn't need the fake comforts that come with it; ergo, the cig's gotta go.

Raymond and Meursault: Friendship of Foils

In my opinion, Meursault's oddest choice in the first half of the first part of Albert Camus's The Stranger was to befriend Raymond Sintès and assist him in his domestic issues. Despite both Meursault and Sintès being social pariahs, they are fundamentally distinct from each other, which Camus emphasizes through effective character development and light-handed symbolism.

From first glance, Raymond and Meursault contrast in more ways than one. While Meursault is a chronic pacifist and tends to avoid confrontation, as shown by his reluctance to confront his boss about his mother's funeral, Raymond is shown to be arrogant and spontaneous in his actions, such as when he punched the man at the train station for insulting his manliness. While both men appear to both have no sense of sympathy, Meursault's lack of sympathy seems to stem more from apathy such as an inability to connect with his dead mother, while Raymond's draws parallel to hubris, shown in his treatment of his girlfriend. This juxtaposition is equally present in many of the minor character traits of the two, with Raymond described as being rough and boxer-like and Meursault being portrayed as a lowly businessman with few edges. Such distinctions can also be drawn from the foods they enjoy, with Meursault drinking coffee with cream, which can be extended to state that Meursault dulls his own senses of emotion to the point of making himself characteristically bland. Likewise, Raymond is shown to have a fondness for blood sausage and (presumably red) wine, which are known to have exceeding strong flavors, that reflects his brash, strongman-like attitude.

Altogether, Meursault's decision to befriend Raymond was one of his oddest choices so far, but has the potential to become one of his greatest assets. Being perfect foils to each other, Raymond and Meursault can learn from each other and develop into more well rounded people.