Chapter 2- Wooden Horse
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"Writing fiction is an interior affair. Novels and stories always will be put down little by little out of personal feeling and personal beliefs arrived at alone and at first hand over a period of time as time is needed. To go outside and beat the drum is only to interrupt, interrupt, and so finally to forget and to lose. Fiction has, and must keep, a private address." (Eudora Welty) [4]
Suzanne Vega's music, from Suzanne Vega, to her most recent recordings, seems to have always sprung from some inner voice and life. The point of view of her protagonists is usually from the periphery, from the margin. It is the music of one who feels as though a stranger in a strange land -- the perspective of the minority position. The minority looks in from the outside; accommodates the large, clumsy feet of the majority; always watches. To survive, it seems as though the minority must keep alive its own culture, even if the "culture" exists solely within the mind and imagination of the individual.
Attempts to bridge the gap between a solitary and private world, and the larger, noisy public realm seems a continual thread in Vega's music. There is the sense of awkward "separateness" in "Solitude Standing:"
I turn to the crowd as they're watching
They're sitting altogether in the dark in the warm
I wanted to be in there among them
I see how their eyes are gathered into one
In "Tom's Diner," the narrator seems almost to add, as an aside
I am sitting (alone)
In the morning
At the diner
On the corner
Like many who live a large part of their lives within their own thoughts, Vega's music reflects a rich inner life. There is everything from the extended inner monologue of "Tom's Diner," the fantasies of peril and revenge in "In the Eye," and the romantic daydreams of "Language" where we think of going
...back to the building
On Little West Twelfth
It is not far away
And the river is there
In "Ironbound/Fancy Poultry" we are treated to a wonderful triple daydream. First, there are the observations of Suzanne as she stands in the "Ironbound section near Avenue L," delivered in a wonderful combination of documentary and dream, the vivid factual details ("the Portuguese women," the "coffee color of her skin," the "wires" and "rails") set against the song's dreamy, atmospheric instrumentation. Is it reportage or is it a day dream? Second, within the song are the daydreams of the woman who, for a brief instant, also travels within her mind to a place far away:
She stops at the stall
Fingers the ring
Open her purse and feels a longing
Away from the Ironbound border
Third, is the song's wondrous postscript, "Fancy Poultry," which comes to us initially as a seeming slice of hard reality (the call of the merchants for the "fancy poultry parts sold here"), but in an instant takes flight as the music subtly shifts to her dreamland with the words nearly free/Nearly free/Nearly free. In all her music there is not a more lovely moment, as the band plays on until we imperceptibly drift into her next dream. Lovely, even spiritual.
"Ironbound/Fancy Poultry" is a song that superbly illustrates not only the dreamworld implicit in Suzanne Vega's music, but its spiritual qualities. Although there often disturbingly blunt images in her lyrics, there is also a prayerful, spiritual touch in many songs. There is the quiet magic of "Fancy Poultry" when the humble surroundings of the meat market embodies the most wonderful of ideas; there is the tentative touch of the woman who "stops at the stall" and "fingers the ring," as though the ring itself very alive; most all, though, there is that wondrous moment of freedom in "Wooden Horse" when Vega uses a repetitive round to move Caspar to a higher plane
Alive
And I fell under
A moving piece of sun
Freedom
As she sings, the music rises and swells like a musical resurrection. Years later, she will use a similar musical device to suffuse "Pilgrimage," from days of Open Hand, with a spiritual feeling
Take this mute mouth
broken tongue now this
dark life
shot through with light