As I woke up the other morning I encountered a strange confluence of dreams, memories, thoughts, and some old rock music with a classic movie I saw when I turned on the television. The dreams were both mine and Seth's, my five year old grandson.
My dream was probably triggered by a Facebook conversation I had had with my dear friend and college roommate the night before. I had been having had something to do with my college days. All I remember for sure is that we were in our dorm room talking and listening to music on her 1960s state of the art stereo record player.
Seth's dream was about going to the beach. He had been excited about the trip to a Gulf of Mexico beach that he, his mom, his dad and his baby brother, Jude were going to be taking later that day. Seth's a kindergartener, and for more than a week he had been caught up in a countdown to this long awaited chance to go to one of his favorite places. When I read him a bedtime story the night before, the trip to the beach was on his mind and in his prayers.
So I wasn't surprised when Seth's early morning knock on my door overlapped the dream I was having. At first I thought someone was knocking on the door of our dorm room in my dreamscape. When no one came in, though, I came to realize that it was Seth's little hand knocking on my bedroom door in my very early morning reality.
I don't know what exactly made me understand that I needed to say, "Come in," out loud. And I was still in that state between dreaming and waking when Seth came in, full of sleepy excitement to tell me about his dream of the beach. As he was speaking to me, though, I was still hearing some music in my mind. You know how it often is with dreams, right? Sometimes there seemed to be some musical accompaniment to the scene that is rapidly fleeing as you wake up. And before the dream escaped my consciousness, I recognized that the music running through my mind was the old rock tune by Procol Harum called "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Below is a link for a rendition of it I found on YouTube with the matured group playing the song in a church converted into a performance space. (There is nothing like an old classic rock group still able to entertain when they are sixty-four, is there?)
Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale (From "Live at the Union Chapel")
Here are the lyrics:
We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
She said, 'There is no reason and the truth is plain to see.'
But I wandered through my playing cards
and would not let her be one of
sixteen vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast
and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well've been closed
She said, 'I'm home on shore leave,'
though in truth we were at sea
so I took her by the looking glass
and forced her to agree saying,
'You must be the mermaid
who took Neptune for a ride.'
But she smiled at me so sadly
that my anger straightway died
If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean
My mouth by then like cardboard s
eemed to slip straight through my head
So we crash-dived straightway quickly
and attacked the ocean bed
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale . . .
[Words by Keith Reid]
A short time after Seth told me about his dream of the beach, my daughter Krista came upstairs with sweet baby Jude to get Seth so that they could start their day. It was a sweet way to wake up. After they went downstairs, I went over and turned on the television with strains of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" still echoing in my mind.
And strangely enough as I "heard" the line about the sixteen Vestal virgins, I saw that on television the Vestal virgins were dedicating a triumph for a Roman commander in the grand historical epic made in 1951 with a cast of thousands , "Quo Vadis." It's one of my favorite movies of that genre, so I kept the TV on and sat down to check on my e-mail with the strains of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" still hovering in my mind while the scenes of Hollywood's version of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. were depicted on the television screen.
As a teenager I had always assumed that the words of Procol Harum's rock song reflected a marijuana or LSD-induced alternative reality, mostly because they do not really make sense.
In addition, the music seems to somehow affirm that suspicion since it has always seemed hypnotic and haunting to me. Maybe the lyrics describe something that actually happened interpreted through a drug-induced haze. (The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"is supposed to have been written from similar inspiration.) "A Lighter Shade of Pale" begins with a narrative about a night out dancing with impressions colored by the sensual image of the room humming and shocking illusion that the ceiling is being whisked away.
The songwriter, Keith Reid, must have had a classical education because playful references to the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton are found in the lyrics. Even the name of the band is roughly based on a Latin phrase meaning "beyond these things" or "of these things far off," but the Latin words are neither spelled correctly nor properly formed grammatically. (Poetic license . . . )
The mention that "the miller told his tale" alludes to the second story in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." In contrast to "The Knight's Tale" of courtly love that precedes it, "The Miller's Tale" is a bawdy story about lust and betrayal. There is a good deal about lust and betrayal portrayed in "Quo Vadis," too, of course. As you may know, it is a historical fiction about the faith of early Christians written by the Polish Nobel Prize-winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz, in the mid-19th century.
The phrase "quo vadis" is actually a question from a tradition about the life of St. Peter the Apostle meaning "Where are you going?" The story is that during the time of Nero's persecutions of Christian believers, Peter is in Rome, but starts to flee. He is surprised to encounter Jesus on the Appian Way heading toward Rome and asks him, "Quo Vadis, Lord?" Jesus replies that he is on his way to Rome to be crucified again. Overcome with his grief at his faltering faith, Peter turns around and heads back to the city where he then is captured and crucified. Tradition also holds that Peter asks to be crucified head down, stating that he is not worthy to be martyred in the same manner as his Lord and Savior.
In the movie as the two main characters leave Rome after Peter's death, they see his shepherd's crook along the side of the road blooming with flowers and glowing with a radiant light while a voice is heard saying, "I am the way, the truth and the life." I only saw the last half of the movie the other morning, and actually "A Lighter Shade of Pale" keeps coming to my mind, but the confluence of dreams, a song and the movie got me thinking about a lot that has influenced us Baby Boomers and some of the collective memories we share.
Certainly even though we share the same memories it doesn't mean that we all think of them the same way. And the older I get the more I realize that each one of us have reacted to the events of our lives in very individual ways. In our generation the world became a very small place because of our ability to travel, because of improvements in communication, because many old boundaries between East and West were torn down or transgressed, and because the anti-establishmentarianism that characterized our rebelliousness lead to a radical world-view.
Not all of us have embraced the most far out manifestations of the revolution we all found ourselves in, but over time each of us has come to be comfortable with whatever we have come to embrace as true and good for each one of us. And I think for the most part we respect one another's beliefs. We understand that the roads each one of us has traveled have moved through the turmoil of the violence of the Civil Rights' movement, the Viet Nam War and the protests against it. We suffered through the assassinations of JFK, MLK, Jr and RFK.
We were born in the shadow of the end of World War II when the devastation in Europe, in the Pacific, and in Japan was still extant. The people of the world were still in deep mourning, and the shock of our use of nuclear weapons still overshadowed our parents and grandparents psyches. And we have raised our children with our values, just as they are raising their children with the way they interpreted what we taught them by action as well as words, while adding their own take through the circumstances they have lived through.
A "gospel" is the good news about something. And a saint is just someone who is blessed. The music of the baby boomers and the movies we grew up seeing characterize not only the input we were subject to, but are also records that map out the emotional landscape in which we thrived or just survived. Does that make any sense? I'm not sure. But it was just what all that led me to think about and I wanted to share it with you.
Thanks for "listening."
Kathleen Ware Harris © 2013
kwharris777@gmail.com
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