Look for a while at the China Cat Sunflower1
proud-walking jingle in the midnight sun2,3
Copper-dome Bodhi drip a silver kimono4
like a crazy-quilt star gown
through a dream night wind
Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandana5
like a one-eyed Cheshire6
like a diamond-eye Jack
A leaf of all colors plays
a golden string fiddle
to a double-e waterfall over my back7
Comic book colors on a violin river
crying Leonardo words8
from out a silk trombone
I rang a silent bell
beneath a shower of pearls9
in the eagle wing palace10
of the Queen Chinee11
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
Porcelain cats in sleeping or beckoning postures are works of art in Japan and, to a lesser extent, China. A subset of the art form kutani, dating to the seventeenth century, the cats are painted with delicate patterns and very fine brushwork. Satsuma porcelain cats, also Japanese in origin, are decorated more whimsically, with an amazing array of colors and patterns.
Compare the line in “The Eleven”: “Six proud walkers on the jingle-bell rainbow.”
An oxymoron, though one that is actually applied to arctic regions such as Alaska and Scandinavia (the land of the midnight sun). “So Many Roads” has these lines: “From the land of the midnight sun / where ice blue roses grow. . . .”
Sanskrit and Pali: “awakening,” “enlightenment”; in Buddhism, the final Enlightenment, which puts an end to the cycle of transmigration and leads to Nirvana, or spiritual release; the experience is comparable to the Satori of Zen Buddhism in Japan. The accomplishment of this “awakening” transformed Siddhartha Gautama into a Buddha (an Awakened One).
The final Enlightenment remains the ultimate ideal of all Buddhists, to be attained by ridding oneself of false beliefs and the hindrance of passions. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The supreme creation of George Herriman (1880–1944), the Krazy Kat comic strip appeared daily from 1913 to the time of its creator’s death.
There are many ways to view Krazy Kat, and it has been analyzed exhaustively. It has been portrayed as a variation on the eternal triangle of tragic romances; as a grand statement on freedom versus authority; as an allegory on innocence meeting reality; and, of course, as a comic cacophony of obsessions. The strip had a Joycean affinity, especially in its high/low wealth of language. Herriman is supposed to have once responded to these analyses with the astonished reply that he merely drew a comic about a cat and mouse. (Marschall)
See note under “Can’t Come Down.”
This is a mystery phrase. I’m coming to think that it actually originated with Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” which includes the line “Don’t the brakeman look good, Ma, flaggin’ down the double-e” 17 though I previously thought that it really was a type of train, probably standing for the Double Express—therefore, a fast train. Might also be a shortened version of the Double-Ender, defined in Rail Talk as “a steam locomotive built to run equally well in either direction. It had two boilers and a central cab and firebox.” Double-Ender also exists in hobo slang as “a train with two engines and two cabooses.” (Alpert)
See also Warren Zevon’s “Poor Pitiful Me,” which contains the line “Laid my head on the railroad track, waitin’ on the Double E.”
Perhaps no other phrase has engendered as much discussion and speculation in the many email messages I’ve received over the years since first posting The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics on the web. Ideas run a wide gamut: E. E. Cummings is mentioned (there’s even a Cummings painting titled “Waterfall”!); a guitar chord by the name, played high on the neck of the guitar, are two examples among many.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote in mirror script.
Both pearls and the moon are “symbols of the Buddha-nature inherent in all beings.” (Snyder)
According to Pao-chih (418–514),
Why should you look
for treasure abroad?
Within yourself you
have a bright pearl!
(Quoted in Burton Watson’s translations of the Cold Mountain poems.)
Compare Hunter’s lyric “Invocation” from the Eagle Mall Suite: “To the Eagle Palace with walls of water we came. . . .”
A quote from the Dame Edith Sitwell poem “Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone”:
When the phoca has the pica
In the palace of the Queen Chinee!
In an interview in Golden Road, Hunter said:
“China Cat” took a long time to write. I wrote it in different settings and added this and that to it. It was originally inspired by Dame Edith Sitwell, who had a way with words—I like the idea of quick, clicky assonance and alliteration like “See me dance the polka, said Mr. Wag like a bear, with my top hat and my whiskers, that tra-la-la trapped affair.” I just like the way she put things together. I’d have to admit that before you could trace it back that there was some influence. 18
Studio recording: Aoxomoxoa (June 20, 1969).
First documented performance: January 17, 1968, at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco. An enduring song in the band’s repertoire, usually paired with “I Know You Rider” in concert, leading to the designation “China/Rider.” Bruce Hornsby sampled the tune’s signature lick for his 1998 song “Sunflower Cat (Some Dour Cat) (Down with That).” In an interview in Relix, Hunter said: “I can sit right here and write you a “China Cat” or one of those things in ten minutes. . . . How many of those things do you need . . . ?”
In his A Box of Rain, Hunter wrote:
Nobody ever asked me the meaning of this song. People seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s good that a few things in this world are clear to all of us.
Hunter says:
I think the germ of “China Cat Sunflower” came in Mexico, on Lake Chapala. I don’t think any of the words came, exactly—the rhythms came.
I had a cat sitting on my belly, and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to—I believe it was Neptune—and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow. This cat took me in all these cat places; there’s some essence of that in the song. (Gans: Conversations) 19