LADY WITH A FAN1
Let my inspiration flow2
in token rhyme suggesting rhythm
that will not forsake me
till my tale is told and done
While the firelight’s aglow3
strange shadows from the flames will grow
till things we’ve never seen
will seem familiar
Shadows of a sailor forming
winds both foul and fair all swarm
down in Carlisle he loved a lady
many years ago
Here beside him stands a man
a soldier from the looks of him
who came through many fights
but lost at love
While the storyteller speaks
a door within the fire creaks
suddenly flies open
and a girl is standing there
Eyes alight with glowing hair
all that fancy paints as fair4
she takes her fan and throws it
in the lion’s den
“Which of you to gain me, tell
will risk uncertain pains of hell?
I will not forgive you
if you will not take the chance”
The sailor gave at least a try
the soldier being much too wise
strategy was his strength
and not disaster
The sailor coming out again
the lady fairly leapt at him
that’s how it stands today
you decide if he was wise
The storyteller makes no choice
soon you will not hear his voice
and not to master
Since the end is never told
we pay the teller off in gold
in hopes he will come back
but he cannot be bought or sold
TERRAPIN STATION
Inspiration move me brightly
light the song with sense and color,
hold away despair5
More than this I will not ask
faced with mysteries dark and vast
statements just seem vain at last
some rise, some fall, some climb
to get to Terrapin6
Counting stars by candlelight7
all are dim but one is bright:
the spiral light of Venus8
rising first and shining best,
From the northwest corner9
of a brand-new crescent moon
crickets and cicadas sing10
a rare and different tune
Terrapin Station
in the shadow of the moon11
Terrapin Station
and I know we’ll be there soon
Terrapin—I can’t figure out
Terrapin—if it’s the end or beginning12
Terrapin—but the train’s put its brakes on
and the whistle is screaming: Terrapin
AT A SIDING
While you were gone
these spaces filled with darkness
The obvious was hidden
With nothing to believe in
the compass always points to Terrapin
Sullen wings of fortune beat like rain
You’re back in Terrapin for good or ill again
For good or ill again
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
The plot of this section of the piece is very similar to that of the ballad “Lady of Carlisle,” known also as Sharp, #66, “The Bold Lieutenant,” and as “The Lion’s Den,” or “The Lady’s Fan.” (Hunter recorded a version of this on his 1980 album, Jack o’ Roses.)
Down in Carlisle there lived a lady,
Being most beautiful and gay;
She was determined to live a lady,
No man on earth could her betray.
Unless it were a man of honor,
A man of honor and high degree;
And then approached two loving soldiers,
This fair lady for to see.
A brave lieutenant and a man of war;
The other being a brave sea captain,
Captain of the ship that come from far.
Then up spoke this fair young lady,
Saying, “I can’t be but one man’s bride
But if you’ll come back tomorrow morning,
On this case we will decide.”
She ordered her a span of horses,
A span of horses at her command;
And down the road these three did travel
Till they come to the lion’s den.
There she stopped and there she halted
These two soldiers stood gazing around,
And for the space of half an hour,
This young lady lies speechless on the ground.
And when she did recover,
Threw her fan down in the lion’s den
Saying, “Which of you to gain a lady
Will return her fan again?”
Then up spoke the brave lieutenant,
Raised his voice both loud and clear,
Saying, “You know I am a dear lover of women,
But I will not give my life for love.”
Then up spoke this brave sea captain,
He raised his voice both loud and high,
Saying,” You know I am a dear lover of women,
I will return her fan or die.”
Down in the lion’s den he boldly entered,
The lions being both wild and fierce;
He marched around and in among them,
Safely returned her fan again.
And when she saw her true lover coming
Seeing no harm had been done to him,
She threw herself against his bosom
Saying, “Here is the prize that you have won!”
Hunter invokes the muse with a prayerlike supplication in the manner of the Greek poets: He comments on this in Steve Silberman’s interview, “Standing in the Soul”:
Hunter: This band is known for dense subconsciousness. A lot of it is the Muse.
I just started work on an essay last night, because I told Anne Waldman that I would go to Naropa, and I was informed that I had to give a ninety-minute lecture. And I went, “Me? Lecture?” I’ve got no retentive memory at all. I don’t remember the names of poets. I don’t remember anything but the feel of them. So I decided to write a lecture called “Courting the Muse.” That’s one thing I do know something about: Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!
Silberman: The Muse is often envisioned as female in lyric tradition, and you have delineated her garments more deliberately and elaborately than many poets. There’s a very interesting female presence in your work. Can you talk about that?
Hunter: I saw my muses once. It was a very, very high time, many years back. There were three golden presences in the room. It was a visual. I don’t say I was straight at the time, but I will say it had a lasting effect on me. I have a feeling that there’s something that helps me, gives it to me, sometimes. “Terrapin” starts out with a shameless invocation to the Muse.
I know Muse is unfashionable now, but I think if people knew what it was, they couldn’t throw it out. It’s an informing joy in creation, in which one’s verbal flow spills over the page with a great deal of ease and pleasure. That joy is there even in the communication of pain. The trick is to seek this out first, before anything else. William Burroughs has said something about, “A writer’s business is to make his mind absolutely blank.”
This is not literally so, but you could say something “comes into the ear,”* and moves around the head, and you know you’re on. When you’re on, you can do no wrong.
Silberman: Kerouac said, “Don’t think of words when you stop, but to see the picture better.” Thus an image-centered process. Do you feel more conscious of your writing being driven by the language, or by a set of images, or feelings? What does your Muse feel like?
Hunter: The language is little tricks that I play with my input, and if it delights the Muse, you hear a little bell [laughing]. Don’t take this literally, ’cause we are talking about what can’t be talked about. I’d say a lot of my poetry is about that, even. Milton found a very fine way to talk about it. Wallace Stevens is just chock-full of Muse. I feel that anything that doesn’t have this central, singular focus is an exercise, and you wouldn’t select it for your selected works. 73
*Compare Hunter’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s second sonnet from Sonnets to Orpheus:
Something akin to a maiden strayed
from this marriage of song and string,
glowing radiant through veils of spring;
inside my ear a bed she lay.
And there she slept. Her dream was my domain:
the trees which enchanted me; vistas vast
and nearly touchable; meadows of a vernal cast
and every wondrous joy my heart could claim
She dreamed the world. Singing, God, how made
you that primordial repose so sound she never felt a
need to waken? Upon arising she fell straight to dream.
Where is her death? O, will you yet discover her theme
before your song is eclipsed forever?—
Abandoning me, where does she go?—some thing akin to a maid. 74
Some examples of the invocation of the muse in literature:
Homer begins the Iliad: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus. . . .”
Virgil’s Aeneid borrows from Homer and begins in the same fashion (“I sing of arms and a man”), but moves on to a four-line invocation of the Muse. The footnote for these lines in Clyde Pharr’s edition of Virgil’s Aeneid shows the importance for classical poets of seeking inspiration (the muse), when it states:
It is the custom of epic poets to invoke the muse for inspiration and to assign to some such divine source the gift of being able to compose their poems.
Hesiod: “Pierian Muses whose songs glorify, hither!”
Solon: “O, ye splendid children of Memory and Zeus the
Olympian, Pierian Muses, hear! Heed me now as I pray!”
Inspiration is from the Latin for “breathing in.” The entry for “inspiration” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics states that:
At least as early as Homer, inspiration holds a central place in Greek poetics, both as invocation to the gods, or, more often, the Muses for the gift of memorable speech, and also as claim that when the god does take possession, the poet enters a state of transcendant ecstasy or frenzy, a “poetic madness” or furor poeticus. Throughout most of archaic Greek thought, the creation of art is associated with ritual, religion, and substance-induced ecstasis.75
Compare Hunter’s lines in “Lay of the Ring,” from his “Eagle Mall Suite”:
Josephus lately of the mountain wild,
Seated before a desert fire,
Led the men to silence
While the fire told its tales . . .
Lewis Carroll’s poem “Faces in the Fire” presents another interesting comparison:
The night creeps onward, sad and slow:
In these red embers’ dying glow
The forms of Fancy come and go.
The picture fadeth in its place:
Amid the glow I seem to trace
The shifting semblance of a face.
Again, compare the Lewis Carroll poem:
She’s all my fancy painted him;
(I make no idle boast);
If he or you had lost a limb,
Which would have suffered most?
Hunter’s journal of September 24, 2001, contains this entry:
Later:
After dark fell, I sat alone on the roof, fifteen stories high, of a building in Soho commanding a panoramic and unobstructed view of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan and the lights of the bridges. I had my guitar in hand and felt moved to sing “Terrapin Station” to the City. While I sang, rain began falling—I stood and edged around to the other side of the roof, still singing, to the corner of the roof facing the World Trade Center, some fifteen blocks away, where the sky is bright with floodlight illuminating the work of the excavation crew. A great plume of smoke continues to rise from the site of the devastation. As I sang, a powerful wind blew up very suddenly—wind so strong it threatened to rip my guitar out of my hands—reminding me of the storm in which I first composed the words I now sang. I wondered if I was involved in some kind of sacrilege, singing like this in the face of all that had gone down—the wind roaring increasingly louder and stronger, as though filled with spirits, as though trying to blow me over, make me stop. I kept singing until the end, repeating the “hold away despair,” expressing all the sorrow I felt for the lost loved ones and for the healing of this magnificent and resilient City. I hope it helped. Helped me, anyway. 76
From the Algonquian for “little turtle.” Brought into the English language ca. 1672.
According to Cirlot:
The turtle has a variety of meanings, all of which are organically related. In the Far East its significance is cosmic in implication. As Chochod has observed: “The primordial turtle has a shell that is rounded on top to represent heaven, and square underneath to represent the earth.” To the Negroes of Nigeria it suggests the female sex organ and it is in fact taken as an emblem of lubricity. In alchemy it was symbolic of the massa confusa. These disparate senses have, nevertheless, one thing in common: In every case, the turtle is a symbol of material existence and not of any aspect of transcendence, for even where it is a combination of square and circle it alludes to the forms of the manifest world and not to the creative forces, nor to the Origin, still less to the irradiating Centre. In view of its slowness, it might be said to symbolize natural evolution as opposed to spiritual evolution which is rapid or discontinuous to a degree. The turtle is also an emblem of longevity. 77
The Encyclopedia of Religion has an entry on turtles and tortoises—here’s an excerpt:
There is a widespread belief that the earth rests on the back of a turtle or tortoise. This archaic idea is found not only among North American Indians but also in South Asia and Inner Asia. The turtle now appears even as a symbol of the entire universe (e.g., in China). Moreover, according to creation myths involving an earth diver, the turtle, sometimes as an incarnation of the divine being, plays a prominent part in the cosmogony of various cultures. (Eliade)
Other resonances occur: the naming of the North American continent as “Turtle Island” by the Native Americans; and the use of the terrapin as a character in the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris.
Turtles always make me think of the following story:
An old woman approached William James after he gave a lecture on the solar system. “We don’t live on a ball rotating ’round the sun,” she said. “We live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.”
“If your theory is correct, Madam, what does the turtle stand on?” James asked gently.
“You’re a clever man, Mr. James, and that is a good question, but I can answer it. The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger turtle.”
“But what does this second turtle stand on?” asked James.
“It’s no use, Mr. James!” the old woman crowed. “It’s turtles all the way down.”
William James did write at least once about turtles and elephants. In “Humanism and Truth” Mind 13 (N.S.): (October 1904), p. 472; reprinted as chapter III of The Meaning of Truth, he wrote:
But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again? Must not something end by supporting itself? . . .
This in turn seems to be an echo of comments by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, Chapter XIII, Section 19:
. . . Had the poor Indian philosopher (who imagined that the earth also wanted something to bear it up) but thought of this word substance, he needed not to have been at the trouble to find an elephant to support it, and a tortoise to support his elephant: the word substance would have done it effectually. And he that inquired might have taken it for as good an answer from an Indian philosopher,—that substance, without knowing what it is, is that which supports the earth, as we take it for a sufficient answer and good doctrine from our European philosophers—that substance, without knowing what it is, is that which supports accidents.
and Book II, Chapter XXIII, Section 2:
. . . If any one should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded, what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was—a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied—something, he knew not what.
Vincent van Gogh famously painted Starry Night Over the Rhone on the banks of the Rhone River, with candles set on the brim of his hat.
The motion of the position of the planet Venus, viewed over a period of eight years, describes a pentagram across the zodiac, progressing from one constellation to another every nineteen months: from Scorpio to Taurus, to Capricorn, to Cancer, to Pisces, and back to Scorpio. But is this motion a spiral? Not really.
The planet, named for the Roman goddess, has long been associated with the goddess of love, who in the Greek pantheon was Aphrodite.
The Greek poet Bion (ca. 100 B.C.E.) writes:
Evening Star, gold light of Aphrodite born in the foam,
Evening Star, holy diamond of the glass blue night,
you are dimmer than the moon, brighter than another star.
Hello, good friend!
And William Blake’s “To the Evening Star”:
Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves, and while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.
Spiral Light was the title of a British Grateful Dead fan magazine (“The official newsletter of Deadheads in England”) that ran for thirty-five issues, from Feburary 1984 through May 1996.
A possible Masonic allusion pertaining to a Masonic ritual in which all new Masons are placed in the northwest corner of the lodge, standing there a just and perfect mason (the implication is that you are as yet unsullied, much as an infant is considered innocent, having not yet experienced the world).
In the Phaedrus, in a section called “The Myth of the Cicadas,” Socrates relates a creation myth of how cicadas (or in some translations, “locusts”) came to be, in which, when the Muses were finally born, a curtain tribe of people were so overcome with happiness at being able to sing that they sang until they expired for lack of food and drink. From that time, they became cicadas, who need no sustenance from birth until they die, can sing constantly, and are taken to the Muses upon their deaths.
An American weather saying has it that “crickets are accurate thermometers; they chirp faster when warm and slower when cold.” Sloane notes that.
They are extremely accurate. Count their chirps for fourteen seconds, then add forty, and you have the temperature of wherever the cricket is.
An ambiguous line meaning either “within the dark portion of the brand-new crescent moon” or “on the dark side of the moon.” The second reading reminds us, inevitably, of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. Or it may refer to a solar eclipse.
Compare T. S. Eliot’s oft-quoted lines from the Four Quartets: Little Gidding:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
(Is it possibly significant that Terrapin Station’s initials match Thomas Stearn’s?)
Studio recording: Terrapin Station (July 27, 1977).
First performance: February 26, 1977, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. It occupied a stable place in the repertoire thereafter.
Hunter:
I wrote Terrapin, Part One, at a single sitting in an unfurnished house with a picture window overlooking San Francisco Bay during a flamboyant lightning storm. I typed the first thing that came into my mind at the top of the page, the title; “Terrapin Station.” Not knowing what it was to be about, I began my writing with an invocation to the Muse and kept on typing as the story began to unfold.
On the same day, driving to the city, Garcia was struck by a singular inspiration. He turned his car around and hurried home to set down some music that popped into his head, demanding immediate attention. When we met the next day, I showed him the words and he said, “I’ve got the music.” They dovetailed perfectly and Terrapin edged into this dimension. (Hunter: A Box of Rain) 78
The Grateful Dead’s realization of the piece is, in Hunter’s view, lamentably incomplete, leaving out as it does the lyric’s resolution. Garcia intentionally uses only a portion of Hunter’s lyric. In A Box of Rain, Hunter writes more about “Terrapin” than about any other single piece, with the exception of “Amagamalin Street.” Hunter’s own recording of “Terrapin,” on Jack o’ Roses, is closer to being complete, and attempts to incorporate a plethora of imagery and iconography from all over the Grateful Dead map, especially in the “Ivory Wheels/Rosewood Track” portion of the song. See Hunter’s A Box of Rain for the entire suite.