Aerynn

Once again, a poetry major listens to a song.

Re: Stacks :

This my excavation and today is kumran

The line as a whole suggests that the song is an attempt for him to get to the heart of what he has lost and what meaning he has left. Kumran is the place where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, so there is a suggestion of the holy about this "excavation" of himself, a search for the sacred and the divine, for meaning beyond just the events he's experienced.

There is a long pause between "to" and "day" in the line, as if he is stumbling on the syllable "to." For me, this is the first suggestion that the song is about the death of his lover. He can't even bear to think of the homophone for "two" because it overwhelms him for a moment that he is now one, forever, having lost her.

Everything that happens is from now on

This line suggests the cataclysmic nature of what he's suffered. He has suffered a loss that will mark the rest of his life as Before and After.

This is pouring rain

Pouring rain suggests overwhelming sadness. It is not just raining, but pouring. It isn't just tears, but overwhelming waves of crying, like he will never stop.

This is paralyzed

At the same time, he finds himself stuck and unable to move forward, which is why he is driven to excavate and dig out the source of his pain, so he might reach understanding and peace with it.



I keep throwing it down two-hundred at a time

Again, he chokes and pauses on "two." He begins to build a metaphor of gambling and losing, over and over, at high stakes. Perhaps he lost her to an illness like cancer, where they tried treatment after treatment, to no avail, and she just kept slipping away. He just had to keep betting, both of them did, that the next bet would pay off.

It's hard to find it when you knew it

This line seems to refer back to the excavation of the source of his grief, in an effort to finally reach peace or some understanding of his grief and loss. He finds it hard to find and excise his pain, because he knew he was losing her -- again a suggesting of a lingering illness, and her slow slide away from him. His mind knows exactly what has happened and why, but he cannot reach an understanding for his heart.

When your money's gone

He returns to the gambling metaphor: money symbolizes hope of recovery, of avoiding the loss, of coming out with something other than the worst possible outcome.

And you're drunk as hell

Here he tells us how he has avoided the excavation thus far, and why he is paralyzed with his grief: he has been trying to stay numb to it, literally through alcohol, or figuratively by disengaging from his too painful reality.


On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load

In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load

In the back with your racks and you're un-stacking your load

I've had the hardest time trying to discover the meaning of the chorus. The racks suggests torture, and the idea of carrying stacks of something, and wanting to unburden it returns to the idea that the song is one where he seeks relief from grief. But beyond that . . .


I've twisting to the sun I needed to replace

The grammar on this line seems to be off, or at least the punctuation, but it is from the liner notes for the lyrics. Maybe the contraction is actually supposed to stand in for a compressed "I have been" twisting to the sun. He is trying to twist -- a turn in another direction from the one he has been moving in, but twist suggests that the turn is not smooth or easy. It takes a wrenching of muscle and sinew for him to try to face the sun again, because the sun -- his source of light, heat, happiness, brightness, tomorrow, daylight, has disappeared and he has had to find a new sun.

The fountain in the front yard is rusted out

Here the fountain suggests a place where you could throw in a coin and make a wish and have hope it will come true. For him, the source of his hope, the place where he could believe his wishes could come true, has become rusted with disuse. That he places the fountain in his front yard also suggests that his loss was at home -- she lived with him. This was more than a break up, or the loss of a girlfriend, but a wife, a companion. She was his sun, and he associates her with home.

All my love was down

In a frozen ground

And here he finally digs down far enough that he can come as directly as he ever will to telling us that the source of his grief is the death of his wife. His love was buried. The use of the word "frozen" recalls the "paralyzed" from the first verse, and he reveals that it is her death that has him trapped and unable to move forward, lost in grief.


There's a black crow sitting across from me; his wiry legs are crossed

A black crow is a difficult symbol to unpack, but I think that the crow represents death. His legs are crossed -- he has sat down and made himself comfortable, with no intention of leaving any time soon. For the singer, death has become a feature of his days, his life. It is a creature that sits just across from him, staring him in the face, with no intention of moving or leaving. The crow, symbolizing death, is the thing that must be excised and excavated. It has roosted in the singer's life.

And he's dangling my keys he even fakes a toss

The keys represent freedom, release. Death has those keys in his grip and seems to tease the singer with the promise of recovery, some day, but right now even that hope, the hope of some abatement of the pain, seems false and that the singer will always been a prisoner of death. Any fleeting happiness that might suggest real recovery is just a tease, a fake.

Whatever could it be

That has brought me to this loss?

Once again, the singer dwells on the word "to," but draws it out in a low howl, before continuing. He has gained momentum, he no longer pauses after "to," but he only seems to move to express grief, not grow beyond it. At least, not yet. He asks what brought him to the loss, although the death of his wife or lover seems to be a clear enough reason. Instead, the singer is asking why he can't seem to heal. He wonders what has brought him to THIS specific place, where he is paralyzed, and unable to break free of the frozen ground where his love is buried.

On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load

In the back and the racks and the stacks of your load

In the back with your racks and you're un-stacking your load



This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization

Although he is able to explore and express his grief in the song, excavate it, in the final verse he tells us that he is not a new man for having done so. He hasn't had a great epiphany. The juxtaposition of the adjective "crispy" contrasts with the "pouring rain" in the first verse, so know he is still in the rain, still without sun. His knowledge has not dried him out yet, brought a return of heat and sun to his rainy days.

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away

Instead, he has simply found a release from the crow, the grief of death. He has recaptured the key, moved upward from the burial in the third verse.

Your love will be

Safe with me

But although he has buried his heart, his love, with her, he wants her to know that the unlocking and lifting away does not mean that he buried her love for him with her. Instead, he carries her love for him with him, always, and keeps it "safe" in a way he wasn't able to keep her safe. He has lost her, and a large part of himself. He retains only the feeling of having been loved by her, and that is the only thing left that he can sustain and keep healthy and safe.

He ends the song there, but leaves 45 seconds of silence, with the quiet sound of him putting his guitar away. The listener is left with emptiness, silence, the singer's departure.

On Friday Joelle and I went to see the Tiffany glass exhibit at the Muscarelle Museum. It was a small exhibit, filled with examples of Tiffany's lamps, vases, and a stained glass window. We thought it would be a good study break from the bar, but I am not sure it actually was a break.

The exhibit showed the result of taking a lot of small, carefully selected pieces, and soldering them together to make something amazingly complex and organic. Each completed work was a result of careful planning and a lot of hard work. Each was the result of a lot of little pieces that didn't mean much individually, but when put together carefully, they made something overwhelmingly complicated and beautiful. Each lamp looked like something no person could make, but rather something that had to grow naturally.

On one lamp, there was a complicated wisteria design, for which Tiffany had become famous. Each lamp had carefully selected and soldered petals, hundreds of them. For one exhibit of several of the lamps, the Tiffany Glass factory had to work round the clock to fill the order for the exhibit. Three women were assigned to work on each lamp, selecting the pieces, and placing them on a planning easel where the welders would assemble the completed lamp. After 5 days of work a cleaning lady bumped one of the easels, sending hundreds of tiny pieces, representing hours of painstaking work selecting and placing, scattered to the floor. The factor foreman said that it was so overwhelming, there wasn't a word of complaint or regret. The team just rushed to the easel and began working to reassemble what was lost from the pieces on the floor.

It seems like maybe the Tiffany glass exhibit wasn't a bar break after all. Instead it taught us something about how to do the work and not flip out about it, to pluck the small pieces from the piles of books in front of us and create something that seems overwhelmingly complicated and beyond our ability to create. Just follow the plan, put the pieces together, and the whole thing will come together in the end. And if you suffer a set back, don't spend time complaining or regretting the error, just get back to putting the pieces together.

Today Patrick and I took the dogs for a walk as the sun was setting. As we passed by the magnolia trees, the fireflies came out. I wish there was a way to take a picture of it: The stately old magnolias, six of them, with their canopy of dark leaves screening out the last of the fading light, their heavy white blossoms nodding their heads, nearly asleep after the hot southern summer day, their trunks wound in the choking embrace of kudzu, and then, down near the ground, where the fading light had just given way to gloom, fireflies. At first, they seem like a trick of my eyes or imagination. But I start looking for them, and suddenly I realize the dim chapel of the trees is filled with them. They hang in the air for a moment, not like stars, but like something friendlier, closer, moving and alive. They aspire to nothing higher than my shoulder, than my eyes. There is no way to capture them in a picture and send it, though. No way to share it, except to be there.

As I was driving into school today I think I saw a river otter cross one of the little residential streets. I've only seen sea otters at SeaWorld, so it was odd to see something that is clearly otter-like skipping across the road. I couldn't believe it.

I guess it is odd to blog about the otter, what with graduation on Sunday and Rose being sick and house hunting. But right now, I think that's all I am capable of really capturing.

I got a B in Virginia Civ. Pro. which reflects how far behind I got in that class, and how impossible it was for me to close the gap. I also figured out how many I missed on my Trusts and Estates final. Law school is nearly over for me now, with just the Client B memos left.

I went into the bathroom in the library with motion activated lights and they didn't turn on for me. It was like I was already a ghost, that my last semester had officially ended with the resolution of those last two finals into the same mediocre grades that marked my first semester here. I was gone, just the memory of a law student, when I had been real just a few hours before.

Then I saw that someone had just turned the motion detector off. I washed my hands in the darkness then left, leaving the room dim and undisturbed.

This year I was the "Managing Partner" (read Teaching Assistant) for my Legal Skills law firm. It was a position I wanted since I was a 1L, and I didn't apply for an Executive Board position on my journal so that I could do it, even though the T.A. position is not as prestigious.

My first week of law school, called "law camp," was awful. I was pretty sure I had just made the worst mistake of my life. I left all my friends, my family, my boyfriend, my pets, my job. I put Patrick in a position where he had to sell his house and move, put myself in a tremendous amount of debt after working half a decade to dig out of debt. I wasn't sure I was going to be successful, or successful enough to make the sacrifice worth it. I didn't have a home when I moved to law school, and just stayed with a friend, indefinitely. I was in a long-distance relationship as Patrick was still in Atlanta, when I expected to have him with me. The future seemed uncertain, and full of dragons. Dragons I wasn't sure I had the strength to face.

My greatest fear is a fear of failing. Even if failure is only a failure to meet the standard I set for myself. That fear kept me out of law school for seven years. The decision to go started a chain of things that I had to do, each one fraught with the chance to fail to live up to expectations: the LSAT, applications, memo writing, reading, outlining, dealing with the Socratic, moot court tryouts, etc. etc. For a long time, I was facing a fear of failure every day. Awful.

But Fred and Stacey-Rae stepped in that first week and helped. The Legal Skills small group structure gave me almost instant friendships. By the end of the first week, I had friends and a support system. I had a chance to use all the real-world people skills that I used all my adult working life; I wasn't really starting over. All my old experience would still be relevant. Legal Skills did that for me. And I felt such a huge debt of gratitude. The confidence, the support, the friendships, the chance to feel like it was all relevant, that my experience and common sense wasn't suddenly obsolete were invaluable.

I am the person I am today, in the position I am today, because of Legal Skills in a large part. And because Fred and Stacey-Rae, and Linda our Managing Partner gave us so much as 1Ls. I wanted to give that back. So I resolved to become a T.A. myself.

This year, I had a chance to give back some measure of what I got. In August, I walked into Law Camp, excited for the year that was to come, but also a little nervous for what was about to happen. What were they going to be like? Would I like them? Would they like me? Would they care?

By the end of the first week, I already knew a bunch of them. Each 1L I met I liked. They were fun, interesting, engaged, hopeful. They were excited, nervous, hardworking, smart, insightful. It was fun to match them to their upperclassmen mentors and then hear back when the match worked. It was odd to see myself in them, and remember how I felt when I was doing the same things there were.

Then the 2Ls came back and their classes started too. They started tired, and maybe a little bitter about Legal Skills. Life sucks Fall of 2L year. Legal Skills is a lot of time and effort, when you don't have the ability to give much of either. I was pretty new to most of them, and more of a peer to the ones who did know me. By the end of the first semester, I was friends with some of them and we had bonded by working on the practicums together, but the others still didn't know me. I felt like there were still 1Ls that I barely knew.

Then this semester started, and we started the semester already a team. Both classes had at least a sense of who I was. And inevitably when things started to go wrong, they came to me and I had a chance to start giving back to them some of what I had received. I got closer to a lot of them, and earned the respect of the others through sheer hard work and dedication. I made some very close friends, friends that I am going to have for years, maybe forever.

In trial planning meetings, to go over ways to make the case work, get evidence admitted, make the witness sweat on cross, it was so enlivening to see that fire come on. With client ET, everything went wrong it seemed. But the 2Ls really interrogated the problem, helped find solutions. Every late night email got a response. Every last minute request was met. It seemed like we were truly partners in the program, which is an amazing feeling.

It ends tomorrow. I am going to miss it so much, because even if I become a Legal Skills adjunct some day, it will never be with this team again. I can't imagine walking away from this school and these people in just four weeks. In my attempt to pay back Fred, Stacey-Rae, and Linda I got far more in return from the 2Ls and 1Ls who I was privileged to serve. I leave, taking with me far more than I left.

My Facebook status today:

Erin McNeill
was patiently constructed out of sand, water, and hope, just out of reach of the rising tide, protected by only a shallow moat; the sea and the wind will win someday, but not today.

I feel like there is a poem in there somewhere, but I am too busy to find it. Sarah said it was depressing, but I think it is hopeful.

I really like the song "Big Girls Don't Cry," but the video really irritated me. The director of the video clearly understood that it was a breakup song, but in the video, Fergie is breaking up with a bad boy boyfriend because he is a drug dealer. In the song, the singer specifically says that she has to leave her boyfriend because he is holding her back from growing up. In the song, it is clear she still loves him, but she knows he is not good for her, because he makes her too safe and protected. She refers to him using a lot of child-related imagery, like playgrounds, jacks, Uno cards, and a security blanket. Because she sees him as a security blanket, she can't take some of the risks she needs to in order to grow up and discover her adult self. The imagery is nice, and wistful, and it captures how hard it is to let go of someone you love because going it alone is the healthier thing, even if it is also harder.

The video undercuts all of that. She dumps him because he deals drugs. I mean, where is the heartbreak in that? I hate that; when the director seems like he didn't even really listen to or think about the song, but decided to do a "story" video anyway.

During Obama's inspiring inaugural speech, when he opened by saying that he was the 44th American to be sworn in to the office of President I got really distracted, because although he is the 44th president, Grover Cleveland is counted twice, because his terms were not consecutive. There have only been 43 presidents, not 44. Did no one fact check that for him? Or did they decide that fixing the rhetoric would be distracting for the people who forgot about Cleveland?

But I am really touched by the music played by Pearlman and Yo Yo Ma. It included the song "Simple Gifts" "in the arrangement by John Williams. I used Simple Gifts as my song for the processional of my wedding, and it was nice to hear it to start Obama's presidency. I take it as a good sign. :)

The law school offers two soups each day. Today's soup was Minestrone or Corn Chowder. I went for the Minestrone. . . . and there is real, actual, CHEESE TORTELLINI up in that soup! Best. Soup. Day. Evar.