Balckwell Rising!

Neil Young is a rocker. At seventy-seven years old, Neil Young right now has more rock-and-roll flowing through him than anyone else in the world. The man was born to rock.

Neil Young writes songs about all sorts of things. He’s written hundreds of songs. He’s often said that he doesn’t edit his songs; he just writes them and then he plays them. The songs emerge from deep within him, or perhaps they emerge from somewhere else and he captures them. It’s hard to say exactly.

Over the course of his career, certain motifs have appeared consistently within Neil Young’s work. One of these is pre-Columbian civilizations. This essay is about Neil Young’s Mesoamerica, but actually there are songs about non-Mesoamerican people too, like the Inca, and then there are songs that aren’t necessarily about any group in particular, but clearly point toward some sort of pre-Columbian world. These places are all part of Neil Young’s Mesoamerica.

It’s not necessarily the case that the more precisely the topic or group is denoted, the more precise and focused the song is. Songs that are explicitly about Maya or Inca aren’t really about Maya or Inca at all. They’re about the images which the words Maya and Inca prompt in Neil Young’s head.

It says on Wikipedia that Neil Young wrote “Cortez The Killer” while in a history class in high school. If this is true, this might be the last documented instance of Neil Young opening a history book. The man is not a scholar; he’s a poet, and he’s a rocker. He doesn’t need any book to tell him about anything.

In the documentary film, “Year of the Horse,” we see Neil Young on a tour bus with a man who’s reading “Ken’s Guide to the Bible,” a book that, according to its promotional blurb, promises to “take you directly to the naughty parts and wastes no time on the stuff you already know.” The man on the bus with Neil Young is quoting Matthew 5:30. “It is better for you to lose one part of your body, than for your whole body to go to Hell.”

“The Bible is quite a book, isn’t it?” Neil Young replies. “I’ve never really read it from this point of view.”

We then cut to Neil Young saying, “The Old Testament is related to the New Testament. What’s the difference between… what’s the Old Testament?”

The man beside him says, “The Old Testament is before Christ.”

“Before Christ…”

“It’s Moses and all that. And it’s when God is really pissed all the time.”

The man continues reading. “‘God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the hairy crown of those who walk in their guilty ways. That you may bathe your feet in blood — [Neil Young looks at the camera, leans his head to one side, mouth agape] — so that the tongues of your dogs may have their share from the foe.’ God asks you to let your dogs lick up the blood of your enemies, after you butcher them.”

“Ohh,” says Neil Young, his chin in his hand. “Is God pissed because he created man? And then man turned out to be man?”

Neil Young’s friend then quotes a passage from Ezekiel.

“Wow,” says Neil Young, “God is like, uh… Well, I now think of what I was doing when I planted a bunch of trees and I thought they were going to be one way and then they turned out to be not the way I wanted them and I chopped them all down.”

This brief conversation tells us quite a lot about Neil Young as a thinker. During the fifty-one years of his life up to that point, he had never put much serious thought toward the Bible as a book. He didn’t know the difference between the Old and New Testament, or we could more generously conclude that he had once known and then forgotten. And yet, he immediately captures the spirit of what is being told him, connects it to an idea from his own heart (the corruption of mankind), and then relates a story from his own life.

Right here, in this brief moment on the bus, we see Neil Young reveal the exact form of thinking that created “Cortez the Killer” decades earlier. “Cortez the Killer” is an account of an actual man named Cortez and his adventures fighting Montezuma in the historical land of the Aztec Empire. It is also a mythological story about the Edenic purity of man prior to its corruption. It is also, at the end, revealed to be a lamentation for a lost love on the part of Neil Young himself.

Neil Young sings a lot of songs about losing things. He is an emotional man, and he is often grieving. All memory is, in a way, a form of grief, and when we extract poetry from our memories, there is always that hint of lamentation. Neil Young expresses that through his lyrics, his voice, and his guitar. This combination of expressive tools is what makes him a rocker. Every aspect is communicating the same thing with different nuance. It’s a beauty that is impossible to encapsulate only with words. Thus, I am, in this essay, doing Neil Young a disservice. For that, I apologize.

Neil Young combines these tools in a variety of ways. He experiments with a multitude of genres and instruments, although there’s usually a guitar somewhere in there. Like most great artists, he has one or two things to say, and he says them in a thousand different ways. Each different way has its own unique character; when combined, they make up a body of work that is an absolute unity as well as an eclectic mix.

In the song, “Sleeps with Angels,” Neil Young laments the death of Kurt Cobain. In “You’re My Girl,” he laments the end of his daughter’s childhood. In “Thrasher,” he laments a lot of things all at once, in a creatively ambiguous sort of way.

In “T-Bone,” he laments how he’s got mashed potatoes, but ain’t got no T-bone.

Is the take-away here that Neil Young is a very sad man? Well, not exactly. The music is sad in a joyful sort of way. Joy and sadness are not opposite ends of a spectrum; there can be much joy in sadness, if you know how to find it. Expressing your emotion in an artistic way is a beautiful experience, and finding expression for your emotions in someone else’s art is beautiful too. It’s a sharing, communicative sort of endeavour.

Years later, Neil Young would say in an interview, “What the fuck am I doing writing about Aztecs in ‘Cortez the Killer’ like I was there, wandering around? ‘Cause I only read about it in a few books. A lotta shit I just made up because it came to me.”

I will tell you exactly what Neil Young was doing: he was being Neil Young. While writing about Cortez, he embodied the spirit of this mythological story so fully and so personally, that it felt entirely natural at the end to sing the lines:

And I know she’s living there

And she loves me to this day

I still can’t remember when

Or how I lost my way

despite them having, in a literal sense, no real connection to what had come before. Who’s living there? And where exactly is she living? And when did you lose your way? You were just singing in the last stanza about the beautiful cities the Aztecs built. By “lost my way,” do you mean you lost the plot of this song you were singing?

NEIL YOUNG’S DREAM

“In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.”

The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!”

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the composition of the poem Kubla Khan

“One night I stayed up too late. I ate like six hamburgers… Felt terrible. I was studying history, and in the morning I woke up and I’d written this song.”

– Neil Young on writing Cortez the Killer

These two passages tell the same story. A man is reading a history in an altered state. He falls asleep unexpectedly, and dreams of a world influenced by his reading. He wakes up to find that, in his dream, he has composed a poem.

Both accounts have a ring of truth, and a ring of falsehood. Coleridge provides too many details, and in this way betrays himself. Neil Young provides a paucity of detail; however, six hamburgers is probably an exaggeration.

(On a side note: I once met Neil Young in a dream, and all I could think to say to him was that I think Violent Side from “Landing on Water” is actually a great song. I guess I figured no one had ever said that to him before.)

In our dreams, we don’t exactly see things the way they are. Our focus is narrowed, and the blank space around us is filled in arbitrarily. Sometimes, when we look away from someone and then look back, they have changed into someone else. In that moment, we re-write history and retroactively confirm that this someone else has been there the whole time.

Sometimes, Japan and Canada need to be moved so that they are across the street from each other. The Pacific Ocean becomes what we often feel it to be in our waking life: an arbitrary excuse for planes to float around for thirteen hours before landing again.

Sometimes these changes are tiny, and sometimes they are cosmic. Sometimes rather than a mere physical change, we have to completely transform the past and the future in order to suit our emotional state. We are panicked; thus, the world is going to end. We are hopeful; thus, something amazing is about to happen.

In the dreams of Coleridge and Neil Young, a fantastical world is contained, uneasily, within our world, amess with contradiction: “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” In both the poem and the song, the narrator intercedes midway through to tell us enigmatically of a mysterious woman whose relation to the rest of the work is unclear.

These women are important to the narrator in a way that can not be explained. Like many before and after them, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Neil Young have fallen in love with a dream. They have fallen in love with a person with few or no distinct qualities; a pure being crafted entirely from longing and a sense of what the word “love” might mean when we don’t try to put it into words. They have awoken with a deep feeling of loss, not only for the idyllic dream world but for something deeper, some belonging or comfort that this woman, or should we say presence, has provided them.

In the same vein, the lost paradises which they are eulogizing are mutations of a historical “world.” History is itself a fantasy world, because you can never go there. It is an extrapolation from certain evidence. Historians extrapolate according to certain logical rules that ensure their accounts are mutually consistent. Poets extrapolate according to their whim, fancy, and of course, their emotions.

Coleridge wants a pleasure dome. Simple enough. Don’t we all?

Neil Young is thinking about a lost love. Whether he had the love and then lost it, or whether he lost it before it even started, the effect is the same. All love points toward the future, because love is ideally supposed to last forever. When love falls apart, it brings a whole future down with it. When one experiences lost love, one is grieving both a person and a future. It can really do a number on you.

It doesn’t matter if this love existed only in a dream. It doesn’t matter if the cause of this love in a dream is indigestion from eating six hamburgers, or brain-delusion from taking pain-killing drugs. Love is love, and the futures we imagine in a dream are just as real as the futures we imagine in real life, i.e. not “real” at all but real in our hearts.

As he does in “Inca Queen,” “Like an Inca,” and “Pocahontas,” Neil Young is idealizing a civilization about which, for a long time, little was properly known. He is telling a classic story of an Edenic paradise and its corruption. He is telling the story of a world attuned with nature, with ancient philosophical ideas that make ours look childish, where peace reigns and structures are able to be built that we still can not even replicate — a world that is destroyed when a murderous man dances across the water looking for his own slice of paradise. By discovering paradise, Cortez destroys it, because Cortez is a fallen man.

Neil Young’s Mesoamerica is not a historical reality. It is a dream. It is a dream built on love: it is the promise of an eternal paradise. Cortez destroys it by grabbing at it, by insisting too strongly that it should belong to him, and in the end, he watches it crumble in his hands. As far as Neil Young is concerned, this is exactly what happened when Cortez went to Mesoamerica. He does not differentiate between his dream myth and the real history. The myth is as real as the chronicle.

The myth evokes a universal sense of loss. When the Aztecs were wiped out, the world lost something. It’s not particularly important what exactly the world lost, or whether the Aztec women actually were all beautiful, or whether they actually did build things with their bare hands that we still can’t build today. Factually, we can say that most of what Neil Young says about the Aztecs in this song is not true. However, we still have this feeling that they might have been true about someone, if not specifically the Aztecs. That feeling comes from the knowledge that we, as we are now, are not perfect. We made a mistake somewhere. We could be better. As a nation, as a civilization, as a society, and as individuals.

The last stanza, with its ambiguous longing, speaks to this.

When Neil Young sings of a dream about Cortez and Aztecs and a woman “living there,” he is not telling us about Cortez and Aztecs and a woman “living there.” This woman waiting for us is a way we could have been, that perfect paradise we could have preserved if we hadn’t made the silly mistake of being a human being. God is pissed because he created man and then man turned out to be man.

What if man had not turned out to be man? What if we all had grown up to be the person we aspired to be, instead of the person we ended up as? There’s a perfect version of ourselves that we threw away, somehow or other. When did we do it? What did it look like? Ask Cortez.

Neil Young is inviting us to live his experiences with him, to feel with him and to mourn with him about our lost futures. He is inviting us to share in being human, being human in both a particular way and in a general way. It is the specifics that capture our attention; it is the generalities that capture our heart. Too vague, and there’s nothing to grab on to. Too particular, and there’s no way to relate.

In “Cortez the Killer,” the image and the emotion are in such harmony that they bleed together into nonsense and it doesn’t even matter. The image is not only an image and the feeling is not only a feeling; they are both both things at once. You can not analyze and synthesize this song into sense. The only sense comes from its illogicality. You can’t read it one way, and then the other. You can’t read it as a history, and then as a personal lamentation. It has to be both at once.

I mentioned before that what makes Neil Young a rocker is the particular combination of expressive tools he uses. The electric guitar is a vital component here. The song begins and ends with extended guitar solos. We can’t ignore these, even if we don’t necessarily have the tools to speak about them. The guitar tells its own wordless story, introducing us to the tone of the song a whole three minutes before Neil Young even begins to sing. After the last stanza, when the words have collapsed in on themselves, the guitar returns to finish the story. I can’t translate for you what the guitar is communicating. I can only say that what it’s communicating is as essential an aspect of the song as the lyrics themselves.

Through the harmony of all these methods, we are pulled into the dream, and the dream is made to feel real. When the song ends, and we emerge from the dream, that feeling of reality doesn’t go away.

NEIL YOUNG AND HISTORY

After listening to this song enough times, I listened to a lecture series about Mesoamerica. I learned all sorts of information about the Aztecs: their culture, their practices, their language, and their history. I learned about Cortez too, his circumstances and his idiosyncrasies. And yet, when I think of the Aztecs, or Cortez, or Montezuma, I don’t think of any of these facts; I just think of the song.

Is it appropriate that Neil Young, a man who admittedly knows little about the Aztecs or Cortez, should have this power? That his words speak to me more truly than the words of a man who has devoted his whole life to researching the facts of the matter? It seems unfair, doesn’t it?

I’m saying this as someone who loves reading history books, who appreciates the work of archaeologists, and who thinks the discipline, as a whole, is cool. But no matter what they do, they can’t compete with literature and art. The Bible is more interesting than any textbook; Paradise Lost makes more sense than the Big Bang; and “Cortez the Killer” is more evocative than any Great Courses lecture series. This is because they appeal to that most human quality: emotion.

It’s interesting, in an intellectual sense, that Cortez sailed across the ocean and fought Aztecs. It had a lot of repercussions, and helped shape the world we know today. There are also lot of antecedent events and circumstances that explain how and why it happened. It’s part of the large web of data that we call history.

But it only really matters if we also have some sort of emotional connection to the people involved. It only matters if the Aztecs mean something to us, either as a real people or as a symbol. We may be interested in their art, or their astrology, or their architecture, and wish it may have continued. (Truthfully, much of this was heavily influenced by the Maya, who are still around and who you can go visit and talk to if you like. But that doesn’t necessarily weaken the symbolic quality.)

On the other hand, we may be interested in the Aztecs, as earlier generations were, as a particular form of savage tribe who partake in such gruesome acts as cannibalism and ritual sacrifice, and therefore celebrate Cortez for his heroic deed in wiping them off the face of the Earth.

In either case, the history takes on a mythological dimension; either the loss of something beautiful, or the destruction of something evil.

No matter how dryly you wish to present the facts, when they are presented to human beings, we will turn them into a story. It may be a simple moralistic story, or a complex and ambiguous story. It may have complexity hidden within its simplicity, or vice versa. The story we create often has more to do with what’s inside us than what we are looking at. Neil Young read about the conquest of the Aztecs and tied it intrinsically to his emotional state, his favoured themes of love and loss, and the six hamburgers swirling around in his stomach, and thereby created a masterpiece. And in the end, as buildings crumble to pieces and history blows away in the wind, it is these stories and the myths that live on.