The Big Picture and the Closeup

The way I became familiar with the piece is a sort of a shaggy dog story of lonely young people leveraging what social assets they had, and making do with what was available.

And there is much melody in this ditty, especially as contributed by a deceptively simple ukelele. Hearing that plangent instrument obsessing over a C# minor 7th chord with McCartney’s sweet falsetto crooning the leading tone at the top and then swooping down through the chord to the tonic, lifts you into a sublime, solitary, and calm place.

Lennon’s voice comes across as exhausted by sadness. And it speaks to me because that’s how I feel after this close encounter. I could have been a war casualty; I’m not, thank God. But I tell myself I must never forget what it felt like nearly to have been one. And I never do.

Of course there’s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve’s parents’ front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.

To me, proof exists that the future can be different. The Emancipation Proclamation, Brown, the Civil Rights Acts, and the creation of a society that could elect a mixed-race president are not just American achievements; they are major human achievements. They themselves embody but also point further down the path we as a species are following: gradually reconfiguring our psyches to recognize but one race and one tribe: human.