I've Been High - REM

December 2, 2007

Say I handed you the following quotation:

you see there's this cat burglar
who can't see in the dark
he lays his bets on 8 more lives,
walks into a bar.
slips on the 8 ball. falls on his knife.
says, "I don't know what I've done,
but it doesn't feel right!"

If I told you these lines were from a poem, who would you guess wrote them? My guess would be John Ashbery, with its nonsensical narratively challenged patter. In fact this stanza is from the last studio album by REM; it is the opening to the song "The Worst Joke Ever".

Michael Stipe's lyrics have always been engmatic, but this Ashbery-like late phase is enigmatic in a different way than "Swan Swan Hummingbird", the lines are longer, sentiments more diffuse. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery lyrics set to music, and that is perhaps the central challenge faced by REM: how to find the right musical setting for Stipe's mature lyrics.. which will not fit with a Document-era musical approach.

One place in REM's recent work where Stipe's lyrics get a perfect musical setting is "I've Been High" from the album Reveal (2001). I found a live treatment on YouTube that I have embedded below.. but I am not sure the song comes off as well live as it does on the CD. It seems inert onstage but can be layered and beautiful in an ambient electronic version. I would argue that this is just the kind of subdued and subtle setting that works best for these lyrics.

"I've Been High" works its way around the idea of experience.. always in Stipe's inimitable one-step forward one-step backward manner:

have you seen?
have not will travel.
have I missed the big reveal?

A broad question is thrown out to the singer: "have you seen?" It's a question tied to nothing in particular. It probes experience: have you seen.. really seen. The response is "no" and then the plan: will travel. This is followed by a self-doubting question: has he missed "the big reveal", a phrase which in an abstract way points to illumination as to the meaning of experience.

Stipe follows this stanza up with lines that build on the metaphor of sight:

do my eyes
do my eyes seem empty
I've forgotten how this feels.

I've been high
I've climbed so high
but life sometimes
it washes over me.

Empty eyes are what we expect from someone who has not seen.. and who has missed the big reveal. Despite this emptiness he recalls that he has been high in the past, conceptualized (in typical Romantic fashion) as a climb up a mountain:

The Romantic climber has a stupendous gaze upon the world, and Stipe knows this Romantic vision.. but sees it as lost. Life with all its dailiness has washed over him and dimmed that vision. The hunger to get it back impells him to travel, but that moment of vision is elusive.

The next two stanzas dispense with the sight imagery and push into "being":

have you been?
have done, will travel.
I fell down on my knees.

was I wrong?
I don't know, don't answer.
I just needed to believe.

"Have you been?" is again an odd unanchored question, and like the earlier question "have you seen?" it reaches for a deep place: are you a true person? The negative is implied and again there is a renewed desire to travel and really "be". These lines also bring up a religious response to his sense of emptiness: "I fell down on my knees". And that response is immediately interrogated by Stipe: maybe that is a hopeless path, but he needed to believe in something.. something that could get him back to the heights of experience.

An odd bridge intervenes between these lines of emptiness and the confession of hope that ends the song.. and the bridge is perhaps the hardest section of the song to interpret:

so
I dive into a pool so cool and deep that if I sink I sink
and when I swim I fly so high

No doubt it is strange to go from the visionary Romantic mountain to a pool. Stipe has elsewhere sung about the freedom of night swimming.. and the modern swimming pool is a useful metaphor for experience:

I am not suggesting that Stipe is directly referring to this painting by David Hockney, but the same web of ideas surrounds this visual meditation "Painting of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)". The singer of the song is in much the same ambivalent position as the painter staring into the pool. Notice how the freedom of the pool is combined in the painting with the vision of heights. There is a possible Romanticism in the picture.. if only the painter grabs hold of the freedom in front of him instead of meditating on his secondary position.

The next lines of the song are some of my favorite in popular music.. and I often find myself singing them silently:

what I want
what I really want is
just to live my life on high.

and I know
I know you want the same
I can see it in your eyes.

There is no grasp of the visionary ideal, but there is a clear apprehension of that as a goal: to live life on high. That is again frustratingly abstract. What can it mean to live life on high? It would at least be free of emptiness.. and clear of the dailiness that washes away the soaring sense of freedom. The second stanza is a turn to someone else (finally) and the recognition of the same goal in that other person's eyes. This will not be the Manfred model of lonely Romantic accomplishment. There will be a companion and love.

Having expressed this ideal, the song comes up against the same recurring problem:

I've been high
I've climbed so high
but life sometimes
it washes over me.

washes over me
close my eyes so I can see
make my make-believe believe
in me.

but those last lines offer the first real theory as to how ordinary experience can be transcended: the imagination. His eyes can't see because they are dulled by the everyday, but the answer is not to seek out a greater more vivid experience. The answer is to close the eyes and re-imagine the self and the world: "make my make-believe believe in me". It is a classic Romantic turn toward the interior world.. and a confession of faith in the power of fiction.

Look back at the cover to Reveal. It does not feature a vision from the heights, but a washed out everyday photo. The shadow of the photographer can be seen in the bottom left corner. The "big reveal" will not be a grand vision encountered on some grand trip.. it will arrive only with an internal re-alignment and a sense of the self as creator.