Pocahontas, Neil Young

May 12, 2007

Rust Never Sleeps (1979) by Neil Young and Crazy Horse reminds me of our short time in New Orleans. For some reason this was the CD that we played over and over during our two and half weeks there. I remember turning the sound way down for "Welfare Mothers" as we passing by some projects and I judged someone might take offense. But that is a personal sentiment.. and everybody who is alive comes to associate certain songs with different events in their lives.

The songs on Rust Never Sleeps are uniformly strong but share a certain level of incoherence. I am thinking especially of "Thrasher" and "Powderfinger".. brilliant songs, packed with resonance, but ultimately very hard to say anything about. To read the lyrics of these songs is like encountering a French Symbolist poet who somehow got lost in the American landscape.

"Pocahontas" is my favorite song from Rust Never Sleeps, and although it shares a level of incoherence (in this case mostly historical), it is possible to make sense of it. It begins with a striking evocation of the old virginal America:

Aurora Borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man to the fields of green
And the homeland we've never seen

I should note that our daughter might not have been named Aurora if it wasn't for this opening. "Aurora Borealis" makes for a confident and perfect opening.. casting our minds to a distant and haunting light. The real Pocahontas, living in what is today Virginia, would never have seen the Aurora Borealis.. but that's OK, because Young is not going to get tied up with historical technicalities in this song.

The opening involves us in a journey. We are on the move, hushed and passing through an erie landscape to get away from the white man and arrive at the fields of green. Those "fields of green" are also identified as "the homeland we've never seen". It is not just a matter of escape.. but of coming home to something we should know but don't.

The second stanza gives us the world from the point of view of a Native American:

They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks and the wagons come
And the night falls on the settin' sun

The image of a home getting sacked and women killed is best known from the point of view of white settlers.. scenes from The Searchers come to mind. But having left the white man and fled to the fields of green, we are disappointed to discover the natural world destroyed.. the homeland in the process of being settled. The final line provides a double closure to that world: the night falls on the setting sun.

They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box at the top of the stairs
With my Indian rug and a pipe to share

It is now clear that we are moving quickly through time. The new settlers are present in the first line killing the buffalo, but that image immediately gives way to images of the modern world: taxis and apartments. We walk up the stairs and enter a little box of an apartment and see the pitiful remnants of the Native American past: Indian rug and pipe. Perhaps we should consider this apartment a little hippy hideout. There is nothing here but loss. What began as an escape has ended now as a captivity within the busy modern world (again reversing a stock theme of white encounters with Native Americans).

I wish I was a trapper
I would give a thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin' on the fields of green
In the homeland we've never seen

Opening this stanza with "I wish" alerts us to the fact that the situation is different than it was in the first stanza. There we were guided by some mysterious light and could hear paddles cutting the water.. now we are in a counterfactual world. Would that I were a trapper! But not the kind of trapper we know from history.. not the kind who collected piles of pelts and made a fortune. Rather one who would take that fortune and exchange it for one night with Pocahontas. (Again, the historical references are mixed, trappers being a development that came into its own long after Jamestown.)

That is a daring line.. that wish to sleep with Pocahontas. I am sure it could cause offense somewhere or other. Who wants to imagine the symbolic Pocahontas sullied by some trapper? But as an expression of pure desire the line is right. Pocahontas appears, opens herself to the trapper, but then fades away into the land. The morning dawns on those "fields of green".. and on "the homeland we've never seen". That land is what the desire is for; that land is what has been lost.

And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Pocahontas

Marlon Brando comes out of nowhere. But suddenly he is sitting there by the fire with the imagined trapper and Pocahontas. I have always found the sudden presence of Marlon Brando surreal, but then come to find out Brando was an activist in the American Indian Movement.. and so it makes more sense. But I like it the old way.. with an eccentric Hollywood actor suddenly turning up by the fire. Another escapee from the modern world.. who can reminisce about all those modern things. The Astrodome, for instance. By this final lyrical gambit the modern world comes rushing back into the fields of green. The wannabe trapper who desired the old pure America is suddenly thinking about baseball and astroturf. And maybe even wishing he could get the hell out of those fields of green. And poor Pocahontas.