Carey, Get Out Your Cane

I think a lot about Carey. I’ve been listening to Joni Mitchell’s song, “Carey,” for almost fifty years and I never seem to tire of it. There are several others that sit high on my replay list—Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” for example-- but the lively jauntiness of “Carey” always seems to cheer me regardless of the mood just prior. Just yesterday on my walk I reran it three times.

     “Carey” concerns levels of comfort. There is the comfort of home—drinking my fresh brewed Costa Rican beans purchased regularly my favorite coffee house in my favorite coffee mug that was gifted years ago by my daughter. There is the familiarity of home—the clean white linen and my book-filled shelves—and the layers of sweetness with which we anoint ourselves to raise us, well, above the malodorous and offensive smell, grit and dirt of the street. What the narrator of “Carey” misses is the trappings of her culture that arises out of the basis of her familiar civilization. To talk about culture is to talk about civilization. Terry Eagleton asserts that culture is the product of the civilization that requires some “spiritual foundation.” Culture is the practices and beliefs to which a civilization deems acceptable and to which it attaches significance. I appreciate Eagleton’s characterization of culture as the social unconscious, “the vast repository of instincts, prejudices, pieties, sentiments, half-formed opinions and spontaneous assumptions which underpins our everyday activity, and which we rarely call into question.” Culture in Western civilization is the practice of eating with utensils except when we dine at an Ethiopian restaurant or when we indulge in a slice of pizza from our local pizzeria or a hot dog with all the fixings and a slew of napkins from the local food truck! Culture is farting when alone, even walking down the street, but not under the covers when accompanied there. This social unconscious, not dissimilar from Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling, is prelinguistic: it exists as the sense of reality of the everyday life that we hold without thought.
     A culture legitimizes a civilization. Culture arises out of a civilization and a civilization is defined by the culture it fosters. At any one time there may exist a multitude of cultures arising out of a single civilization. We might even say that there might exist multiple civilizations in any one place and certainly in many locations.
     Comfort derives from the relationship one has to the culture of a civilization. Comfort is about becoming acclimated to the luxuries that we can take for granted.  “My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet/And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.” But before I choose to return to that comfort, Carey, get out your cane! And for the moment we’ll “laugh and toast to nothing” with freaks, soldiers and friends. One grows accustomed to comfort, to a room in Amsterdam or Rome, to the grand piano and the roses about the room. but sometimes the appeal of the grunge feels comfortable as long, I suppose, as one understands that it is a choice and that leaving it is an option. Tonight, Carey, we’ll celebrate the immersion into the carefree, even untroubled life—the life that becomes defined by that other life of culture—of clean linen and finger nails, and fancy French cologne. But for now, the night is a starry dome, and there is the Matala Moon and some scratchy rock n’ roll playing somewhere, and let’s celebrate whoever is here-- even that bright red devil that fixes me here now. It is sometimes good for just a while to forget culture and enjoy dirty fingernails and suffer beach tar on the feet. As long as there is some clean white linen I can return to.