What Can Be Said

By Wayne Brown

I urge the reader to take the time to listen to this song - sorry about the ads.

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
 
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Moons and Junes and ferries wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
 
I've looked at love that way
But now it's just another show
And you leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away
I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take and still somehow
It's love's illusions that I recall
I really…

You can run into the same idea all over the place and through the ages. For example, I remember the opening words of the Tao Teh Ching

The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao
(From a hard copy edition, long lost and long out of print)

Chinese pictograms are delightfully ambiguous - impossible to translate into English. Another translation (from a version I accidentally purchased with Amazon's one-click) goes:

The Tao is teachable, yet understanding my words is not the same as following the Tao. The guidance is describable, yet knowing the description is not the same as following the guidance.

Liang, Yuhui. Tao Te Ching: The New English Version That Makes Good Sense (Kindle Locations 637-639). Kindle Edition. 

The second version makes more "sense" in English but I quoted the first to myself almost daily for 60 years.

Much too early in my life, I took on Wittgenstein's "Tractatus".

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence

Jodi makes the same point as Lao Tsu and Wittgenstein, but in a way that is so clear it wound up on the hit parade. How can that be?

It's a question worth asking with an answer that can change the way we think about life. In fact, I have said that Jodi's song is 30% of Zen. The other 70% can probably be found on the Country Hit Parade.

A song invites us to share an experience, along with visual images, emotions, and whole life history. It's a "whole brain" communication.  Words and logic are processed by a relatively small part of the brain (the language centers and forebrain). Experience is much more than words can capture. In the end, our experience is an illusion. The ultimate nature of reality (The Tao) is ultimately unknowable.

  A person of my generation summed up all this in a review of Jodi's song:

About 50 years ago a group of friends and myself went out on a Friday night to Phil's Steak and Pancake House located at the Chinook Shopping Centre on MacLeod Trail in Calgary.  They had live entertainment every weekend and on that particular night there was a shy young girl (a student at Mount Royal College) by the name of Joan Anderson who was our entertainment for the night.  She mesmerized us all with her music and she still has that effect upon me today.  Although she did not perform this song (I don't think she had written it yet)  when it came out on her Clouds album I just fell in love with it.  To hear her sing the same song  almost half a century later and appreciate the lyrics which now have seriously different meanings is breath taking.

 

I am an old man and do not feel ashamed at all to cry every time I watch this

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