Davita's Harp (Song)

 I have called this one "Davita;s Harp" after the novel of the same name by Chaim Potok because that is where the story comes from that is the base of the song. In that novel, young Ilana Davita Chandal is the daughter of a mother who grew up Jewish and a father who grew up Christian, both now active members of the communist party in America (as are the majority  of Potok's novels, Davita's Harp is set in Brooklyn in the time period when Potok himself was growing up there in an Orthodox Jewish family). Her father is a journalist and dies in the 1937 bombing of Guarnica while reporting on the Spanish Civil War (while trying to save a nun). Jacob Daw is a friend of the family and fellow member of the communist party, whom Davita calls "Uncle." Daw is a story-teller and writer, and after her father's death, to try to help cope, he tells her the story of a little bird who saw all the suffering in the world, but also saw that there is a very beautiful music from somewhere unknown but its beauty distracts many from seeing all that is wrong in the violence and destruction. So the bird set out to find the source of the music to ask it to please stop or at least pause so that people will not be distracted from the violence and see the need to remedy it and do so. But after flying the world over and not finding the source, the little bird has come back to live in the door harp in Davita's home, and every time she hears the door harp ring, it is that little bird singing a little of its own song that hopefully comforts her because the bird also saw all the violence and tried to help stop it (I think maybe emblematic of her father)

I usually would not straight out take a title like this from a novel as title of a song, but I pretty much carry that story over directly, so it seems that is the only accurate and fair title. What I hope is the new and further element is the participation (at first with the hearer and then with the bird) as a vehicle to talk about music as healing and the deep need for that, the need to let go and find peace, but also the interplay between that and the need to not tune out from seeing the troubles and trying to do what one can to help. Some of that is fleshing out the tiring travels (losing good friends), while some of it has hat-tips, especially to Bob Dylan, to whom I had been listening A LOT when the song first popped into my head decades ago, and just resurfaced recently out of the blue, and only the memory of the lines about the poor and the luck and the weather and cash stashed in aback bedroom dresser; the chords were not hard to remember from the melody, as they're pretty simple; I tend to think that the first verse was all I had done before losing train of thought on it, and so the first line about the powerful and  rest has been written fresh recently (the line about the powerful contains one of the hat tips to Dylan, which is "cold iron fetters" evoking his song "Cold Irons Bound" from the Time Out of Mind album, originally a kind of forlorn song of rejected love [you rejected me, now I'm "20 miles outside of town in cold irons bound"] but then given a new social-justice twist when used over for the closing mayhem in the film Masked and Anonymous; the other hat-tip is the line of along the way losing friends, which evokes the line in "Bob Dylan's Dream" from the Free-wheeling album, his line that "I dreamed a dream that made me sad, concerning myself, and the first few friends I had"). Other parts of it play off the imagery from the novel and the interior psychological word, a world within and a world without mirroring each other as the things the music must soothe. On the level of the world outside, there is bombing imagery akin to movie scenes of bombings because the Guarnica bombing was horrific (see Picasso's painting), and on the interior level, the elements used also sum up interior psychological struggle, like a person with anxiety or phobia feeling shell-shocked as if they just ran through a mine field in situations where others there didn't realize the situation was so harrowing to the person. The soot in the eyes is mainly the exterior bomb imagery, but I guess could be loosely tied to the idea of tears. The blood in the ears is more clearly both worlds: the ear damage you see in bombing scenes (blood trickles from ears) but also the blood pounding in the ears from anger or anxiety. Likewise, the noise in the mind can be the ringing in the ears from a bomb or grenade and the jumbled perception and panic of somebody concussed, but also, on the interior plane, something like the racing thoughts of hypomanic episode.

So this song mainly works through an idea of participation in that story (with some new twists, like in the last verse, the song to be sung from the harp is not simply soothing, or the loss of friends across a course of life, which is also why the old are sad--not saying that all the elderly are sad and depressed, but that if one lives that long, one has said a lot of goodbyes as family and friends die), with some further detailing of some aspects (the idea of a bombing) and a few hat-tips to especially Dylan and the albums I was listening to a lot at the time the song first popped into my head (Time Out of Mind and Free-wheelin' . . . and the song "Masters of War" on the latter definitely shares a theme), all in a project of looking at the interplay or back and forth (do we ever find "balance"? would we really want something as static as what people usually look for when they talk about "balance"?) between the need for healing through the mystical thing that is music and the need to try to help things getting better, which means a certain amount of looking at the ugliness that needs healing.

There is also a little hidden Greek-nerd word play in there being rivers from the music and that paired off against "remembering truth." The Greek Word for "truth" is alehtia, which is made from the alpha privative (atheism vs theism, amoral vs. moral, agnostic vs. gnostic) being put on the front of Lethe, which is the name of the river in Greek mythology into which one can be dipped and have memory washed away (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind kind of thing), and so truth is a not forgetting . . . and in fact, for Socrates, or at least Plato's Socrates, learning and seeing truth is precisely an act of remembering it from when one knew it before birth).

In case I bunged up any lyrics or slur them any, the lyrics are:

Verse 1

Well, the powerful, they rule with their cold iron fetters

And the poor they are suffering underneath their oppressors

And me, I get by on my luck and the weather

And a bit of cash I got stashed in a back bedroom dresser

But I hear a little bird sing in that harp on the door

And I don’t think about these things any more

 

Verse 2

For her song is sweet, and washes soot from my eyes

and blood from my ears, and noise from my mind

From the hurt of our age that blinds all my sight

I need a rest for the peace to walk in the light

and clean my heart and feel it beating once more

and not have to think about these things anymore

 

Bridge 1

There’s a music in the world, that is deep and serene

We need its rivers in our souls to heal our bad dreams

But we also need silence, to open our sight

And remember truth and change the things that ain’t right

Verse 3

So, like that little bird, I flew far and wide

To find the music powers abuse to hide the hard sights

And to ask it to pause, so we can open our eyes

but the source of that song I never could find

Now like that little bird in the harp on the door

I’m too tired to think about these things anymore

 

Bridge 2

For my journey was long, and my travels were sad

And along the way I lost the few good friends I had

They fell too earth tired, before we reached home

And when I flew through that door, I was singing alone

Verse 4

Now like that little bird, with her song sad and sweet

I look from my harp, on the door to the street

and watch passers by, the good and the bad,

The young who are happy, and the old who are sad

And I don’t howl like the wind, but I still won’t ignore

The sights we hide from our eyes, and lock out with doors

And like that little bird, I still hope for much more,

That someday, we won’t have to sing about these things anymore