This morning in the car my son Mark was singing along to one of his favorite songs, the Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven." He doesn't ever seem the slightest bit put out by the whole "If man is five, then the devil is six and God is seven" part (not that that section makes a whole lot more sense than the rest of the song), because I think when you're seven years old, you kind of expect to run across many things in this world every day that are completely baffling.
Whereas when you get to be my age, the world is still mostly nonsensical, but by then it's just kind of irritating.
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Years ago I was a counselor at a day camp, in charge of 12 six year olds. When we went from activity to activity, we were supposed to proceed in an orderly fashion: two rows of six kids. One day while we on the march, one of the kids was talking about how sunny it was. I turned around and said, “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken.” They thought this was just about the funniest thing ever. Our two lines of six fell into a paroxysm of laughter just as the camp’s owner passed by, winning me a reprimand. All proving, I suppose, that Bob Dylan is easy to relate to when you’re six, and that his work is indeed a challenge to authority of all sorts.
By the way, Black Francis once explained that song to me. It’s about global warming. All us monkeys will go to heaven unless we do something about this problem. Actually not that obscure given the sludge in the sea and hole in the sky in the first two verses. But if he'd been clearer, maybe we wouldn't still be dealing with a climate crisis nearly twenty years after "Doolittle."
I actually meant to include with this post a reference to that saying about how avant-garde music becomes children's music within the space of a generation or two -- I was going to look up who said it and everything -- but I forgot. That would have supported your point, and would have made this post really outstanding.
Well, I meant to include the story about how Kim Deal tried to pick me up.
Let's not be so hard on ourselves.
Hug!
So did Black Francis explain the part about "the Devil is six"? Was he handing out uniforms for the John Milton Little League?
I always took that stuff to mean, simply: man, devil, god. In that order of power. Devil beats man; god beats devil.
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