A lyric from Stan

Update 8/11/08: You can hear a recording of this song at “Hurricane again.”

There’s a hurricane coming:
Everything’s up in the air.
Alice says she’s got to be going;
Sonda says she doesn’t care.

The lights are going down:
We’re whispering in the dark.
There’s no need for running,
You know we’d only get caught.

You said it doesn’t really matter
I didn’t break your heart.
But there’s a hurricane coming;
Something’s bound to start.

There’s a hurricane coming;
Weatherman says its for sure.
Out on the island they’re praying,
Looking for the miracle cure.

They’re shutting down the power;
They’re shutting down the streets.
Here’s an end to running;
Here’s an end to me.

I thought we had made the investment
We’d built on solid ground.
But there’s a hurricane coming.
My heart’s starting to pound.

There’s a hurricane coming.
You can’t tell if it’s day.
I see my life on the faces of the clouds.
They’re all blowing away.

Here comes the water.
If it could wash us clean,
Wash me down the river,
Wash me to the sea.

It’s easy to say that nothing matters;
We can build it all again.
There’s a hurricane coming,
It’s coming to an end.

This is a song I wrote some time ago. My notes say 10/31/2000 although, as often has been the case with songs, I probably had it bubbling in my head for a while before that, singing snatches here and there. It’s a seventy-something rock thing in three repeating parts, the A part (two quatrains) over a D/A/Bm pattern, the B over G and A7, and the last line over Em/F#m/G.

Of course, the reason that it came to mind this morning has been the repeated warnings about the approach of Dolly, now a tropical storm according to the 10 am advisory from the National Hurricane Center, but thought possible to advance to a minimal hurricane before landfall sometime tomorrow. I mentioned that we needed to get the windows boarded and Mrs. Raines tut-tutted me. It’s just going to be a category one hurricane, as if that’s old hat these days.

There was Berry in the early eighties, the first storm we sat through, that time in the La Hacienda Apartments on Boca Chica Boulevard and a segment of the Old Town Resaca. Berry made lots of noise coming in then stopped a few miles offshore and sputtered a few tornados at us and then died. I saw people in t-shirts with “Berry who?” printed on them. Nevertheless, there was flooding in parts of Southmost and in large parts of Matamoros, and, to my mind, flooding is not to be disregarded.

Bring it up high enough and flooding will surely destroy your house where high winds, even eighty and ninety miles an hour, won’t do much if one has battened down properly and been assiduous in trimming the trees and bushes and fence maintenance. Well, that’ll be the test here. We do have trees, some of which are rather tender. A large one in a neighbor’s yard dropped a couple of limbs across the fence last year and I had to cut them the rest of the way myself to get rid of them, although I was reaching across the fence to do so. We have a good relationship and work it so that whatever’s on my side is my problem and what’s on his is his. This includes a very fecund grapefruit tree that he planted within a foot of the fence, so it’s not just problems that come over. There is also fruit, and in enough abundance that we give away quite a bit and still eat off the tree in June. We have discovered that, as long as they remain on the tree, grapefruit remain sweet and fresh. I suppose it’s something to do with hormones passed back and forth from fruit to tree, but I don’t know.

Of course, the song is not about hurricanes.  As a proper post-modernist, I turned it into a discussion of what’s going on in my head, as that is the only part of the universe of which one can properly have actual knowledge. Or so I think. There is a railing against the recent outbreak of agnostic and atheist thinking by one David Berlinski (previously unknown in our most recent model of the universe) that pushes me once again towards the view that the world is mystery and, except for the arbitrary conventions of names and language generally, we do not have much in the way of tools to describe much beyond our ability to construct analogies. Science gives us arbitrary names and then assigns numbers to them from some observation set or other and then starts looking for analogies to explain the results. The closer scientists get to explanation, the farther the universe recedes from their explanations, a phenomenon experienced as well by theologians as well, God and gods receding always from our definite sayings about them so that we are left with echoes of knowledge, but little else.