Anyway, to finally get back to The Mountain Goats, the song
I’d like to discuss first is the one that, if it didn’t exactly serve as a
gateway to them, it was at least the first of theirs that really got under my
skin and earned my devotion: “The Birth of Serpents.”
I’ve linked the David Letterman
version because it’s really awesome (the live performances I’ve seen on YouTube
are pretty electrifying, Darnielle, the lead Goat, really inhabits them
emotionally). So, speaking of getting under the skin, the first thing that
struck my about this song was this stand-out line about halfway through the
song: “See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest.”
There is a lot to unpack about this line alone, not only in itself but also in
how it connects to the rest of the song.
To begin with, the line itself is
a psychologically astute description of a certain kind of (somewhat
self-inflicted) misery. There are a variety of ways that someone can be at odds
with themselves in this way. Drug abuse is a particularly relevant example,
esp. considering that the content of practically an entire Mountain Goats album,
“We Shall All be Healed,” is drawn from Darnielle’s experiences as a meth user.
Anyway, the kind of damage that drug use can inflict on one’s body (along with
the damage that comes of the accompanying lifestyle) certainly resembles the
careless destruction (or at best neglect) of an uninvited guest. But being at
odds with oneself is not limited to drug abuse, I have certainly seen people who
are not comfortable with their bodies in all sorts of ways: those with
self-esteem or self-image problems; those who are uncomfortable with the bodily
or the sexual, often for religiously-derived reasons; and those who, for
whatever reason, have never developed their physical capabilities but then are
called upon to use them (I can recall having to help teach a fourteen year-old
boy who styled himself a cultured aesthete how to run—something that is
difficult to teach precisely because the details of learning it lurk so far
back in most of our histories).
The very title of the song does offer
hope: insofar as the song is about the “birth of serpents,” there is the
possibility of shedding one’s skin, growing out of one’s problems, being reborn
or regenerated. At first sight the image of shedding one’s skin doesn’t make
sense here: surely the solution to “dwelling inside one’s body like an uninvited
guest” is to learn to properly dwell within one’s body, so that the fault lies
with oneself, not with the body. However, particularly if drugs are involved,
the opposite may also be true. The degree to which drug addiction is a physical
force and operates on a physiological level, means that to a certain extent it
could be said that the fault could very well lie with the body, that one’s body
might no longer be hospitable and that we can only dwell within it as a
uninvited guest. In this case, the therapeutic possibilities of shedding one’s
skin, i.e., cleansing or detoxing the body, are clear. (Of course, you could
simply say that what you have to shed in this case is simply one’s way of life
or something like that, and you wouldn’t be wrong to say so, but what I think
that explanation misses is the extent to which a very bodily form of
self-relation is at stake here.)
Anyway, the interesting this how
the song proposes this detox as a literal form of shedding one’s skin by
getting outside of oneself. Consider the first two verses of the song, which
are about self-reflection in the form of reflecting on one’s (literally)
external image by way of photography:
Let the camera pull back till the
fullness of the frame is clear
and plain
Peer into the screen until you
see it all
Like a vision in a crystal ball
Let it all fill with smoke
Is this somebody’s idea of a
joke?
The very first line introduces the camera as a tool that
brings things and their context (their frame) into focus. The last line about
it being a joke points to the kind of defensiveness and disbelief that meets such
a process at the outset (and thereby points to the need for such a process). The
objectivity of photography promises a picture of how things are that is not
clouded by the vagaries of a biased (and potentially drug-addled) memory. The
song dwells on the process of developing a picture—of exposing it—as a process
of being exposed to the truth about oneself:
Let the fixer work until the
silver’s washed away
And take the picture from the
tray
Look hard at what you see and
then remember you and me
And let the truth spring free
Like a jack in a box
Like a hundred thousand
cuckoo-clocks
The lesson in this seems to be that one actually has to shed
one’s skin in order to properly inhabit it, or to put in an amusingly
paradoxical way, sometimes in order to become who we want to be we have to stop
being ourselves. Self-reflection sometimes requires self-estrangement, which is
the triumph recorded in the following lines:
Let the camera do its dirty work
down there in the dark
Sink low, rise high, and bring
some blurry pictures to remember all your darker moments by.
