Going to Alaska.5

When I first heard "Going to Alaska," I had to look up the word jacaranda. This is what Wikipedia has to say about jacaranda:

Jacaranda (pronounced [ʒa.ka.ˈran.da], [ha.ka.ˈran.da], or [ˌdʒæk.ə.ˈran.də]) is a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The genus name is also used as the common name.

Which reminds me, as does "Going to Alaska," of Joan Didion's novel A Book of Common Prayer. This is what Wikipedia has to say about A Book of Common Prayer:

A Book of Common Prayer is a 1977 novel by Joan Didion. It is a story of both personal and political tragedy in the imaginary Central American country of "Boca Grande." In 1983 Didion would publish Salvador, a book of essays on corruption and violence in El Salvador; the fiction and non-fiction reflect a similar perspective of rage and despair.

Run with me here. You are the deposed dictator (AKA president) of Boca Grande. Although your successor is your brother, you might like to get out of the country for a while. You might like to go somewhere quite different. In Alaska, you hear, there's snow to suck the sound out from the air -- whether or not this will also remove the sound of bullets remains to be seen.

Where you are now, the soil is soaked through with old blood and with relatives who were buried here, or close to here, and they are giving rise to what is happening. Alaska will not be like Boca Grande. The purple blossoms will have emptied out into the blinding snow, and there will be no politics, no fratricide, no under-the-table bribes. Nor will you have to get your foot in the door all over again; there will be no door to get it in, and the silence will clothe an entirely new kind of murder. It will be a vacation. You feel refreshed already.

first post! Going To Alaska.

It's hard to write about "Going to Alaska" without feeling hopelessly inadequate--it's one of John Darnielle (henceforth referred to as Alpha Cabra, for "head goat" in Greek and Spanish)'s most overtly poetic songs (and that's saying something). It's a big, raw, bold and many-layered type of statement. I wanted this to be the first song I wrote about because it was one of the songs that made me woozy and tingly by the end, filled with strange and fearsome feelings, and this blog would give me the opportunity to analyze that alien fearsomeness ("alien electricity," anyone?).

This song uses the "Going to..." format to great effect: while the Going To songs are nearly always stellar, and nearly always reflect on the geographical reality of the song-protagonist's surroundings, Going to Alaska is more intimate than usual with physical details of place. The song creates an extremely sharp dichotomy, vivid as an hallucination, between the protagonist's origin and his destination. The place he's "Going From" is lush and tropical (jacaranda only grow in tropical or subtropical regions), watched over by a hearty and almost violent sun. It's a hypersensual place; there is an obverabundance of sun, of color, of physical experience. There, sense passes to synaesthesia: the heat makes things "wet with color"; the plants, instead of merely thriving, are "thick and alive with alien electricity"; and the protagonist, overwhelmed by sensual intimacy with his surroundings, lets his febrile imagination move to a spiritual plane, where the ground is "soaked through with old blood and with relatives that were buried here...giving rise to what is happening."

The contrast with his imagined Alaska is stark: there, the environment is so bleak that it deprives its inhabitants of their senses. Snow "sucks the sound out of the air"; you can "go blind just by looking at the ground"; and even the animals kill "in silence." Existence is a struggle; instead of bursting with vivid life, your average freezing Alaskan must eat fat by itself "just to keep the body warm." In this song, neither of the protagonist's options are particularly heartening: he is fleeing from a strangling and overpowering richness into a brutal void. What I see in "Going to Alaska" is the story of someone who wants to flee sensuality gone depraved, and who sees unforgiving asceticism as his only option--and, because it's the Alpha Cabra, that story is laced with the kind of images that make you sit up straight in your bed and wait for the night to pass, your only companion his thin, earnest voice and tinny guitar.