Non-Literature Literature: Shakespeare & Pink Floyd

I always thought you can get a fantastic level of truth from any form of art - be it music, film, visual art, photography, or whatever. We teach English and American literature in public schools, as if the printed page were the only conduit of truth - yet there are surprising parallels between poetry and prose and other forms of art. We concentrate on literacy, which obviously is important to a functioning society, but we leave out the appreciation of the higher arts - and even some of the lower arts - to develop a full-bodied mind, a mind capable of thinking fluidly and communicating with images and sounds as well as letters and numbers.

I was considering the following passage from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (I feel that, despite the fact that all we can credit as Shakespeare's is the text, the full experience comes from seeing and hearing one of his plays well stage and delivered. Nevertheless, I'm reproducing the text only here - imagine whichever intonation and visual image you want):

[THESEUS:] The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imatination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imatination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!
[Act V, Scene i, Lines 7-22]

The whole celebration of what one might call deliciously warped minds - atypical thinking - and the rolling of the lines in my mind: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet...The lunatic...The lunatic..."

Naturally, where was there to go but the song "Brain Damage," from Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon? Obviously songwriter Roger Waters had former bandmate Syd Barrett in mind, who had written most of their first record and pointed the band toward a trippy, spacey musical direction. Of course, in the year since their first record, Barrett's overuse of LSD, combined with an already less-than-stable mental condition (speculations run from schizophrenia to Asperger's syndrome) led him to erratic, unpredictable performances and his inevitable departure from the band, from whence he released a few solo albums and lived in seculsion in his Cambridge home before dying in 2006. This fascination shows up constantly in Waters' songwriting with Pink Floyd, and no more poigniantly than in "Brain Damage."

The version below is not the 1973 album version (which is fantastic nonetheless), but a very recent video of Waters playing the song solo, preceded by him describing the song and his motives behind it. The lack of any accompaniment other than his own sparse, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, combined with his own voice, which by now has cracked and weakened with age, gives the performance an incredible frailty and tenderness that makes it transcendent, and one of my favorite recordings.




London 1595
London 1973
Brooklyn 2008