Billy Joel, dreams of exotic instruments, and the myth of Er.
TRANSCRIPT
Growing up as a child, I would wake on Saturday mornings to the sound of music playing on the stereo downstairs. My father was typically the first one out of bed in our house, and he would play albums - pretty loudly - while he was doing various chores or starting to prepare breakfast. Sometimes I would hear his voice, singing along under the volume of the speakers. He liked to harmonize with whatever singer he was listening to, and as my sister and I grew older, we learned to do the same.
Perhaps our favorite artist to sing along with was Billy Joel. He made frequent Saturday morning appearances and was the centerpiece of many a vacation road trip sing-along, and the album that was probably played the most was River of Dreams, his final album of all new songs. I was eight years old when River of Dreams was released, and I have a very vivid memory of going to the store with my father to purchase it. With the internet just in its infancy and my father not being much of a magazine reader, both of us had yet to see the cover art for the album, and when we got to the store, he told me that he wanted to find the CD version of the album first. I was confused. CD players had just been invented the year before, and we didn’t have one. When I mentioned this incongruence, he said that, because CDs were bigger, it might be easier to find first, and then, being familiar with the album cover, we might have an easier time finding the cassette tape we actually planned to take home.
It wasn’t long before we found the CD, and I can picture my dad standing there holding it in both hands, studying the artwork and turning it over to read the track listing. Whether he really thought this would make it easier to find the cassette, or whether he just wanted to take in the fullness of this novel technology - perhaps daydream about when we might own a CD player ourselves - I cannot say. But my memory tells me that he relished those moments while studying the CD case. The time came to move on; he replaced the CD back into the central display where they were prominently located, and we moved to the outer walls where the cassette were kept, found what we were looking for, checked out, and rejoined my sister and mother in another part of the shopping mall.
Twenty-nine years later - or in other words, this last summer - I had the privilege of seeing Billy Joel live in concert during what is expected to have been his final tour. The day after the concert, my friend (who had also been at the show) asked me what my favorite song had been. I hadn’t really thought about it, but after doing so for a moment, a natural response seemed to rise up: I had been most excited to hear the song, “River of Dreams”, the title track on the album of the same name. Musing about why I am so fond of this song, I recently realized that it reminds me of an old story that has become a favorite of mine.
“River of Dreams”, by my estimation, is a song about spiritual searching. In an interview recorded many years ago, Joel tells about how the idea for the song came to him upon waking up one day… as if the song came out of a dream. He said that he tried not to write the song, because it had the feel of a gospel song, and he’s not a gospel artist. However, the song’s main hook wouldn’t leave him alone, and so he submitted to writing it. In that interview (which I’ve linked in the show notes), he says, “It’s got all these biblical references; I still don’t know what it means… I’m not a biblical person… but these [visual] images [I had] were very strong, and that’s why I wrote it.” It’s true that the song evokes images reminiscent of biblical language - phrases like “the desert of truth” and “the valley of fear”. However, arguably the most persistent image is that of a man walking down to the banks of a river in search of something that he has lost or forgotten, and it seems as though he believes that the river is a place where he might find it.
For me, this image evokes, not biblical ideas, but the mythology of ancient Greece. In the myth of Er, human souls dwelling in what we will just call the other world await incarnation, and they are birthed into this world only after feeling drawn to the particular story and unique potential unfolding around a individual human life and then agreeing to both the limitations of that life and the divine gifts meant to be brought into the world through that life - what we might call ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’, respectively. The trick is, before actually coming into the world, the souls (our souls) must pass through the River Lethe - also known as the waters of forgetfulness - so that they forget any past life they may have lived, as well as forget the sacred agreements regarding the life they are about to enter.
From what he said in the interview, it seems like Joel had not been aware of this story when he wrote the song, but it seems to me, that the story found a way of being retold through Joel’s songwriting. Consider these lyrics:
In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it's too hard to cross
There’s a clear image here of something sacred that was left behind (we might even say forgotten) on the other side of a river. The song goes on to say:
Even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I’ve been looking for
It’s a beautifully poetic depiction of the human search for meaning - our life-long and (arguably) universal quest to make sense of our place in the universe and uncover the purpose of our individual existence. And while the troubling realities of life in the modern world might suggest that we are experiencing a crisis of meaning - whether in the form of a pessimistic fatalism or existential nihilism - the myth of Er provides another image that might serve as a type of medicine in such a time. Although each soul being born must forget the fate and destiny it has itself chosen and agreed to, each soul is also assigned a companion who still carries the story, who still knows the purpose of one’s life, and whose job it is to remind us of the greater meaning and beauty and potential inherent in our lives. The Greeks called this soul companion the daimon. The Romans called it the genius; this is the original meaning of the word ‘genius’ - not someone who is smarter than the rest of us, but rather the source of divine wisdom and aptitude that exists within every one of us since the moment we were born.
For thousands of years, humans have believed that the daimon works by providing us with clues to let us know we are on the right track… or to offer corrective suggestions if we are not on the right track. These clues include hunches we might have about a certain situation and coincidences that happen in our external, physical lives; and perhaps the most profound form these clues take on are the images and feelings and stories that come to us while our conscious minds are asleep - in other words, our dreams.
For example, when I first purchased my piano and brought it into my home, I began having dreams about pianos and other keyboard instruments. For me, acquiring the piano was an important act of recognizing what I would call one of my soul’s gifts, and doing so transcended a longstanding block to embracing that gift that I had been carrying in the form of a belief that I would never be able to afford (or be willing to spend the money on) a piano of any worthwhile quality. Sometimes, the dreams were about strange keyboard instruments that I had never seen before, being shown to me by a learned old man who had collected them and now wanted me to learn to play them despite my feelings of trepidation regarding my lack of familiarity with the instruments.
In another dream that felt highly significant, I was loaned a piano from a community center that apparently had much value to offer the community, but that value seemed to be unrecognized and more or less ignored by those it could be serving. The piano was beautiful, ornate, and immaculate - crafted out of a exotic red-colored wood and adorned with pieces of trim made of pure gold; the instrument was not at all something you would expect to be owned by such a seemingly under-resourced institution (which is what I considered the community center to be, given a quick surface-level assessment). In the dream, I was pushing the piano through the city where I live, and I knew that I needed to push it all the way home into the nearby suburbs where my house actually was; and I knew that pushing the piano to my house required me to go up a huge hill.
When I woke from that dream, I knew it had a significant message for me; and while I had some questions about the specific details of the message, I knew that the overall tone of the message was positive and encouraging. And while some of the images in the dream might seem somewhat mundane - the room inside the community center where I met one of the staff, the city streets down which I was pushing the piano - the piano itself had such a magical presence, that the story conveyed within the dream seemed quite epic, nothing short of mythic.
As I already mentioned, this was just one dream of many that involve keyboard instruments, and during this significant time in my life, I also had many, many other potent dreams that were about something other than a piano. And what I find to be quite wondrous, is that each and every one of us has access to these clues about the underlying story of our life by way of this steady stream - night after night (or day after day, for those whose intuition seems to visit more during those idle moments while awake) - this steady stream of insight taking shape in the images and feelings and stories brought to us by some autonomous part of the psyche, just flowing by the banks of our conscious mind… a river of dreams, indeed.
And interestingly enough, in the often bivalent cosmology of ancient Greece, running parallel to the river of forgetfulness in the Underworld is the perhaps lesser-known river Mnemosyne: the river of Deep Memory. So, while I do not question him when Billy Joel says that he doesn’t really know what his song means, I can’t help but imagine that the images that filled his verses were inspired by the flow of these archetypal energies - both that of existential forgetfulness and that of deep soulful remembrance - up out of the Underworld of our collective unconscious and into our physical waking world, making their way into our contemplative minds by way of his tuneful songwriting.
And while some may be prone to ask what relevance ancient myths have in our world today, I would respond only by asking in return: When was the last time you watched a movie or read a book and found that it resonated with you on a deep level, so much so that you find yourself carrying the story around as you make yourself breakfast, or drive to work, or change your child’s diapers, or go for a walk around your neighborhood?
This question reminds me again of being in the music store all those years ago with my father as we were buying the River of Dreams album. And now it seems clear to me that he was on to something as he was looking for the CD as a larger image of the artwork that might help him to better locate the cassette tape. It seems to me that every epic story, be it a recent blockbuster or an ancient myth, is simply a retelling of the stories that are playing themselves out inside of us - the personal, unique stories that can belong only to us, because it was our unique individual soul that brought it into the world. And just like the CD helping my dad find the cassette he planned to carry out of the store, these ‘bigger’ stories (although it doesn’t really seem right to call them bigger) are simply the eye catching version that we might use to find (or remember) our own energizing, life-giving narrative.
NOTE
BILLY JOEL INTERVIEW: https://youtu.be/31TIbOlm9kM