April is going, going . . . . We’ve had a dose of JC, so now
time for the other guy. It’s Walpurgisnacht,
a concept I first made acquaintance with in Goethe’s Faust, lo these many years
ago, to find it sustained as well in Mann and Joyce, mutatis mutandis, and in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Teutonic, I am, in part, as well as
Scandinavian, so I’ll lay some genetic claim to the German celebration of the
end of winter, that comes with a big witches’ bonfire and celebration in the
Brocken or Harz mountains. No, I’ve never been. Maybe someday.
And a rainy miserable end of April it is too. Perfect for
the Father of Lies. And what song better to celebrate that “other guy,” than
Mick and Keith’s paean to Lucifer, “Sympathy for the Devil.” The song dates
from that cursed year 1968, when, as I like to say, “all hell broke loose.” The
song is current enough in its sense of atrocity to include in “who killed the
Kennedys” the recent death of Robert Kennedy (6/6/68)… and yes there are three
6s in a row there.
Mick, of course, has the temerity to sing as if he is in
fact the Devil. When, in the film Gimme
Shelter, violence breaks out during the song, Jagger says something about
there always being problems when they play it, suggesting the song is jinxed.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but it certainly has long stood, to me, as a chief song in The Rolling Stones catalog. I first heard it on 1972’s collection Hot Rocks—a very good collection by the
way—and it was instrumental in making me take the Stones more seriously than I
had before. Its film-like montage of great moments of twentieth-century
carnage is surprising.
We get the February Revolution that killed the Czar and his
ministers in the WWI era; we get a tank commander during the Blitzkrieg, for the WWII era; and
we get the killing of the Kennedys in the post-war era, so, Russia, Germany,
and the U.S., while “your kings and queens fought for ten
decades” could reference a century of British rule, though it’s hard to say. In
any case, the “troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay” brings in
the British Raj. The point being that Lucifer, as Jagger conceives him, is just
a global mischief maker. On that same landmark album, Beggars Banquet, “Street Fighting Man” (opener of Side 2 as “Sympathy”
opens the album) points to the current period where perhaps a different kind of
mischief is taking place in the streets.
For it’s safe to say that the Devil is not a street fighting
man. He’s a “man of wealth and taste” and he’s here to make sure that as many people
as possible suffer, meanwhile spreading the blame as widely as possible. The
song interleaves Jean-Luc Godard’s One
Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil),
a rambling discourse on the possibilities for Marxist revolution after the
breakdown of May 1968. The use of “Sympathy for the Devil,” with its conception
of the prelude to the Soviet revolution as basically evil, might suggest that
Godard views the notion of rock as revolutionary quite ironically.
In any case, the part of the song that I take to heart,
making it more or less my current motto is: “So if you meet me have some
courtesy / Have some sympathy and some taste.” Is that too much to ask? The
notion that the 20th century is hell-bent is clear enough but at least one can
maintain a sense of dignity. The song suggests that Satan, whatever else he may be, is a gentleman.
“Courtesy” is a well-chosen word as it suggests the
old world of amour courtois, the tradition
of the troubadours of medieval times, where it denotes the willingness to
undergo “ordeals” for love. From that time of the chivalric dedication of a
knight to his lady comes the notion of courtly behavior as a kind of discretion
and valor and virtue. “Sympathy”—or
“fellow feeling”—might be said to have Christian overtones in the sense that Christ’s pity or sympathy for humanity leads to his sacrifice. The idea
of taking an attitude of sympathy toward Satan's suffering is certainly novel, but not
unheard of, for Milton’s Satan, at least, is at times rather sympathetic. “Taste,” of course, leads us to both
libertinism as well as aestheticism, and to the notion that a life in which one
“tastes” pleasures and enjoys the fruits of the world—including art and fine
human products (and fine human beings)—expresses a high desiderata. Such a man
does become—think only of someone like James Bond—the hero of the era this song
hails from, a man of action able to be discreet, cordial, and discerning.
Pleased to meet you /
Hope you guessed my name / Just what’s puzzling you / Is the nature of my game
A great chorus, with the doo-doos high-pitched and
insistent, the congas bouncing, as though a kind of tribal Walpurgisnacht were
being celebrated for our ears. What is the nature of the Devil’s game, anyway?
To carry away our souls? To conquer the world or to lay waste the world, simply spreading as much ruin, even “creative destruction,” as possible?
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