How a Jimi Hendrix song got me to leave town

1. The cue: a "song signal"

“Important news!” I wrote to a friend the other week… “I finally sleuthed the song lyrics for the musical motif, of three ascending notes, that was in my head for much of the other weekend; which you may have had the pleasure of hearing me repeatedly hum, trying to recall the song and lyrics.”

It’s from the Jimi Hendrix song “Hear My Train a Comin’”; as hearable in classic, solo acoustic, my favorite version, charmingly captured in the 1968 documentary about him, Experience¹. The image at top of this post is of him playing this.

What was stuck in my was the opening three notes of the main part of the song, repeated at one later point, the lyrics for which go:

“Well, I wait around the train station/ Waiting for that train…”

“Gonna leave this town, yeah/ Gotta leave this town…”

I regularly experience this phenomenon, where I recall and fixate on a musical phrase, only recalling the notes. Then I eventually sleuth the song and lyrics for it, and invariably find they are distinctly expressive of something I’m recurrently thinking about.

This kind of unconscious expression through song recollection; or a case of it, I decided to term “song signal.”

2. From signal to seed

What is done when one goes from some passing thought or experience, to naming it as a concept, like “song signal”? I’d say, it’s like going from a gene fragment to a seed. The former is some amount of signal, but it’s fragile, incomplete, and to our eyes invisible. A seed, on the other hand, is sturdy, a package, with a casing and nutrients; it can be gathered, stored, sown, and can grow into a whole organism.

Or consider as another case, how unconscious impulses can turn into vivid, complex dreams, in the process that Freud called ‘dreamwork’ (‘traumarbeit’) in The Interpretation of Dreams.² The song example, and the dreamwork concept, may help explain why so often, small things like a song, or term or phrase, can be so powerful, so epochal in one’s life. They’re succinct, but may be like the visible tip of an iceberg of far larger underwater meanings and movements. As Neil Young said, “a song is a seed.” Or it’s like a lever, a small thing which if placed rightly, it can as Archimedes said, move the world. In this case, as usual, the world, no; but it moved me.

Gotta leave this town…

Indeed, I had been often thinking about leaving that town, or cluster of towns, I’ve been in, one way or another, mostly abstractly. The song signal made me stop and listen, over and over, and feel; then investigate, decode, leading to a ‘Eureka’ moment. I being me, that prompted building a concept on it, and finding a term, which for me seems always how new ideas and pathways form, how to make sense of anything. How to, amid the vast “discordant concord of things” as Horace described³, find a footing, take a step, and place a lever: in the beginning is the word.⁴

The word-seed got me thinking further, giving me a topic to write on and energy to carry on; and that was really the whole point, because this was a key stumbling-block and preoccupation.

It’s hard to say what directly causes what, but as former Oregon Poet Laureate, William Stafford, wrote, “The authentic is a line from one thing/ along to the next”⁵; and not long after all this, I actually did leave that town. I’m now on the road, on another open-ended, cross-continent road-trip.

Also, it was a successful flight for a project/platform I’ve developed for the last year, on precisely the idea of gathering and growing such seeds, making such levers, hopefully making some thing or some sense out of the void.

But more on that later. As Beck said: “I’m on the run with things to be…”. (from the song “Burnt Orange Peel,” recorded in 1993 in Olympia, Washington, close to where I currently am.⁶ That’s a clue!).

3. Possibilist

This is also an opening post, for this quietly started newsletter I’m calling ‘Possibilist’, in which I plan to post stories from and thoughts about movable dwelling and my related, unfolding projects. There is of course a backstory about how and why I’ve used this term Possibilist, as a self-description and for a string of project experiments, for over a decade now. But I’ll leave that for some other time, and meanwhile leave you, or at least leave the search engines, with this small story that’s an example: of a seed of possibility surfacing, finding a name and expression, and moving forward.

References

¹ Jimi Hendrix (song and lyrics). “Hear My Train A Comin.” Acoustic version, seen in documentary film Experience (1968), see clip at https://youtu.be/Vrs0XgnXsxk?si=aWETIXqD47yfx0Ct. (also included in the 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix, the accompanying soundtrack album, and the 1994 compilation Jimi Hendrix: Blues).

² Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, 1898.

³ “discordant concord of things”: from the Latin, “Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors?” —Horace, Epistles 1.12.19.

[‘What is the meaning and effect of nature’s jarring concord?” in Niall Rudda, trans., Satires and Epistles of Horace and Satires of Persius. (London: Penguin, 1979; Reprinted with revisions 1987,1997, and 2005).

Also commonly translated, more explicatively if less deftly, “the concord of things through discord.”

⁴ “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” —John 1:1, KJV. [Original Greek: “En arkhêi ên ho Lógos, kaì ho Lógos ên pròs tòn Theón, kaì Theòs ên ho Lógos.”].

⁵ “The authentic is a line from one thing along to the next; it interests us. strangely, it relates to what works, but is not quite the same.”

—from William Stafford, “An Introduction To Some Poems,” in The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, but originally Port Townsend, WA pretty near where I am; 1998).

⁶ Beck, “Burnt Orange Peel.” from lo-fi classic album One Foot in the Grave, 1994. https://youtu.be/kqPaxe2ujIQ?si=kI5AhsDChVJCbkYl.

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