Beach

"Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."



Neil Young is not the first, nor will he be the last, to contemplate, in song, the meaning and meaninglessness of life whilst on a beach. We also have, at the very least, Virgina Woolf and Matthew Arnold as examples. And it cannot be ignored that their specific sense of beach stems, in part, from the fact that Great Britain is a great island. What, perhaps, separates Neil from these others, however, is not the fact that he is a Canadian, but rather the very inexpresiveness of his existential expression. The lyrical content to "On the Beach" is not Neil's best - nor, for that matter, is his vocal delivery. Yet, as my good friend, Forest, noted the other day, that the song lacks in lyrical depth makes it all the more poignant - it emphasizes the human struggle to adequately express what one feels, especially when one is at a loss, adrift on a seemingly solid piece of land that still changes from moment to moment, from wave to wave. For a beach is a threshold: at once the portal to the infinite, the transcendent, and the stark, if amorphous, site of an inexorable terrestriality. Indefinite and definite. Unbounded and bounded. Passion and limit. Oasis and desert. Being and death. We can't drink the water, we can't eat the sand. We can only play in these elements, which are, in this way, always already necessary and superfluous.

Neil has his guitar with him on the beach, too, but even this instrument, in his hands, in these moments, seems to be meandering if not muted, promising something greater than what it is actually able to transmit. To bring it back to matters unbound and bound, Percy Blysse Shelley writes of this same frustrated effort in Prometheus Unbound: "Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran / Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, / Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever." Or, to put it another way, Neil's solos function as some sort of affective homage to a shipwrecked humanity - now landlocked, formerly lost at sea.

The inimitable metaphysical poet, John Donne, also a Brit, and, therefore, also an islander, famously wrote:

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee. -Meditation XVII

Yet, maybe Donne had never been on the beach. He could hear the bells toll, yes, but only because the sound of the waves crashing didn't drown out their song.