In Medias Res: Friday PSTSS: "If I Had a Boat"

Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday PSTSS: "If I Had a Boat"

This is probably apocryphal (if it comes from an interview, it's not one I've been able to find online anywhere), but supposedly when Lyle Lovett was asked about this song--from his excellent early album Pontiac, though you can also get it on collections like Cowboy Man--he said it was inspired by his childhood confusion over what he wanted to be when he grew up: a pirate, or a cowboy? Much as I doubt the story, I sure hope it's true. It's perfect! After all, what do most little boys want to do? To go after those open spaces, that's what, whether they be the distant horizon or the Texas plains. Why compromise? You don't need a masked ranger to make you do some dirty job, and you definitely don't need a Dale to domesticate you and make you clean up after yourself--you're young and free, you can move like lightning and leave no tracks behind you, and you can take your pony on your boat and ride him and take care of him and watch movies with him and steer across the open seas to your hearts content. Take that, Mr. Grow-Up-and-Take-Your-Place-in-Society!

I mock the individualist mentality here plenty, because I don't agree with it philosophically and because I think it's often harmful. But that doesn't mean I'd like to extinguish it: it's part of the modern package, an inheritance of millions of people struggling for hundreds of years to figure out social systems where, dammit, they can go buy a pony and boat if that's their dream. Lyle here is a poet of that sensibility, that longing which, at its best, is a mature, responsible, quiet insistence (if not defiance) that is a reminder to us all. So take it away, Mr. Lovett, you and all my Texan and libertarian friends (one of whom first introduced me to this song years ago, during a long drive across west Texas from Dallas to San Angelo). I probably won't ever join you on that boat, but hell, sometimes even I would just like to ride or sail away.

If I had a boat,
I'd go out on the ocean.
And if I had a pony,
I'd ride him on my boat.
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean--
Me upon my pony on my boat.

If I were Roy Rogers,
I'd sure enough be single--
I couldn't bring myself to marrying old Dale.
It'd just be me and Trigger--
We'd go riding through them movies,
Then we'd buy a boat and on the sea we'd sail.

And if I had a boat,
I'd go out on the ocean.
And if I had a pony,
I'd ride him on my boat.
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean--
Me upon my pony on my boat

The mystery masked man was smart--
He got himself a Tonto,
'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free.
But Tonto he was smarter,
And one day said kemo sabe:
"Kiss my ass I bought a boat,
I'm going out to sea."

And if I had a boat,
I'd go out on the ocean.
And if I had a pony,
I'd ride him on my boat.
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean--
Me upon my pony on my boat.

And if I were like lightning,
I wouldn't need no sneakers--
I'd come and go wherever I would please.
And I'd scare 'em by the shade tree,
And I'd scare 'em by the light pole,
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea.

And if I had a boat,
I'd go out on the ocean.
And if I had a pony,
I'd ride him on my boat.
And we could all together,
Go out on the ocean--
Me upon my pony on my boat.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Escape by the sea and on ponies are referenced elsewhere in the Lovett body of work:

All my friends told me she was too young
Well I knew that myself and I tried to run
But the faster I ran the more I fell behind
Because she'd already made up her mind

Now there is nothing so deep as the ocean
And there is nothing so high as the sky
And there is nothing so unwavering as a woman
When she's already made up her mind

So now she's sitting at one end of the kitchen table
And she is staring without an expression
And she is talking to me without moving her eyes
Because she's already made up her mind

And she said something about going home
And she said something about needing to spend some time alone
And she wondered out loud what it was she had to find
But she'd already made up her mind

So my friend carry me down to the water's edge
And then sail with me out to that ocean deep
And let me go easy down over the side
And remember me to her

--------------

Now a young girl
She don't know when she's lying
But a woman
Great God she knows how it's done
So mama before I go
There's just one thing on my mind
Which way does that old pony run

And how much is that saddle
And a straight shooting gun
Which way does that old pony run; Friday, February 29, 2008
Russell Arben Fox said...: Harl, thanks for the shout out to "Which Way Does that Old Pony Run," another awesome Lovett tune. But I'm not placing the other song; what is it, and where is it from?; Friday, February 29, 2008
Anonymous said...: "She's already made up her mind" is on the later album Joshua Judges Ruth. JJR is probably my favorite LL album but If I had a Boat was one of the first country songs I learned and Pontiac one of the first three country cassettes I ever bought. (The other two were Dwight Yoakum Guitars Cadillacs etc. etc. and the Garth Brooks album with Friends in Low Places.) I love the similar John Flynn song on his kids album Love Takes a Whole Box of Crayons.

Last night on the late late show I saw old Errol Flynn
Swash his buckle with Olivia Dehavaland
I fell asleep and dreamed I had a moustache pencil-thin
A tall ship and a star to light my way

Sail, sail, sail, sail away
Sail, sail, sail, sail away
I don't know why it is
But sometimes I do wish
That I could sail, sail, sail, sail away

When I was a kid with every birthday I'd barrage
My parents with requests to put down hay in our garage
And buy the palomino I'd ride straight back into Dodge
Sometimes I still wish I could ride away

Ride, ride, ride, ride away
Ride, ride, ride, ride away
I don't know why it is
But sometimes I do wish
That I could ride, ride, ride, ride away

Maybe I'd just take a ride out to the edge of town
Or maybe I'd go far enough to prove the world was round
When troubles that I left behind and troubles that I found
Are just the same... Just the same...

I was still a boy when I first saw an eagle soar
I'd have give anything to wear the wings he wore
And fly so high that nothing really mattered anymore
Except the wind and sun upon my face

Fly, fly, fly, fly away
Fly, fly, fly, fly away
I don't know why it is
But sometimes I do wish
That I could fly, fly, fly, fly away

Sail, sail, sail, sail away
Sail, sail, sail, sail away
I don't know why it is
But sometimes I do wish
That I could sail, sail, sail, sail away; Monday, March 03, 2008

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday PSTSS: "If I Had a Boat"

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