I Started a Joke

This is a very hard song to read, and we will try to comment on it in a way that does not detract from the meaning. At any rate, we are the "listeners themselves" who "have to try to interpret it themselves." The inspired song came to him following a bit of nervous collapse, and he heard the melody in the four engines of a plane he was riding in. Were he not a wealthy songwriter, he might be considered abnormal and drugged. The reaction to things said is like things said in awakened states, and the way these things can grate one as they come back later upon reflection. Socrates would say he had a little man at home with a stick who would beat him for his errors in speech. Prudence in speech is a high virtue. The things he said, in line four, is the joke that opens the song in line one. That the joke started the "whole world" crying is difficult, and in trying to understand the universal effect, people have mentioned Jesus, the Devil and Hitler. Another possibility is that the Joke is this song, which everyone in the world has now heard. In 1967-8, he may be introducing a new kind of despair into the expression of ballads, as such things were not said in public previously. But in what way is the Joke on him? He had gone into a fit where he could not stop crying, after being in a train wreck, and the joke being on him would fit with the sorrow expressed by inspiration in the song shattering his soul a bit, as it does to see the deeply sad things covered over so we can just get through our days. If one will look at the skies and run their hands over their eyes, one will see the meaning of this line a bit: it is an involuntary gesture of anguish universal to man, as is waving and such. It means that we look to the highest things for an explanation one does not expect to find, and clear our eyes as though they must be blurred over, given what we are seeing. They had just done the song about the mining disaster, for example, then he saw the train wreck and was unable to help the injured on the scene. Mary Lee Foote, at NaPathon.net, mentioned above, reads his falling out of bed to mean "out of his dream state into reality." Has he seen the principle of tragedy, that Providence upholding the just is not what the world is about, or is not quite what is going on here ? That his death starts the whole world living is indeed like Jesus, but is also like the poet, whose "words trickle down from a wound" he has "no intention to heal" (Simon). The alienation of one whose joke makes everyone else cry, and whose death to live. The "schizophrenic" can be that alone, that alienated from human community, which makes even parrots pull out their feathers. That the joke is on him, though, is that the sorrow he saw brings him down, and this is part of the principle of tragedy that he has seen.