Sawdust and Diamonds

This was in an article on Joanna: some of it relates to this song:

"...The last element of Newsom’s magnum opus to arrive was its title. Newsom spent a long time fishing for a name that would encapsulate the spirit of the project. One night she dreamed about the title, a swirling reverie that featured the letters Y and S smashing together in unusual combinations. Afterwards she began searching for a single-syllable word that bluntly combined the two letters. At the same time, Newsom also finally got around to reading the fantasy novel on her nightstand, which happened to be her best friend’s favorite book. She thought the novel might be cheesy, but she loved it. And one night, there it was: a passage about a seaside castle that had been raised 'by the magic of the ancient folk of Ys.'

"Et voila–Newsom had found her title. Ys is a lost city immortalized in the folklore of Brittany, a region that lies along the northwest coast of France. As Newsom read more deeply into the legend, things got a little spookier. Here, in a nutshell, is one version of the tale: Dahut, the blond daughter of King Gradlon, begs her father to build her a citadel by the sea. And so he does, creating a city that’s protected from the waves by an enormous wall of stone whose one entrance, a gigantic bronze door, is opened by a key that Gradlon carries around his neck. Like a lot of seaside towns, Ys attracts horny sailors laden with goods, and Dahut makes a wicked pact with the powers of the ocean to make the already decadent city rich. The agreement is rather kinky: every night the princess takes a new sailor as a lover, and places a black mask on his head. In the morning, when the song of the meadowlark is heard, the mask strangles the guy, whose body is then offered to the waves. Eventually Dahut meets her match: a haughty crimson-clad lover who persuades her to slip the key from around the neck of her sleeping father. The rake then opens the gates of Ys to the raging ocean, which swallows the city. Father and daughter escape on a magic steed, but daddy is forced to drop the princess into the sea and she drowns. In some tellings, she is then transformed into a mermaid.

"Newsom saw so many parallels between this story and her own that it freaked her out. There were the themes of decadence and excess, of fathers and daughters and boundaries burst, not to mention details like the meadowlark and the heroine’s underwater metamorphosis. Then Newsom stumbled across the clincher: according to Breton folklore, on calm days along the coast you can hear the sunken bell of the cathedral of Ys, tolling evermore. Later, as Newsom finished the fantasy novel, she stumbled across yet another uncanny echo of her own tale: a line that spoke of 'that damnable bell,' a direct sample, as it were, from 'Sawdust & Diamonds.'

To me, the song seems to be told from the point of view of a sailor and also his wife/significant other that waits for him. Most of the song seems to be told from the point of view of the wife, up until the lyrics “in the trough of the waves which are pawing like dogs.” As I see it, the sailor left on a voyage and never returned. Throughout life we all have moments like the sailor's wife where we contemplate eternity and a possible afterlife.

The song starts out with someone seemingly philosophizing about eternity- I believe this is the wife, she asks if her lover will wait for her at the door to eternity so to speak. There is no mention of setting for most of the work, this adds a dream-like quality to the piece. The bell symbolizes the memory of the loved ones that left us, thus when the bell is dropped from the “top of the wide, white stairs” it falls forever and echoes not just throughout our remaining days, but forever as it passes from generation to generation.

After the death of a loved one we're left with memories, and like a bell falling down a staircase they never fade from our lives completely. But if someone leaves on a ship and is lost in a storm many times they are never seen or heard from again, this was especially true a hundred years ago or more. Their family and friends would be left wondering whether their loved one's ship crashed in a foreign land and they didn't have a way back, if they are slowly dying on a deserted island, or if they died before anyone even realized that something went wrong. The memory of the sailor is muted by the waves, by the possibility that they aren't gone forever. Not to say that the memory of them is forgotten, because it would still be there despite the lack of closure, but the most powerful feeling associated with the sailor would be the hope that they're still alive somewhere out there.

The sailor's wife was so deep in thought, and grief, at the start of the poem that she was in a listless, trance-like state as she fell asleep. “The moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor, though no longer bereft, how I shook, and I couldn't remember.” From these lines I gather that she began to dream, and all of the lines up until “in the trough of the waves which are pawing like dogs” are taken from her dream. The dream itself is made up of fractionated memories that have been filled with new symbolic meaning. The point of view seems to shift to the sailor aboard his vessel with the line “In the trough of the waves which are pawing like dogs,” but this could have been the wife dreaming of the sailor's fate.

Without reading the whole thing, and just commenting on the first and last stanze in the song, I'm pretty positive she's talking about eternity. There was an interview with Joanna where she said that all her songs are an attempt to remake a dream she had when she was a little girl about these dogs and cats with party hats, but anyway, there were these stairs, and she had these sense that they were eternity. Check it out at Milky Moon. So, there's probably more, but I thought that was pretty cool.

this has been one of my favorites ever since i first heard the green man recording of it as posted on milkymoon. it's one of those songs almost cinematic in drama, to me about that quiet pondering everyone tends to fall into over the afterlife or whatever. when you lose people in your life you start to wonder if when you expire, they'll be waiting for you there "at the top of the wide white stairs."

the imagery having to do with false angels rising with wires and flying with wings of clipped magazines and cardboard is so vivid for me, so gorgeous.

"what was yours and mine appears to be a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes,"

there's something so touching in these lines for me. sometimes it seems no matter how much tender loving care you put into something, there's always a wave that can easily take it away.

"

"Hold me close," cooed the dove who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.

-one of my favorite lines ever.

"I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight no, I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright"

The latter fits well with a deer (or similar) being born, and immediately on the hoof.

As poetically obscure as these lyrics might be, the effect is beautiful and touching. It's difficult to express how much I love this song!

This song brings to mind part of a poem by Federico García Lorca that seems to be chasing the same thing:

My heart of silk is filled with lights, with lost bells, with lilies and bees. I will go very far, farther than those hills, farther than the seas, close to the stars, to beg Christ the Lord to give back the soul I had of old, when I was a child, ripened with legends, with a feathered cap and a wooden sword

I wonder is it a coincidence?

This song has a lot of references to zen Buddhism, in which you give up desire to find enlightenment. They say carry water and chopped wood..become enlightened and carry water and chopped wood.
Also, i heard this song played on a piano rather than a harp, it sounds like a ticking clock. Which makes me think that it's really just about life, and running out of time.

youtube.com/watch

"(...)supposedly when the sea is still and quiet, somedays you can still hear the bells of the cathedral of Ys ringing under the water, and that takes place on one of my songs"