Plateau

PLATEAU - my interpretation

I'm going to take the approach of understanding poetry which uses four categories or lenses, if you like, for interpretation: Plain sense, tone, feeling, and intention.

PLAIN SENSE: Beginning with the title "Plateau", a plateau is not a mountain peak nor is it necessarily that high. It is quite high. It also means a state of little or no change. This meaning is more negative. However, it is possible that the writer, having grown up in Phoenix, Arizona, may have had the spectacular rocks and plateaus in Monument Valley in mind.

Verse 1: The use of "hand" instead of person is intriguing. A hand can mean a low level worker, i.e. Not someone important but an ordinary Joe like you or me. "has scaled", obviously means has climbed. It has an added meaning of has weighed or measured. I can not help recalling the land surveyor, K. in Kafka's "The Castle" and his arduous and unsuccessful attempts to scale The Castle and meet the mysterious, authoritative, pre-eminent but unreachable official, Klamm, which in Czech significantly means illusion. "The grand old face of the plateau" is clearly positive and expresses admiration and sounds like a challenge. The similarities with Kafka's unfinished novel are considerable and very interesting.

The other references e.g. "Holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand / to beautify the foothills and shake the many hands", must all be referential, all symbolic, and refer to the illusions of religion, and television. These illusions are unstable (you can't build on sand), temporal (sands of time), shallow (not much grows in sand), cosmetic, decorative, entertaining, distracting but also gratifying.

Verse 2 and chorus: "A bucket and a mop" are clearly for cleaning, but for cleaning what? And why is there nothing else on the top? Again, this must be symbolic, so cleansing might be a more appropriate interpretation and that might be connected to the idea of the soul. The "Illustrated book about birds" might be some kind of guide (like for example a bible) to help understand the world maybe as it is. But why "don't be scared? Hitchcock's film "The Birds" comes to mind but it does not make sense here, especially if we are talking emblematically. It might refer to there being too much information which is too complex and we will never understand what we are doing here. Birds are the largest living tetrapod species numbering about ten thousand. However, birds are also a symbol of the souls of the dead. In this case, "don't be scared" might be a very oblique reference to the fear of death.

"Who needs action when you got words". What is this? Is it an observation or a criticism. A reference to complacency, a reference to freedom or ideals etc all being a dead letter? The state of being so caught up in discussions, thoughts and talk that we do not act any more? There seems to be strong irony here. It might refer to personal life, society or even politics. More in general, who can deny that some important things are just never done.

Verse 3: "finished with the mop then you can stop... and the work it was fun", refers to rest and satisfaction from some kind of useful action, however simple, however commonplace and unglamorous. Nothing is hard if done willingly, it can even be enjoyable to do something that is useful.

Verse 4 (last verse): again, "many a hand scanning around looking for the next plateau". Sense of restlessness of dissatisfaction, a search for new challenges, other avenues of research or perhaps, a wish to colonise new places. "However, others decided it was nowhere except for where they stood". Some people prefer to look into themselves, look at consciousness for the answers and consider agitation and change useless or counter productive.

"Those were all just guesses, wouldn't help you if they could" seems to refer to the impossibility of really getting to the bottom of the sense of things.

TONE Here this is conveyed by the music, especially the beat, which is plodding and hypnotic. This gives a sense of relentlessness, labour, hard work, drudgery.

FEELING is communicated perhaps more by Kurt Cobain's voice which becomes very emotional, intense, desperate almost hysterical in the chorus. The feeling conveyed by his singing of the words is existential, surreal, agonised, heart-wrenching. It would be almost absurd unless he is singing about something of vital importance, a question of life or death.

Cobain's voice with its high-pitched intensity in the chorus conveys disbelief and anguish. That is, after all the hard work of scaling the plateau what is found on top is so banal, so confusing, so unsatisfying. The voice returns to its normal pitch in the following verse when the work has been done and satisfaction is expressed.

INTENTION: Given the amount of symbolism in the words, the intention of the song must be to wish to explain reality and interpret life. Is it a search for inner peace, salvation, knowledge, ideals, understanding, meaning, or perhaps even just a wish to get high? The latter is extremely unlikely because there are just too many symbols. The Plateau of the title now perhaps symbolises ideals, or at least something higher and more meaningful than the surrounding desert or foothills, something beyond the everyday, the mundane.

Is all we can expect from life practical work, the need and the chance to maintain some order and cleanliness in our personal lives, in society? Is that all there is in the end, practicalities and some management? Is that life's lesson looking down at things from up above? Probably!

Sergio Savioli