[On September 7th, 1776, the Revolutionary forces employed the Turtle, the first submersible to be used in warfare. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and other submarine stories in our history and culture, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of my favorite people who has a special sub connection!]
A few key details that open up a handful of the many ways to read John Mayer’s ambiguous, beautiful masterpiece of a song.
- “He’s working away on displacement/And what it would take to survive”: The most essential question about how we read “Walt Grace” is whether we see the submarine as literal or metaphorical, as a real invention to take the title character away from “his whole place” or a symbolic stand-in for such escape. Either way, Walt “dreamed to discover a new space,” but there are still significant differences between the literal and metaphorical subs, especially when it comes to lines like the one on which this item focuses: displacement and survival mean very real scientific things when it comes to submarines, and also very definite psychological and life challenges when it comes to, y’know, being a human. I’m not going to tell you how I read this song, not in this item and not anywhere in this post—not least because I think the multiple readings, the multilayered ambiguities, are precisely the point.
- The title: While much of “Walt Grace” is thus purposefully vague, the setting is strikingly specific, with those two extra words in the title telling the audience exactly when these events take place. In some ways setting the song some forty-five years before its 2012 release just adds extra haziness, moving the audience from the present into an imagined past that is nicely established by the airy, jazzy tone-setting of the song’s instrumental opening. But maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about sub stories all week, and about some Cold War such stories in yesterday’s posts, but I do think that choosing 1967 for the song’s specific setting does also locate us in the nuclear age, that time when (as I wrote yesterday) subs were one the main delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons, when “submarine tests” thus meant something quite different in military terms, and when Tokyo (the song’s other specifically mentioned setting) likewise echoed nuclear histories.
- “That morning/The sea was mad and I mean it”: Despite the number of times my wife and I had listened to this song (a large number, I assure you), I’ll admit that I hadn’t given this specific line much thought until I taught “Walt Grace” last Fall as part of my First-Year Writing unit on close reading song lyrics (I plan to do the same this Fall). But when I did, I came to love that “I mean it” as much as I do any choice in this magisterial song, because it adds a whole new layer: that of storytelling, of our speaker explicitly creating and presenting Walt Grace’s story as a narrative for his audience. That’s another ambiguous detail to be sure—did the speaker know Walt, perhaps as his son for example? Or is it just John himself, breaking the musical fourth wall?—but whatever else we make of it, it reminds us that this text, like every text and every history on which I’ve focused all week, is a story, crafted and told and passed on as they all always are. And many of our best stories, for 250 years now, happen to be sub stories.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Sub stories you’d share?
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