WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS AND THE SMALLPOX BLANKETS
Sat. Jan. 5th, 2019
Today I heard the Beatles' recording of George Harrison's
song While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the radio.
I am grateful to my favorite radio station, 957theride.com for playing
this great classic of rock and roll, at a time when I needed something to distract
me from the ridiculous sore throat which has dogged me all fall and into
January, and to distract me from the ridiculous mistakes I have made.
And I'm grateful as always to Wikipedia for their wonderful
article about the song. (Quotations below
from the Wikipedia article reflect the state of the article as of the date I'm
writing this, Sat. January 5th, 2019.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/While_My_Guitar_Gently_Weeps
shows that over time various groups of people have agreed with me that
Harrison's song is one of the greatest which rock and roll has to offer (see the
footnote at the end).
And the article is
a wonderful summary of the work of many musical critics who have tried to put
into words how the song came into existence, and what makes it so great.
Wikipedia quotes a critic who wrote that one more recent recording
of the song by another musician recaptures the grandeur of the Beatles'
recording of the song.
And I, as a child of the sixties, feel that grandeur is an
appropriate word to use.
Just as various memorable people of the Elizabethan era have
been described as having given of their best to glorify the reign of their Queen
Elizabeth I, so it seems to me that the Beatles, especially in their later
period from 1966 to 1970, may be said to have glorified the reign of Queen
Elizabeth II -- not by praising her, but by using the gifts which God had given
them to their utmost ability: by pushing the talents given to them as far as
they would go.
In this essay I will try to meditate on two themes that
appear in Harrison's words. One theme is
what Wikipedia calls "the world's unrealised potential for universal love"
--
I look at
you all, see the love there that's sleeping,
While my
guitar gently weeps.
The other theme is the theme of manipulation:
I don't
know why-y you were diverted, you were perverted too.
I don't
know why-y you were inverted, no one alerted you.
The Wikipedia article places more emphasis on the failure of
universal love than on the theme of manipulation, and this essay will move in
the same direction as the Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia quotes a theologian, Dale Allison, who wrote about Harrison's
song. Using double quotation marks for
my quotation from Wikipedia, and single quotation marks for one of Wikipedia's
quotations from Dale Allison, we arrive at this quote:
"Allison writes that the lyrics
represent the 'antithesis of spiritual triumphalism', in which Harrison 'mourns
because love has not conquered all'."
And here we turn aside to a brief unpacking of Allison's reference
to spiritual triumphalism. It is a clear
reference to the words and music of certain hymns. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Venantius
Fortunatus wrote in his Easter hymn "Welcome, Happy Morning!", as
translated by the Victorian John Ellerton, "Hell today is vanquished,
heav'n is won today"; and in his Victorian hymn "Crown Him with Many
Crowns," Matthew Bridges wrote "Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns
all music but its own." These are
examples of the tendency of Christians to write and speak, in a spirit of
longing, as if future consummations have already arrived. And the Victorian music which very properly
belongs with these two hymns is well-described as triumphalist! I love to sing them. But they do not present a well-rounded
picture of our world, and that is what While My Guitar Gently Weeps seems to me
to correct.
Now we turn to the grim subject of the smallpox
blankets. This is a disaster of American
history, a terrifying moral failure of my white American people. The smallpox disease came to North America
with the Europeans. When children of
some of the white people died of smallpox, their doctors told the grieving
parents to dispose of the blankets with which they had tried to keep the children
warm before they died, because the blankets were contaminated with the disease,
and certain men offered to dispose of the blankets for the parents. This was done and the certain men -- I have
done no research on their names, occupations, backgrounds, conditions, or
anything about them -- gave the blankets to Native Americans, and the disease
germs which were in the blankets gave smallpox to the Native Americans, and
large numbers of Native Americans, adults and children, died of the smallpox
because of this miserable failure of compassion
which asks the question "Why did the heavens not darken?"
The question right now before me is, do you want to approach
the disaster of the smallpox blankets as an example of manipulation -- people
tricking an ethnic group with whom they had no sympathy -- or do you want to
approach this disaster as an example of the failure of universal love?
- - -
My answer is, the root of the evil is not in the manipulation,
not in the treachery implicated in withholding the life-threatening facts about
the history of the blankets -- the root of the evil is in the monstrous failure
of universal love.
- - -
It is also a monstrous failure of supervision! The grieving parents, and white society in
general in this earlier American century of which I speak, failed to control
the behavior of the men who stepped forward to dispose of the blankets. White society may have tried to extract
certain promises from the men who stepped forward, but if that was tried, there
was no mechanism to insure that the promises were carried out -- no mechanism
to control the behavior of the givers and receivers and re-givers of the disease-infected
goods. The poisonous blankets would have
passed from people with more moral qualms to people with fewer moral qualms, and
from them to people with even fewer moral qualms, or else to people totally
lacking in supervisory gifts.
Love is not supposed to die after the first outward
ripple. And intelligent supervision --
which includes governmental controls designed and instituted to thwart
wickedness -- at its best, is the servant of love.
Harrison put these two themes, manipulation and the failure
of universal love, into the words of his song, which he wrote along with its
musical spine. (Others contributed to
the instrumentation.) Of these, the
greater is the failure of universal love.
"I look at you all, see the love there that's
sleeping" -- it refers to the good deeds which will proceed in the future from
the person being looked at. But from
every one of us, there are also evil deeds to come in future. To me, Harrison's guitar Lucy says, Moses
gave you this law, because of your hardness of heart.
Rules for the disposal of contaminated blankets are
necessary.
Frank Newton
- - -
Footnote. Touchingly,
the Wikipedia article refers to the praise the Rolling Stones gave to this
great song by one of the Beatles: "In their written tributes to Harrison
following his death in November 2001, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards each
expressed their admiration for the song."
