Sync: Ne(m)o and Morpheus

Today an obscure song from 30 years ago, one I haven't listened to or thought of in ages, came to mind. In order to establish that its coming to mind had nothing to do with my recent posts about The Matrix, I will have to describe my train of thought in some detail.

First of all, few days ago, I happened to be looking through my old sync log from 2016-17. One of the notes I read was this one:

2016 Mar 3 (Thu) – I read a few pages (pp. 87-89) of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine in [a cafe called] FM Station. They were playing the Lukas Graham song “7 Years,” which I had never heard before. It begins:

Once I was seven years old, my mama told me

Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely.

Once I was seven years old.

It then goes through various other ages: once I was 11, 20; soon I’ll be 30, 60. It ends by repeating the opening lines quoted above.

While listening to this, I was reading pp. 88-87 [sic] of Dandelion Wine. The children are discussing how Colonel Freeleigh is a “Time Machine” because he can remember so many of his past experiences.

‘Maybe old people were never children, like we claim with Mrs. Bentley, but, big or little, some of them were standing around at Appomattox the summer of 1865.’

Tom and Doug discuss what Doug calls “far-traveling” – meaning going back in time through memory.

“Far-traveling. You make that up?”

“Maybe yes and maybe no.”

“Far-traveling,” whispered Tom.

“Only one thing I’m sure of,” said Douglas, closing his eyes. “It sure sounds lonely.”

Thus the chapter ends.

A bit earlier in the book, on pp. 72-73, old Mrs. Bentley insists that she was once a little girl, but the children refuse to believe it. She shows them a photo to prove that she was 7 years old once.

In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old…

“Who’s this little girl?” asked Jane.

“It’s me!”

The two girls held onto it.

“But it doesn’t look like you,” said Jane simply. “Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.”

They looked at her for a long moment.

“Any more pictures, Mrs. Bentley?” asked Alice. “Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?”

The girls chortled.

“I don’t have to show you anything!” said Mrs. Bentley.

“Then we don’t have to believe you,” replied Jane.

“But this picture proves I was young!”

“That’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.”

Like the song, this focuses on the fact that one was younger in the past – with a specific focus on “seven years old.” Both also emphasize loneliness.

That was several days ago. Today I was doing some mindless paperwork and humming to myself and discovered that what I was humming was the 1967 Monkees song "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)," with the repeated line, "Oh, how I wish tomorrow would never come." It occurred to me that this was similar to Bob Dylan's line "The present now will later be past," in that both highlighted the need for a Dunnean model in order to make sense of the passage of time. If there is only one dimension of time, then the past never was -- and the future never will be -- the present. Tomorrow will never come, and Mrs. Bentley never was seven years old.

This made me think of the sync notes quoted above, and I tried to remember the term the children in Dandelion Wine had used for revisiting the past through memory -- "long-journeying"? I see now that it was actually "far-traveling," but "long-journeying" is what came to mind and what made me think of the 1993 Moxy Früvous song "Morphée," which begins with the words "Longue journée." It's all in French, a language of which I am relatively ignorant, and I never was very clear on most of the lyrics. I tried to sing it to myself but had to lapse into humming and dum-de-dumming for most of it. All I could remember was "Longue journée . . . chez Morphée . . . ce doux piège . . . et je fuis, je fuis . . . je rêne

Nemo en exil sur mes rêves fragiles" -- which I figured meant "Long journey . . . at Morpheus's place . . . something-something . . . and I went, I went . . . I reign, Nemo in exile, over my fragile dreams." Translating je fuis as "I went" was just a guess (wrong, it turns out), based on Spanish, and I hadn't the slightest idea what ce doux piège might mean, though it was one of the lines I remembered most clearly.

Then I thought: Morpheus! Nemo! I've just been posting about Morpheus and Neo -- and "Morphée" was released six years before The Matrix. Morpheus is the god of dreams, of course, but why "Nemo"? Is it a reference to those trippy old Little Nemo in Slumberland comics?

Sure enough, the very first panel of the very first Little Nemo strip (1905) mentions "His Majesty, Morpheus of Slumberland."

And what does ce doux piège mean? It turns out it means "this sweet trap." Here's the French Wikipedia article on the Venus flytrap:

Here are the complete lyrics of "Morphée":

Longue journée

Qui s'achève dans une chambre foncée

J'entends au loin les sirènes

Qui comme une vague me tirent, m'amènent

Chez Morphée

Émerveillé

Ce doux piège

Ou les gammes en délire s'arpègent

M'emportent si loin des villes

Et je fuis,

je fuis les escadrilles du privilège

Beau sortilège

On solde les vieux pays au marché des gorilles

Caché dans les bras de Morphée je rêne

Nemo en exil

Sur mes rêves fragiles

And here, since no real translation seems to be available and I can't be bothered to do it myself (at least not now; I probably will do later), is the Google Translate version:

Long day

That ends in a dark room

I hear the sirens in the distance

Which like a wave pulls me, brings me

To Morpheus

Amazed

This sweet trap

Where delirious scales arpeggio

Take me so far from the cities

And I run away

I flee the squadrons of privilege

beautiful spell

We sell the old countries at the gorilla market (???)

Hidden in the arms of Morpheus I reign

Nemo in exile

On my fragile dreams

That's "scales" as in do-re-mi, incidentally.