Still "From the Narrow Desert"

A few weeks ago I discovered and started listening to a second Vampire Weekend song, "Step":

This is the chorus:

The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones
I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone

Given the immediate context, I don't think "the wisdom teeth are out" refers to routine dental surgery. It means "the snake has bared its fangs," snakes being a metonym for wisdom ("wise as serpents"). The third line reinforces this reading with its (probably unintentional) nod to Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Listening to "Step" now, I naturally think of Narrow Brain, "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one," the malevolent spirit in Time and Mr. Bass. In the post I've just linked, I noted with concern the link between Narrow Brain and my blog title From the Narrow Desert. It's a line from a poem by George MacDonald in Phantastes. The complete couplet is:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,
Come into the house, so high and wide.

I've been thinking of the implications of that last line because of the recent syncs relating to the Wise Men: "And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him" (Matt. 2:11).

And what does the chorus of "Step" say? "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

I started to think that maybe it was time to retire the name From the Narrow Desert. I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview. And, I thought, haven't I done that? I made it -- right, guys? Whatever else you might say about me, I'm not a narrow materialist anymore. I've made it into the house. Maybe I should change the blog name to High and Wide.

When I played "Step" just now, YouTube queued up after it an unfamiliar song by an unfamiliar band: "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco:

The video shows Brendon Urie walking up the side of a skyscraper in Los Angeles until he reaches the roof, where he performs with his band. At first I took this as confirmation -- it's a house that's very high -- but almost immediately I realized that this interpretation didn't sit well with me. Urie (a lapsed Mormon, incidentally, and not in a good way) never actually goes into the building. He stays on the outside, never entering its heart, and uses it to realize his "high hopes" -- which turn out to be no higher than some vapid dream of being a famous pop star. This isn't the imagery of the Wise Men bowing down to the infant Christ, but of the people who wanted "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven," an idea planted in their hearts by the same being who plotted with Gadianton (Hel. 6:28).

Returning to "Step," "Such a modest mouse!" now seems like a sarcastic response to "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

In 2002, They Might Be Giants released their first children's album, No!, and these lines from "The House at the Top of the Tree" startled me:

There's a plan to eat the house
In the mind of a mouse in the woods.

Back when I lived in Maryland, more than a decade before this song was released, we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. The tree was down in a ravine, so the tree house could be entered by a ramp connecting it to higher ground, without the need for a ladder. One time my sister and I went into the tree house only to find two large snakes coiled around the radio. They looked like colubrids of some kind, and therefore non-venomous, but they still scared us enough that we turned tail and ran back down the ramp.

A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house. I could feel its presence and its thoughts, like those of the nightmare toad. Although I thought of it as a "mouse," my mental image was of a very large animal almost like a rodent grizzly bear. When I saw the illustration associated with the TMBG song, it startled me even more:

Where do mental images come from? Why would we get the same one like that?

I've been reading the Psalms, a few a day, and today these two passages jumped out at me:

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me (Ps. 131:1).

Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob; Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house . . . until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob (Ps. 132:1-5).

So no, I'm not going to rename the blog. High hopes to one side, these posts remain dispatches from the narrow desert.