Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song

If you know the movie, you know this scene.

I wouldn't say that Communion (1989) is one of my favorite films, but I just love the fact that it exists: the story of alien abductee Whitley Strieber, played by Christopher Walken, with a soundtrack by the great Eric Clapton. Strieber comes from a Catholic family with deep roots in San Antonio, but Walken, apparently going by his German surname and Manhattan workplace, plays him as a neurotic New York Jew who says things like "Oy vey, what a day, what a schmear!" and describes his alien visitors as "little blue fuckers about that big."

I dreamed that I was watching that movie, but some of the scenes were different. There was a scene where Strieber was having a beer with Budd Hopkins (who does not appear in the real film, having been replaced by a fictional female psychologist) and kvetching about the aliens that had been making themselves at home in his cabin. "I'm telling ya, Budd," he says, "these rats run around like they own the place!"

Upon waking, I realized that that was a line from the Gordon Lightfoot song "Circle of Steel" (1974) -- and then that the opening lines of that song sound an awful lot like a reference to a UFO.

Rows of lights in a circle of steel
Where you place your bets on a great big wheel
High windows flickerin' down through the snow

A circle of steel with rows of lights sounds like a flying saucer, and the windows of a house don't "flicker down through the snow," so they must be the windows of something that is descending, such as an aircraft or spacecraft. (I honestly have no idea what Lightfoot is really talking about here. Roulette wheels aren't steel and don't have rows of lights. Is it a Ferris wheel? If so, how is that relevant to the rest of the song?)

There's also this line, which could as easily be about the wee folk as about Child Protective Services.

The child is strong
A week, a day, they will take it away

Although Lightfoot obviously intended nothing of the sort, this reminds me of "The Fairies" by William Allingham:

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.

A further coincidence is that "Circle of Steel" is set at Christmastime, as is Communion.

Update: What is Walken best known for? The “more cowbell” sketch, featuring the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Hours after posting this, I put my music on random shuffle, and the first song it played was this:

What species was Bitter Green?

Is the title character in the Gordon Lightfoot song "Bitter Green" (1968) a dog, a horse, or a woman?

Upon the bitter green she walked the hills above the town
Echo to her footsteps as soft as eider down

This certainly sounds like a horse. A grazing animal would naturally spend its time "upon the . . . green," and only the footsteps of a large hoofed animal would echo through the hills. A woman's footsteps might echo on pavement, but not on a green. It's hard to know what to make of the last phrase, since "footsteps as soft as eiderdown" surely means silent footsteps, the kind that don't echo. Anyway, on balance these lines support the horse theory.

Waiting for her master to kiss away her tears
Waiting through the years

"Master" normally refers to the human owner of a domestic animal, but it might be used poetically of a woman's husband or lover. Tears of sorrow, on the other hand, are shed only by human beings, but again could be ascribed poetically to other species. Waiting through the years for one's master to return is a behavior most stereotypically associated with dogs, but horses and women have also been known to do it.

Bitter Green they called her
Walking in the sun
Loving everyone that she met

"Loving everyone that she met" sounds like an animal, and specifically like a dog. Applied to a woman, the phrase is rather scandalous and also seems inconsistent with the idea of a Penelope patiently waiting for her true love to return. "Bitter Green" itself also seems like a name that would be more naturally given to an animal than to a person. A woman would be known by that rather strange nickname only if no one knew who she was or what her real name was, which is inconsistent with "loving everyone that she met."

Bitter Green they called her
Waiting in the sun
Waiting for someone to take her home

This also sounds like an animal. A woman whose husband or lover had disappeared would still have a home and would naturally wait there (perhaps by the window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door) rather than in the sun.

Some say he was a sailor who died away at sea
Some say he was a prisoner who never was set free
Lost upon the ocean he died there in the mist
Dreaming of her kiss

Horses don't kiss people, but dogs and women do.

But now the bitter green is gone, the hills have turned to rust

Is this just a seasonal change? But Bitter Green waited "through the years."

There comes a weary stranger, his tears fall in the dust
Kneeling by the churchyard in the autumn mist
Dreaming of a kiss

This strongly supports the woman theory. The most natural interpretation is that the long-awaited "master" finally returns, but too late, and kneels in tears at Bitter Green's grave. It seems unlikely that a dog or horse would have been buried in a churchyard, especially in her owner's absence. (Against this, note that this line is "dreaming of a kiss" -- not "her kiss" as in the chorus. Perhaps the wife whose grave the stranger is visiting is distinct from Bitter Green.)

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Another question that arises is, why "Bitter Green"? How did that particular phrase come into Lightfoot's mind? To me it suggests the bitter greens of the Passover feast, and "waiting for someone to take her home" carries echoes of "next year in Jerusalem" -- but I think it unlikely that Lightfoot, who is not Jewish, consciously intended any such allusion.

In one of the sci-fi stories I wrote as a very young child, the astronaut protagonist had, among other items of spacefaring equipment, a "space shovel" which he used for digging on the surface of distant planets. I had no very clear idea of how a space shovel might differ from a common-or-garden shovel, but the phrase "space shovel" just sounded right, and it seemed that an astronaut ought to have one. It was not until years later that it dawned on me that "space shovel" sounded an awful lot like the then-common phrase "space shuttle," and that it was almost certainly this unconscious echo that made me think the former phrase "sounded right." I think some similar unconscious association was likely behind Gordon Lightfoot's choice of the phrase "Bitter Green."