Tuesday, October 15, 2013

365 Days of Jazz Hands - Day 288

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15th, 2013

Perhaps "The Boxer" is a bit more relevant of a song reference than originally thought.  Perhaps it is not.  But I'm going to write about it anyways.

The song aches with a hunger to retreat, written (mostly) in first person by Paul Simon as an autobiographical depiction of his loneliness and yearning to go home.  In other words, the song is the epitome of longing.  Of course, nobody is entirely immune to this want for times gone or times never had at all.  Everyone plays the "what if" game, and wishes for things they can not attain.  The Boxer is a song written about a phase in one man's life when everything seemed to work against him.  He was scrutinized, beaten down, battered, bruised and wanting nothing but to run from it.  He yearned to escape.

The song doesn't reference a boxer, the song's namesake, until the very last stanza when the story shifts from first to third person for no apparent reason.  

     In the clearing stands a boxer
     And a fighter by his trade
     And he carries the reminders
     Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
     Or cut him till he cried out
     In his anger and his shame
     "I am leaving, I am leaving"

     But the fighter still remains


This begs the question...who is this boxer?  The grammatical shift seems intentional and since the song took Simon and Garfunkel nearly 100 hours to record, meticulously polished and scrutinized, it is difficult to reason that a mistake was made by the man that penned it.  Could this simply be an external metaphor of the self?  The personification of an alter ego?  It's not all that unlikely that it merely sounded better, referring to himself in third person for the sake of the songwriting.  After all, the main chorus is "Lie la lie" repeated over and over again, due to Paul Simon not being able to think up anything better to put in its place, so anything is possible.  The chorus is not referencing a lie of any sort, according to Simon, although he sings of betrayal within the song's first stanza (note the first person perspective):

     I am just a poor boy
     Though my story's seldom told
     I have squandered my resistance
     For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
     All lies and jests
     Still a man hears what he wants to hear
     And disregards the rest

This story is about a man that is better for the sustained wounds and although the experience left him clamoring for the retreat, he did not back down, humility his prize, wearing it as a badge of honor.  Hidden behind all of the words and between the lines, the passage of time is the song's real tale and serves as its missing verse.  Just like the song, we all carry with us that missing verse, or an unwritten chapter or two.  This is the game of what if we like to play from time to time.  What if  the missing verse were found?

You may decide for yourself.  The following is the missing verse from The Boxer, omitted from the most popular, original release of the song on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album:
Now the years are rolling by me
They are rockin' evenly
I am older than I once was
And younger than I'll be and that's not unusual
No it isn't strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same
 

Today's Jazz Hands, after changes upon changes, are more or less the same.

Day two-hundred and eighty-eight complete.

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