“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel

In my post on Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning”, I explored how death fuels the imagination and drives us to live for the world. Mortality underpins the phrase Carpe Diem. Liz Matsushita touches on this briefly in her review of Neutral Milk Hotel’s album. She notes that the folksy indie band captures a similar emotional response to death simply, intimately, and beautifully in their song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. But the lyrics deserve closer attention. Listen to the tone as it shifts from wonderment to doubt to inklings of grief, then back to wonderment washed with tenderness:

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

The emotional narrative begins with delight in beauty, which inspires thoughts of beauty’s impermanence. This realization then multiplies the original delight, as it is made more complex with the knowledge that this experience must end and that we cannot keep it close, though we may try. The lover’s conviction is as desperate as it is doomed, yet he nevertheless confronts the end of life casually and stoically:

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I’m keeping here with me

Neutral Milk Hotel (credit: Wikipedia)

The poignant image of ashes falling through the sky to the sea, though unique and powerful, rolls swiftly off the singer’s melody. It’s a truth he’s heard before. There’s nothing new about death, yet it still rejuvenates the speaker’s sense of his and his beloved’s youth. It refreshes their receptiveness to love and beauty. Thoughts on death turn instantly into thoughts on a life well lived. Meanwhile the singer’s raw voice, the simple acoustic guitar, the haunting slide guitar (if that’s what it is) and the affirmative trumpet all comprise an artless, gentle and emphatically pleasurable experience for the listener. Such transfiguration marks the greatest triumph of life over death, inseparable though the two may be.

Read the full lyrics here.

More from A Right of Passage:

• Memorial Music: “Orpheo” by Andrew Bird
• Memorial Music: “Dreams Old Men Dream” by the Cold War Kids
• Memorial Songs: “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens