AS PROMISED

As promised, here is my entry on what the song "She Came In Throught the Bathroom Window" means to me: please bear with me, as this is an almost completely improvised piece.

"Golden slumbers fill your eyes/smiles awake you when you rise/ sleep pretty darling do not cry/ and I will sing a lullabye", goes the song that follows the one that is the subject of this piece in the Abbey Road album. I bring up "Golden Slumbers" for the simple fact that all songs in this unique Beatles album are connected. They come together(no pun intended) to form a musical novel. Abbey Road tells an epic story about the how love, loss, happiness, dreams, and disillusionment weave themselves into the mysterious fabric that is the human experience; beyond which resound what are perhaps Paul McCartney's most important words: "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." Only within this context can the otherwise obscure words of "She came In Through the Bathroom Window"(SCITTBW) be thoroughly understood.

SCITTBW is a song about our search for safety and for answers. The universe is structured in such a way that we must find safety and knowledge in the deep mystery of ourselves, which nature helps us to get in touch with. We behold this deep mystery with the awe of a child, with little understanding of its significance but with a general sense that it is greater than ourselves; that's why she "sucks her thumb and wonders/ by the banks of her own lagoon."

One of the mysteries of the universe, and the one from which much suffering stems, is constant change. This change always threatens our sense of security. So just when she starts to get comfortable in her lagoon, just as she begins to get attached, father time looks upon her with compassion, asking "didn't anybody tell her? didn't anybody see? Sunday's on the phone to monday, Tuesdays on the phone to me." The world keeps turning, nothing stays the same.

"She said she'd always been a dancer," the song continues. "She worked at fifteen clubs a day/ And though she thought I knew the answer/ well I knew what I could not say." This stanza evokes the hard labor that is life--our day-to-day suffering. We want someone to just give us a way out--to tell us "the answer." We often look to nature for this "answer," but the universe cannot "say" it, at least not in the simple and direct manner that we want. The answer is hidden in our own mystery and we must be creative and courageous enough to find a language for it--a language for who we are.

The universe can never directly tell us who we are or what to do, "and so I quit the police department/ and got myself a steady job." "And though she tried her best to help me/ she could steal, but she could not rob." However much we steal, we could never possess even the smallest part of the vast universe--"she could not rob." We are materialistic. We try to posess as much of the physical world as possible, even if we hurt each other in the process. Ultimately, we hurt each other because we feel unsafe. This fact is at the very core of the structure of our society--with its huge wealth disparities, and corrupt governments and laws. We seek safety in material things because we are afraid to peer into the vast mystery of ourselves--into the "lagoon" that is the universe. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter how much we hurt ourselves or each other--the universe will go on, just as the chorus follows this stanza. We have to be compassionate enough to understand that we are important to ourselves.


Peace,

JA