National Guitar

For years, Paul Simon’s line about the “Mississippi delta, shining like a national guitar” had me thinking about the idea of a guitar for the nation, represented somehow in the shining delta. I could picture the delta from the air, or from space, glinting in the sun. I couldn’t quite see the shape of a guitar in the shape of the delta, but never mind. Lyrics can be obscure, and that’s OK, I thought.

I didn’t know then that there actually was such a thing as a “National” guitar: a type of guitar called a National. I don’t know much. But I discovered it through the Pete Atkin song National Steel. They’re metal: shiny. They glint in the sunlight. Like a delta. The Mississippi delta shines like a National guitar. I think there may be one on the album cover of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms (but be careful, you really shouldn’t trust me on that).

It happens a lot, and I don’t mind, that I discover that whole chunks of what I think are actually based on ignorance, misunderstanding, inattention, deafness or stupidity. It’s reassuring to see that it happens so much to me, because that means it isn’t so shocking when I see it happening with other people. They’re fools, but that’s OK: so am I.

Carlo’s hands

I met somebody new this week, and when I first met him I was under the impression that he was a sculptor. I noticed his hands, and I thought yes, those are a sculptor’s hands. It turns out that he wasn’t a sculptor at all. So now my map of the world has these hands just hanging there uncategorized. I think Carlo may actually have been a former aircraft engineer. So does that mean that those were “former aircraft engineer’s hands”? I don’t have a place for those. I don’t have a file or a drawer labelled “former aircraft engineers’ hands”. I don’t know what to expect of such hands so I don’t know whether Carlo’s fit the role. Were those echt aircraft engineer’s hands? And what, anyway, do I really know even of sculptors’ hands? Who was I to say “ah, yes, those are just so, exactly as they would be”? We rush to judgements on the basis of so little knowledge. In the short period of a day or so when I thought that Carlo’s hands were those of a sculptor, I looked carefully at my own hands and wondered, of what type of person would these appear to be the hands? What should I tell somebody that I was, in order for that person to say “ah, yes, those are exactly the hands of such a one”? And I really couldn’t say. Of me, and these particular hands which I know well, I cannot rush to judgement. Somewhere, somewhere between me and Carlo, perhaps there is a middle ground where I would be able to say something useful. A middle ground of just the right amount of knowledge. I thought that REM sang “I know too much”, but they didn’t, it was “Oh no, I’ve said too much”, so that doesn’t help here. T.S.Eliot wrote: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus’ Litauen, echt deutsch” (I am not Russian, but Lithuanian, real German), which helps a little more.