Several weeks ago I posted some images from the Southwest together with lyrics from Joni Mitchell. I just rewatched Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and so some Beatles lyrics have inspired me, and I’ve got images from a hike on the Devil’s Hall trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in west Texas to accompany them.
John Lennon said the opening lines to the song came to him after an argument with his first wife Cynthia and her words flowing over him, and he went downstairs to write:
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me
He said in an interview:
"It's one of the best lyrics I've written. In fact, it could be the best. It's good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewin' it. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody. They don't have to have any melody, like a poem, you can read them."
I remember being surprised in coming across the Lennon-McCartney lyrics for A Day in the Life in an anthology in a college poetry class. Lennon said the line above was inspired by a photograph he saw in a London paper about a Guinness heiress who killed herself in a car crash, and the mundane nature of covering such a story. In only a few years images of him killed outside his New York home would echo back to these lyrics.
The image is of smoke from a fire that closed most of the trails in the park. In many ways the images of fires, floods, draught and destruction sometimes become just another mundane news story.
Well, it’s not a beetle, but coming across this centipede on the trail was a surprise. Paul McCartney’s lyrics he’d started for a different song were plugged into the middle of Lennon’s in A Day in the Life. If you have a Hulu subscription, you must see McCartney 3, 2, 1. You’ll need to wait until the very last episode, but McCartney’s recall of the creation of this song and inspiring orchestration is mesmerizing.
Ringo Starr might not be the lyrical genius of Lennon or McCartney, but he wrote a few treasures himself. This image is near the end of the Devil’s Hall trail and the entrance into the Hall by some natural stairs.
I’ll end this post with a photo from the end of the hike when we were greeted by a Canyon Wren, and a verse from one of Lennon and McCartney’s greatest.
