7. When I Dream of Michelangelo - (Counting Crows)

"And he seems so close as he reaches out his hand /
We are never quite as close as we are led to understand."

Ahh, Adam Duritz. Self-proclaimed Rain King and modern-day master of the metaphor.

I mentioned it in passing in the last blog entry, but this is precisely the kind of song that T.S. Eliot would love. After all, Eliot practically wrote it in the first place, ya' know. But perhaps imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery. Or as the poet himself once so famously put it:


"Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal."

Make no mistake about it -- the Counting Crows' "When I Dream of Michelangelo" is an undeniably *great* song, but it is just as undoubtedly a stolen one, to boot.

Stolen from source numero uno: Their own freakin' catalogue.

Longtime fans of the band might recognize this song's title as something of a throwaway line from an earlier Counting Crows track, titled "Angels of the Silences," which appeared as the first single off of the group's second album waaaaaay back in 1996. For the sake of historical accuracy, that lyric went a little something like this:

"I dream of Michelangelo when I'm lyin' in my bed
Little angels hang above my head and read me like an open book..."

Turns out Adam Duritz has been dreaming of Michelangelo for a good, long while, but it took him a full 13 years to hammer out just exactly what this dream just so happened to mean. This probably explains why the line has snuck into more than one of his songs.

So what does it mean?

His latest explanation (courtesy of a quite-possibly-chemically-enhanced deluge of pre-song stage chatter):

"When I dream of Michelangelo" is a story about spending your whole life wanting for something. Like a child in a cradle who sleeps underneath a spinning mobile; from the moment we are born, we can't help but find ourselves reaching for something that just seems to elude our grasp. A mobile. A dream. A girl. A painting -- you name it. You spend your whole life chasing after this one thing.

On rare occasion, we might even capture it and make something truly great in the process (kinda like the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, for example). But for the most part, all of our reaching really doesn't make a lick of difference, and so we end up losing sight of everything around us along the way. Sure, it may have *felt* like we were just seconds away from finally getting it right. But maybe (just maybe?) -- it was never really all that close to begin with.


Ouch.

Ah well -- lesson learned, and I supposed we'll take the message to heart and move on all the wiser next time. Don't spend your life staring at the ceiling. Don't let the same girl break your heart twice. And "don't get fooled again" right?

Not so fast.

See the funny thing about patterns is that they usually end up repeating themselves if you wait long enough. Or as Adam sings:

"And I know that she is not my friend.
And I know...
[but] there she goes walkin' on my skin again and again."

Hey now wait just a second here -- a lovestruck protagonist who stares at Michelangelo but keeps finding himself distracted by the same heartbreaker over and over again?


Hey whaddayaknow... we're right back to T.S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

Thematically, Eliot and Duritz are handling the exact same subject material: longing, self-awareness, and self-doubt. And to top it all off, both artists have a thing for Michelangelo, to boot. Take a look at this twice-repeated excerpt from Eliot's poem:

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

(Toldja' the song was stolen.)
Stolen from source numero dos: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Adam Duritz may well have been dreaming of Michelangelo for the better part of fifteen years, but he was hardly the first man in history to watch an existential crisis unfold while pondering the mysteries of a pizza-loving hero on a half-shell.

Prufrock's poem takes us smack-dab through the middle of an art gallery, so the narrator can't help but weigh his own indecisive self-worth against the sheer size, grandeur, and impressiveness of the monuments that surround him. As "the women come and go" while chit-chatting about just how gosh-darned great this Michelangelo feller is (and let's be honest here, he is pretty flippin' amazing) -- Prufrock retreats further and further into himself, ever reminded of his own failures.

So close... but so very, very far.

Time and again, Prufrock *almost* seems to build up the courage to say what he means -- but without fail, he ends up second-guessing his own resolve, and things fall apart. Just like Adam Duritz can't seem to kick this tendency to let this girl who's "not my friend" come right back into his life and start "walking on [his] skin again and again," J. Alfred Prufrock finds himself similarly plagued by indecision, saying:

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.

In the last blog entry (you know, the rockin' good time that was excerpted from the Counting Crows' "Saturday Nights" collection), we looked at how these two protagonists mused openly on their similarly unrealized and violent potential. Here's a one-liner recap:

Duritz: "I wanted to change the world. What's as easy as murder?"
Prufrock: "There will be time to murder and create."

Today, we've entered the "Sunday Morning" side of the spectrum -- a period of quietude and reflection. The violence may have dissipated, and the anger may well be gone, but the sense of self-doubt and longing still weighs heavy on the heart. Duritz has learned a valuable lesson only to turn right back around and forget it. And Prufrock has "seen the Eternal footman hold [his] coat and snicker."

"In short, [he] was afraid."

Like Prufrock, the Counting Crows frontman "seems so close as he reaches out his hand...." But in the same vein as Eliot before him, Duritz' deep-seated longing remains in spite of his newfound self awareness. It's something of a paradox, really. After all:

"We are never quite as close as we are led to understand."