It begins with a sense of interruption, a kind of annoyance, then the ghost. Love as a haunting, something that is beyond the singer, love as a third party - the singer, the love object and the rising of the ghost. "And you happened to call" which brings the ghost back into the earthly world.
Romantic love, falling in love, hardly seems like a choice. I have never said to myself - "ah I think I'll fall in love with this person" and then it happens. Not that kind of love that captures and haunts you.
I do know that whenever I have fallen in love I find it more painful to try to stop loving them. It's more comfortable to tuck it away gently and know that once I fall I cannot stop it. I can choose how to react to it but the effort to stop the feeling either makes my emotions hard or drains me.
The first verse refers to a full moon. The singer is moved by the world around and above her. She is part of the universe because music is extraterrestrial. We make music but we don't build it as much as it builds us.
We are brought back to the world of things, props, connections. Her hand is on the telephone but she is "heading straight for a fall". Or he is. Love does have that emotional cost for people who are capable of loving. Able to fall in love.
I admire anyone who is able to fall in love. There is too much violence done in our world. Not just by weather or the wild. Baez doesn't make such a judgement. Her skill in creating music and writing lyrics places her well within the social world. She is affected by it but she does not stand back and judge it like a Freud or Jungian intellectual. Baez has not put her humanity into a category.
Humanity really needs to be fully present I think. There are gifts we can bring above the problems of our greedy egos. That's a judgment I know.
Our society for centuries has been built on material wealth and need. Yes we need plants, animals, dust and water, but lately we have forgotten we need to respond emotionally to some extent so we don't become a psychopath or alienated by narcissism. (Yes that's just a judgment from me).
Great musicians live deeply in their world. They are wedded to their feelings, not standing apart from it in a separate uninvolved discipline. That's something a human can create but doesn't have to become. A scientist is still engaged emotionally and morally if she invents weapons of mass destruction.
The lover remembers "your eyes bluer than robins' eggs". She didn't just say "blue" eyes. They are not aspects of white supremacy (and white supremacy has reduced us), they are the results of ancestors. It's not the fault of eyes to be blue, it's the reference of privilege. Your blue eyes do not create poverty or wealth. It is the immoral habit of creating a hierarchy of wealth and preference.
All genders are engaged in love. This song is about love. The pain. The humbling need for another even in a world that praises independence, strength, control and power.
Diamonds are hard. They are for the rich who need something to buy. Rust is decay. Diamonds and rust are part of our world. The joys, the loss, love and heartbreak. Some humans live and die without suffering a heart break because they have steeled themselves against their vulnerability, and in doing so may have caused pain in another.
Falling in love with things like "the girl on the half shell" and in our current troubles we fear the unknown and uncertain. We fear being harmed. We look for security in things.
The meaning of this love song is something I must guess at. Baez has provided the metaphors, the beautiful melody, the vulnerable honesty of a young woman falling in love with a vagabond "Already a legend".
Choosing to influence his world yet staying remote, an image that cannot be devoured the way any business can devour our lives.
She loved him dearly - and she already paid for the diamonds and rust (with grief and tears I imagine).
Being in this world does demand something from us if we wish to live. Attempting to take and not give doesn't seem to work.
Beautifully said, Janet. The world asks us to respond, and the only morality is that which accepts that responsibility.
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