Like everyone, I get distracted when my head fills with a song out of nowhere. Sometimes, you're just sitting there or waking up or taking a stroll and a song pops into your head and you're humming it until you realize what you're doing and stop and say, "Hey there, little song! Where did you come from?" as if this song were a stray puppy.
This morning, I walked to the Metro in the wet remnants of yesterdays rain. Small, bright yellow pin oak leaves stuck to the bottoms of my shoes and four huge crows were loudly proclaiming their autumn dominion from the roof of the Presbyterian church. And I was humming. The song was "Bright Eyes" by Art Garfunkel and if you've never heard it, let me tell you, it is a killer, a weeper that never fails to turn a person inside-out.
Have you ever seen the full-length, animated Watership Down from the seventies? The song is used to great effect in that film; it is the root of my association. The song is, without sublety, about death. No question. And in Watership Down, it is, without sublety, about the death of cartoon bunnies. The song serves as a musical interlude in the movie, slightly trippy; the visual is of rabbits hopping around with the ghostly Great Spirit Rabbit -- a rabbit dies -- its body spins in a nice circle-of-life motion turning into spinning autumn leaves before forming the sun, which then bleeds out its redness onto the earth, leaving a blazing whiteness. "Bright Eyes" plays during this metaphysical montage, remixed to be vague and foggy and more echo-y than the original. It is a sad, wondrous moment in film history.
Anyway, I woke up today with the sound of dead rabbits in my head, and a little emotional as a result.
