Gospel & Universe 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid

Myth & Mysticism

“Cerdes” 🧜🏽‍♀️ “Homburg”

The overall meaning of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is difficult to get at, and of course depends on which version of the lyric you examine. The most perplexing version is the four-stanza version, since it contains the obscurities of the other versions and adds an especially perplexing final stanza. Because of the resulting ambiguity, it’s helpful to compare its ambiguity to that found in other lyrics by Reid. On the previous page, I used “A Salty Dog” and “Crucifiction Lane” to get at its slippery religious and existential dimensions, situating it between hints of salvation on one side and hints of suicide and meaninglessness on the other. “A Salty Dog” and “Crucifiction Lane” also underscore the importance of nautical and epic references, as well as the importance of human connection as an antidote to alienation.

On this page I’ll use two other lyrics by Reid — “Cerdes” and “Homburg” — to contextualize his use of myth, surrealistic imagery, and the possibility of some sort of poetic or mystical vision. While “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is lavish in its use of myth, “Cerdes” uses myth to debunk myth. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is much closer to “Homburg” in that it doesn’t debunk anything and it also uses language in a very obscure and surrealistic way in order to depict the real world, romance, and philosophical ideas. It’s not surprising that “Homburg” is often paired with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” given they came out several months apart, and given their similarity in mood, in surreal style, and in abstruse poetic meanings which border on the mystical.

“Cerdes”: The Deflation of Myth

“Cerdes”and “A Whiter Shade of Pale” use similar mythic nautical imagery, yet “Cerdes” makes its existential point far more clearly. Some might say that the point is perhaps too clear, and that the poem might benefit from delving into some of the rich mythic heritage which existentialism often leaves in its wake. In “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on the other hand the poet uses myth while at the same time suggesting that human experience can never quite grasp the depth of myth. He takes mythic dust and scatters it throughout the lyric, leaving a sort of fairy trace that the listener feels but doesn’t feel compelled to reject.

“Cerdes” as a song has a wonderful acid heaviness, yet the lyrics are more noticeable for their deflation of mythic possibilities than for their subtle or integrated use of them.

On first look, “Cerdes” seems to share much in common with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” especially since the mythic scene is set with two of the same major characters: a mermaid and Neptune.

Outside the gates of Cerdes / Sits the two-pronged unicorn / Plays at relaxation time / A rhinestone flugelhorn / While mermaids lace carnations / Into wreaths for ailing whales / Neptune dances hornpipes while Salome sheds her veils

The poem begins with a sort of decadent mythic party, at which mermaids seem to have sympathy for nature, as depicted in its largest and perhaps most mythic form, the whale. Meanwhile, Neptune dances in a sort of orgiastic rite, suggested by Salome and her seven veils. This party scenario has some common features with the first stanza of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” yet the direction is far more chaotic and absurd, and the conclusion is far more openly existential. At the end of “Cerdes,” the poet explicitly rejects legends and wants only facts: “even Christian Scientists / Can but display marble plaques / Which only retell legends, while my eyes, ah, reach out for facts.”

All of this is in stark contrast to “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which ends with the two main characters plunging to the depths of an ocean which has been laden with mythic depth in the form of Neptune, vestal virgins, a mermaid, the queen of love, etc. This depth is accompanied by an even greater depth of whatever it is the miller’s tale is about. The heroine has the compassion of the mermaid in “Cerdes” (who makes wreaths for ailing wails) and she also has a desire for facts: she isn’t interested in any sort of mythic aggrandizement which makes her superior to the laws of Nature, as represented by Neptune. While she doesn’t reject mythic or poetic possibilities, she remains far more engaged with others, both the poet and the miller. She also has a gusto for exploration and, if we can believe the suggestion at the end of the lyric, she has a sexual appetite.

The party which begins “A Whiter Shade of Pale” could have devolved into an absurd scene, like we find in “Cerdes,” yet it doesn’t. Instead of Dionysian and mythic mimicry, we have a real-life scenario in a bar, where two people negotiate both the relationship between each other and their relationship to the universe. The poet tries to understand the heroine by using mythic references, and the heroine doesn’t reject the mythic references so much as she rejects the idea that she has power over realms such as the sea. She never says that the vestal virgins or Neptune are ridiculous and that she wants facts instead. She only points out that she can’t see or control the depths that myths talk about. Her humility doesn’t negate the meanings that myths try to understand or negotiate.

In terms of meaning, the miller adds a powerful although obscure element. His story is obviously profound, even if we don’t read into it the profundity of Chaucer’s subtle dismantling of censorship and puritanism. The miller is a third character, one who doesn’t complicate a possible romantic trajectory of the poem so much as supply a third philosophical point of view. Even if we don’t see the miller as bringing with him the rich cultural background of Chaucer’s miller, his tale is still a deep one, so deep that it deepens the already deep disillusionment of the heroine. This is a depth we cannot see, one which saddens or even terrifies the heroine, and one which accompanies her thoughts about Neptune and the vestal virgins. This makes her all the more uncertain about that journey outward onto an ocean that is a symbol of infinity but is also a practical, spatial, undeniable fact of geography.

“Cerdes” also helps us to appreciate the relationship between the poet and the heroine. In “Cerdes” the mermaid and Neptune are doing two completely different things (although of course the mermaid may be listening to the music of Neptune) and the connection between them isn’t developed further. For instance, there’s nothing as challenging as when the mermaid rejects the poet’s insinuation that in matters of romance she could take Neptune for a ride. The heroine may reject the poet in some things, yet she interacts with him and she even seems to get him to understand her existential dilemma. This philosophical dilemma enriches the poem, yet it doesn’t entail a rejection of either human connection or mythic possibility.

“Homburg”: My Mouth By Then Like Cardboard

While “Cerdes” helps us to appreciate the use of mythology in “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Homburg” (1967) helps us to see how surreal imagery can work in a more developed form. Like “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Homburg” can seem a confusing and rambling sort of poem. Yet in the context of romance and philosophy, both poems are quite brilliant: they use surrealistic imagery and arcane paradox to get at the failure of romantic connection and the clash of philosophic meanings. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is perhaps the more subtle, because the surrealism is never fully emphasized. It is, however, fully integrated into the greater question of meaning, which is also suggested in subtle and ambiguous ways.

As in the final stanza of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the scenario in “Homburg” initially seems absurd. The first few lines are pretty clear — the multi-lingual “business firend” seems to have had enough psychedelic partying and leaves the poet’s home — yet the meanings become obscure when the poet refers wittily to the mirror that on reflection climbs back upon the wall. This psychedelia is reminiscent of the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit,” which was released on June 24, 1967, six weeks after the release of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” In “Homburg” the cosmopolitan businesswoman seems to have had too much of the White Knight talking backward and the Red Queen yelling “Off with her head!” The businesswoman departs, and even the mirror seems to want to right itself on the wall.

The mirror’s behaviour might have remained a brief exercise in poetic wit, if the poetry didn’t become even more surreal, taking meaning with it into a rabbit hole after the chorus. Here the poet contrasts the psychedelic and practical worlds, the latter presumably that of the “business friend” who has left his apartment and its surrealism behind. Yet the poet hasn’t left her behind, for she springs up indirectly in the mirror, the clock, and the market, all of which are markers of the practical world, however much one might transform it in mirrors, where one might see a time-piece hang over a branch, as in Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.”

The poet, perhaps thinking about the world of his business friend, writes

The town clock in the market square / Stands waiting for the hour / When its hands they both turn backward / And on meeting will devour / Both themselves and also any fool / Who dares to tell the time / And the sun and moon will shadow / And the signpost cease to sign

The meanings here become as difficult to understand as when the poet in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” calls behind in front and proclaims that dirt in truth is clean. Perhaps feeling like the business friend who flees his home, he then admits that he has perhaps gone too far in his own surrealism: “my mouth by then like cardboard / seemed to slip straightway through my head.” Both lyrics contain the same logical framework: the experience is beyond words, and can only be suggested by paradox.

The idea that no one can tell the time may seem preposterous, yet from a cosmic perspective, suggested by the sun and moon, it’s not absurd at all. Human time means very little from another galaxy. The mirror helps people see the reality of their physical three dimensional existence, and the clock in the market Square tells time for those who are interested in the material world. But just as the mirror doesn’t get at the deeper psychological reality of our beings, so the clock doesn’t tell time in any ultimate sense. The surrealism in both poems results from the ineffability of experience, and from an awareness that our normal human experience isn’t all there is to life. In “Homburg,” a mirror reflects different types of reality and also possesses a will of its own; the hands of a market clock go backward, suggesting that no one really knows what time it is, and that no one truly understands the meaning of time. Likewise, the signposts in the street, which normally give us direction, miss the larger spatial or ontological realities of our lives. This is similar to “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” where the bar-room hums, the ceiling flies away, and the poet admits that his experience is so ineffable that his words seem like cardboard slipping through his head.

While such surrealism can at times seem chaotic and meaningless, it might also be seen as a sort of illumination. Reid suggests a similar falling apart of the physical and psychological world in “In Held ‘Twas In I [Glimpses of Nirvana],” although the mystical and existential result of his experience is spelled out much more explicitly:

In the darkness of the night, only occasionally relieved by glimpses of Nirvana as seen through other people's windows, wallowing in a morass of self-despair made only more painful by the knowledge that all I am is of my own making ... / When everything around me, even the kitchen ceiling, has collapsed and crumbled without warning. And I am left, standing alive and well, looking up and wondering why and wherefore.

“A Whiter Shade of Pale” has a similar type of surreal collapse of the material world, yet it suggests a more positive conclusion. Like agnosticism, the lyric admits the limitations of our understanding of any unltimate Reality, yet it also makes us alive to the world around us. Like the philosophers, scientists, mystics, and poets from Ancient times, we are left “looking up and wondering why and wherefore.”

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