Mr. Rogers In A Blood-stained Sweater, Part I

The roses on the lawn won't know which side you're on

Years back, my first semester at college, I cheated. Sarah. A sweet girl. With Casey. Her hotter roommate. I went to apologize. Lo sprung the trap. Eight crammed in the closet to play ‘gotcha’, or so? I never learned why, nor exactly what. Did not pan out that way. Maybe some joke, lost.

In short, in front of all her stupid friends.

Knowing this, you might now think that I like betty. After all…

I don’t.

This series shall explain why.

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On The Genealogy Of Anchorites

Lest I remain unknown even to myself, I assert that our muse is oblivious to her own genius.

The roots are for another time, but the gist: cardigan, not Wildest Dreams, is the reason you and I are here. This is my Great Secret, to correct the Great Error. Distant somewhere rolls a drum.

S: And when they have ascended and looked sufficiently, we must not allow them to do what they are allowed to do now.

G: What’s that, then?

S: To stay there.

When I first listened to cardigan, I was a deaf mute. I didn’t know about. Thank heaven!

A.D. Twenty-twenty-too-many. The artist still does not have the final word.¹ Thank heaven!

Swine swindled at first sight. The sheer vulgarity beyond my vocabulary. Thank heaven!

I started from ignorance. I dare say I shall end in ignorance. Thank heaven! Lord knows what mischief if I ever knew anything, if I ever got on to something, if I ever got something right.

ICI JE TESTE

This much I believe: plus time, patience, genius (luck), you could weave together something after-modern man could believe.

This much, I believe also to be true: there is more tragedy lying around, unused in the warps, wefts, and stitches of that dusty and ancient fabric, than in all of the threads of critical analysis hitherto unspooled.

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Data

One day I shall solve the riddle that goes ‘why is it up to me?’. Until then, I will lay down the necessary facts of the case and proceed.

Rule 28: Don’t just take someone else’s word for it. Find out for yourself how well the EVIDENCE stacks up.

“When it comes down to it, I think the director doesn’t know everything about the movie. Everyone always thinks if you want to know something, talk to the director. I don’t think that’s true. I think the answer lies inside every single viewer.” — Mamoru Oshii

Has any other swiftie ever listened to Minutemen’s “Two Beads at the End”

and compared

And when I felt like an old cardigan, under someone’s bed // You put me on and said I was your favorite

to

Feel like a poker in someone’s fireplace

and considered, analyzed etc. their differences, similarities, purposes, etc., etc.?

Has anyone figured out who’s trying to change the ending, and why?

Has anyone yet discovered why the smell of smoke is still hanging around, and its conflagratory source?

The thermodynamically-inclined swiftie can perhaps now gauge the temperature of my discontent.

Put cardigan and august side-by-side.

What do you find? NOTHING in their lyrics that links them definitively. Shared references to: phones, alcohol, infidelity, cars, a door... and that's about it. In other words, catholic commonalities. Is there a Taylor Swift song that doesn't reference at least one of these?

If betty didn't exist, and Taylor never said what she did about these songs, there would not be enough proof to link the two. It would be likely, but speculative, such as how tolerate it sort of works like a prequel to Dear John. Like, maybe. More plausible than not. But nothing conclusive (e.g. illicit affairs, etc., conclusion-confounders). A potential fiction with which to indulge our imaginations.

It is this betty-less universe that I wish to examine. In this serenity, the artistic merit of both cardigan and august, here unsullied, mercurializes. To repeat, I contend that this exaltation is so drastic that cardigan becomes (something to the effect) a Shakespearean tragedy contained within four minutes (i.e. unconditional, immortal, etc.).² Thus betty chases two girls and loses both.

This brings us to the problem of betty. (It’s her. Hi. She’s the problem, it’s her.)

I warn the uninitiated to listen to this song at one’s own peril. Viewer discretion is advised.

Spoilers: betty turns what is profound, mature, and tragic into what is frivolous, juvenile, and farcical. It is The Merry Wives of Windsor to cardigan’s John Falstaff. We shall not be asking why our muse blundered so; we are likely never to get an answer.

This is the ‘baggage’ to which I have so cryptically alluded.

I invite you to join me in ascension to this supernal betty-less plane, to ‘suspend’ your ‘disbelief’ for a moment, so that we can share in its sublime aura.

The success or failure of my efforts can be checked against this standard. I must ‘sublimate’. I must ultimately deliver something worth having.

In principle it would seem that any interpretation which demands the willful feigning of an ignorance of which we are all quite conscious is little likely to present itself as legitimate. At any rate, it does not lie within the scope of this series to deal with the status of formalism in the current landscape of art/literary theory, or to consider the possibilities of absolute justice in criticism, or to consider the rights and responsibilities of the critic. I write barefacedly. You may call me an opportunist if it gives you the least taint of pleasure or of satisfaction.

—The Vengeant Anchorite

1. “Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle... to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard.”—The Intentional Fallacy, Wimsatt & Beardsley.

2. No current plans, but at some future point I may choose to elucidate the betty-less august, though over the course, I just might have to, anyway.