mfinley.com: "Squandered Resistance"

by Michael Finley

Did Paul Simon really say: "I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles"? What does that mean exactly?

It is from the song "The Boxer," which until this morning, walking down by the river, I never particularly cared for. There are numerous "great" songs of Paul Simon's that have always struck me as icky and self-conscious. In other words, he reminds me of me at that stage in life, and it is like scratching a blackboard without fingernails, because they are chewed.

But that one line always struck me a certain way. Not good exactly -- it has that icky feeling about it, especially if you include the mumbles. He sounds like a judgmental college artiste, full of words and capable of vehemence, but shaky and uncertain at the core.

In the song, a boy leaves home to seek his fortune in the world, and instead encounters hard times and disappointments. When he says he squandered his resistance, he is, I believe, describing his temptation as an artist to throw in the towel and have a good cry. He thinks he has wasted his time writing mealy-mouthed songs that no one wants to hear.

"Squandered resistance" is a description of self-loathing, and it is the opinion not of the wiser songwriter framing the song, but of the unwise younger songwriter at the very beginning of it -- the disappointed youth ready to run home to mama and blame the uncaring city for his artistic failure. Back home he can persuade himself he is mortally wounded, but in fact he dodged the bullet by running.

Before he can pack his bags, however, he receives a vision of fresh fortitude. It is a prizefighter who may live in the same apartment building, who carries the scars and injuries of a hundred knockdowns, and is still on his feet. The glory of fighting is evidently not winning, Simon sees, but fighting on. And that's the end of the song, except for an exultant lie-la-lie chorus that seems surgically excised from "Hey Jude."

So if the songwriter within the song is down on "squandering resistance," what does the songwriter of the song think about it? Think of resistance as a way of holding the world at bay. The young songwriter goes to New York in order to discover the world -- his job is not to resist it but to welcome it. But the world chews him up and spits him out.

What does the boxer know about resistance? To him resistance means not getting knocked out in the ring. But it does not mean not taking punches. His is the art of personal exposure. If he wins or if he loses, he still takes his shots. It is a deal he has made with his life -- because it is in him to be this way.

What the songwriter was too young or too self-protecting to appreciate is that resistance is futile. It must be squandered for anything meaningful to happen. We must be brought to tears in the big city, and be made to see the unimportance of our talent. We must allow the other fighter to come in close and have access to us if we are to get within striking distance of him.

Despite the angel persona, Paul Simon was never innocent. He was a whore for awareness from the get-go, and awareness, especially in his early songs, makes many of them seem self-involved and precious.

He is even vain about his humility: ''Asking only workman's wages, I come looking for a job, but I get no offers." But every waitress who ever auditioned for a part knows that this humility is a necessity.  There is no virtue to taking a menial job, you do it or you starve. Artists who can’t hack that aren't strong enough for art. And maybe they are resisting more than they think -- that bus ticket home  is an escape hatch luxury non-artists don’t have.

Simon was our first introspective, "sensitive" songwriter. But he knows, and so do we, that he does his best work when he is writing about something other than himself. Graceland certainly qualified. How galling it must have been for him when Capeman, his broadway show about a juvenile Puerto Rican killer, closed its doors.

But hey, sometimes you get knocked down. Simon knows this now, and "The Boxer" is a declaration that he's not going to be that kind of artist, that kind of man, any more. The song begins being told by one man, the self-pitying poet, but by the end he is someone new, a man determined to do better: Lie la lie.

 

 Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

Choose another essay 
Subscribe to mfinley.com

Like the essay? 

Click on the picture and buy a memento.