Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 82

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The Popular Culture Review

The allusion to Irving’s "Rip Van Winkle" in the final line quoted
hints at the speaker's movement deep into a wilderness that actually
takes him beyond the natural landscape. As the speaker’s condition
worsens, the distinction between the real world and a surrealistic,
almost supernatural world begins to blur: "steam rising from fissures
screened demons / writhing and reaching for me. All night, / spiders
died, mice died in their nests, / rocks burst and scattered like wind."
In the last stanza, like Rip, the speaker has moved out of the
dimensions of time and space which his father still inhabits.
All day the next day my father slept,
unable to save me, his fingers raw
to the bone, my whole foot cold, swollen,
but a foot I could stand on
down on the same rubbled earth.
Though the speaker has died, he has somehow become
invulnerable, has become a part of the landscape, the "same rubbled
earth" which has wounded him and still wounds his father whose
fingers are "raw / to the bone." The father’s futile attempt to kill the
scorpion, to give meaning to the event which has taken his son's life,
in other words to name what has happened, represents his failure to
harden himself, to make himself invulnerable to the pain of reality.
The poem itself however transcends the father's despair and
vulnerability. Like the speaker's process of hardening, becoming
invulnerable in death, which allows him to join with the landscape,
the poem itself goes through a process of gardening, grafts the
harshness of the young boy’s death onto the wondrous, supernatural
experience of moving beyond the dimensions of life.
In ZZTop’s "Master of Sparks" we see the intrusion of the
supernatural into a Saturday night world of celebration where
drinking and street racing are the norm. The advent of God/Death
comes in the form of a stranger who has brought his car into town to
race: "A high class slim came floatin' in down from the coun ty line."
The speaker is with his friends "just gettin' right on Saturday night"
when he encounters Slim, and from this point he loses control over his
own destiny. The first active encounter is a sort of staring match
between slim and the speaker and it is during this exchange of looks
that the speaker allows himself to become vulnerable. In a sense, he