Norwegian Wood

Among all of the Beatles’ ballads that I listened to in my youth, Norwegian Wood stood out for its romantic tune and peculiar title.  I didn’t understand English as well then, but a read of this song’s lyrics is anything but.  As the authors had clarified straightaway, it was about an affair gone awry.  As Paul McCartney explained, the song’s title was a reference to the cheap pine wood used as wallcovers, which was in vogue in London in the 1960s.  Considering that this girl’s room was also without a chair, one could interpret that it was either happening in a cheap motel room, or that the girl was broke.

Yet this circumstance did not appear to deter our boy, as he still sat on the rug, waiting patiently while chatting her up and drinking her wine.  Finally it was two o’clock in the morning and she said, “It’s time for bed.” Did they make love, get raped, or nothing happened?  It was not deliberated, but by the end of the night, the boy crawled off to sleep in the bath, giving off an image of someone drowning.  As for the final stanza’s meaning, according to Paul, “It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the décor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.”

Norwegian Wood was released as a part of the album Rubber Soul, whose title is clearly a word play on the phrase “rubber sole,” as in the bottom of the boot.  The album title recalls a famous passage in George Orwell’s 1984: “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. … But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” It’s perhaps no coincidence that the last ballad of this album is titled Run For Your Life.

But nostalgia works in mysterious ways.  Years later, whenever I listen to Norwegian Wood, all I see is a romantic image of my youth.  I would imagine a forest of pines and cedars – of big trees, one like John Muir had written, “The Big Tree is nature’s finest masterpiece…the greatest of all living things, it belongs to an ancient stock and has a strange air of another day about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from long ago – the Auld Lang Syne of Trees.”  When I was young, I had written a poem about being lost in the forest while trying to find my highest tree.  Recently, I wrote another poem as a response to the lost girl of my youth: