I have always been struck by the phrase “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they have seen Paree?”. It was a phrase I think I have always known. It has lived in my unconscious and it may be proof of Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious, as I don’t ever remember learning it—it was just always there. It would come to mind whenever someone had a life event that was so big and paradigm blowing that it would leave me wondering how they could possibly return to their ordinary life.
I didn’t know until I Googled the phrase that it was actually a song from 1919. I listened to the song on Youtube and as I listened to the tune I found it altogether too sprightly and spirited for the subject matter. This is a song that Billy Holiday or Morrissey really could have done justice to. It is a song about men who had lived a very small life on the farm—maybe they had never left their town. Maybe they never made it to the county fair. They had never seen another landscape, heard another language or eaten a food that wasn’t grown on their farm—and then they want off to war. They were 1900′s Idaho Odysseuses, reluctant heroes who left their farm-girl Penelopes behind to quilt and can things and care for their children and work on the farms while the uniformed Odysseus went away.
