In Celebration of Casimir Pulaski Day (Part One)

If you know me, you know how much I love Sufjan Stevens. I said at the beginning of this year that my favorite album of last year was "Carrie And Lowell" by him. For me, not only was the music stunning (and I'm thankful that he has gotten back to his more eclectic folky roots), but the lyrics were very cathartic for me in trying to get through the grief over my brother's death. One thing I love about Sufjan and his music is how through some of his songs I have learned new things. Also, if you know me, you know that I love knowledge. I love to know things. And thankfully I mostly remember what I learn. Especially if it's useless trivia, haha. One of my favorite albums of all time is "Come On and Feel the Illinoise" by Sufjan, and my favorite song of that album refers to a very obscure holiday that people in Chicago apparently celebrate, called Casimir Pulaski Day. Now Casimir Pulaski day was yesterday, and I was all set to write about it yesterday, but I forgot. (Although I can remember trivia, I have a hard time remembering what I'm supposed to do every day.) This song about the holiday is interesting to me, not only because I love the music, but because Sufjan talks about a childhood friend who he had some kind of romantic relationship with, who died on bone cancer later on in life. Here's the song, in case you haven't heard it and wanted to:

 

I was looking up what some of the lyrics meant, and came across this interesting tidbit about it.

 - The best (and best-known) Pulaski Day tribute comes from one-time Chicagoan Sufjan Stevens. On his album Illinois, Stevens used “Casimir Pulaski Day” to remember both the holiday and his friend, who’d been battling bone cancer. With lines like, “In the morning / In the winter shade / On the first of March / On the holiday / I thought I saw you breathing,” Stevens manages to make the somewhat boisterous but potentially icy holiday lushly reverent, something that’s not all that surprising knowing both Stevens’ history and the track’s tone.

Though Stevens repeatedly extols “all the glory that the Lord has made,” he ends the song instead possibly questioning God’s intentions, especially after his friend’s death on the track’s titular holiday. Though part of life is death, Stevens still struggles with God when, as he puts it, “He takes and he takes and he takes.” Listeners feel his pain acutely, especially as the song slides into Illinois’ next track, the instrumental, “To The Workers Of The Rock River Valley Region, I Have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament.”

Like the holiday itself, “Casimir Pulaski Day” is about remembrance—even if, years later, we might not even be sure what we’re paying tribute to anymore.

The Weeklings have an even better tribute to the song: (Come on Feel the) Illinoise, the second installment in his proposed-but-as-yet-unfinished Fifty States Project, is, for my money, the best album made in the oughts. At turns lush and spare, it features the soaring“Chicago” (the best song of the decade, it says here), the frantic “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” the 5/4-time title track, and the devastatingly beautiful “Casimir Pulaski Day,” known in our house as, simply, “Sad Song.”

The Weeds incident was not the first example of Stevens’ power. When my son was two, he was having a tantrum, as two-year-olds will. As he screamed and complained, “Casimir Pulaski Day” came on the iPod. He immediately stopped crying, as if a button had been switched off on his back, and walked to the speakers, listening intently, spellbound by the music. “This is a sad song,” I told him. “Sad Song,” he repeated. And so it has remained.

I’ve listened to “Sad Song” hundreds if not thousands of times. I don’t mean I had it on while I was driving, or in the background with friends over; I’ve listened to it. I hummed the trumpet part to my daughter the night she was born. I’ve sung it to her and my son as a lullaby countless times, and each time, as I sing lyrics I know by heart, some new flash of insight hits me. It’s a song that never fails to move me.

“Casimir Pulaski Day,” the seventh track on the Illinoise, concerns a young man’s memory of the week leading up to the death of his dearest friend. It is unquestionably the best song ever written about a 12-year-old girl dying of bone cancer. There is an adolescent and artless quality to the lyrics. There is no metaphor, no fancy fifty-cent words, no coherent structure. The story itself is poorly told; we must assemble and organize the traces of the narrator’s memory to deduce what happened. The music underscores this simplicity: the same four chords repeated over and over, uncluttered arrangement, none of the swirling synthesizers and female chorales and abrupt shifts in dynamics that characterize “Chicago” and “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.” But it is this very artlessness that makes the song so moving.

“Casimir Pulaski Day” is artless in the way that The Catcher in the Rye is artless, its simplicity belying the thematic complexity lurking beneath the juvenile surface. This is a song about grief, about coping with the loss of a loved one, and, deeper still, about reconciling that death with the existence of a just and benevolent God, in Whom the narrator has grown up believing. On closer inspection, there is a distinct design to the lyrics. The repetition of key words—night, face, morning, glory, window, shoulder—suggests a sestina and hints at the larger story. The vignettes remembered by the narrator—the futile night at the Bible study, the kiss at Michael’s house, meeting her father at the top of the stairs, and so forth—are not chronological, but seem to come to the narrator as he speaks.

(this is part one)