I'd like to think that "Fixing a Hole" destroys the fantasy embodied by Paul's meditation chapel: the finished, perfected space in which the mind can freely unfold, uninterrupted by accidents of environment.
The song's narrator is pained by his home's imperfections: "I was fully absorbed in an amazing succession of inner tableaux. But a persistent dripping returned me to my physical setting, and the worlds of meaning I had discovered were lost, probably forever. So I'll fix the leak."
He sings as he works: "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/and stops my mind from wandering/where it will go/where it will go..." but his words indicate the exact opposite of what is happening to him: the melody here is the precisely the sound of a mind wandering, losing itself in a dream, awakening someplace else. As the narrator becomes engrossed in his repairs, his work tune forgets itself and becomes a free, independent being, and his mind travels unbelievably far (out into the guitar solo), way further than it would have if the sanctity of his passive contemplation had remained undisturbed. (Active engagement with the broken thing as an occasion for psychedelic transport: what a "flight of science" might be.)
2 comments:
Yet by living in London he was the most exposed Beatle, the least insulated. FAH: But he has a twist: "And it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong: I'm right." Accepting even his negative controlling traits, hippie-values freedom allowing for unhippieish door closing, crack filling, hole fixing. But he doesn't fix himself, where he belongs he's right and he wants that cool thing in his yard.
i always wasnt sure whether it was WANDERING or WONDERING.
i still like to have a vague mental space where either possibility exists (it can be hard with the beatles because so much is known and filled in, but that almost makes it continually expanding, like searching for god, searching but never reaching......
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