I think the difficulty of this one is figuring out what the relationship between the two main characters is in this song. In the song itself, almost no hints are dropped about it. Friendship, love, might be a thouasand other things.

Annika, you write about not asking someone to remember you, even if you only knew that someone just a couple of days. Maybe that's not the way this song was meant to be: maybe it's about an even shorter social relation, or maybe it's something that isn't asked directly into someone's face. Could be a farewell though, or just someone you remember from long ago, and you would want him or her to remember you (all you ask).

Spikey

Hi Spikey,

I think you're right - there are not many hints given here.
I think what automatically happens is that you sort of try to adapt the lyrics to your own feelings - maybe to make it more clear. But I realize it can't always work. After all I guess I wasn't in a situation like the one Suzanne describes in this song.

Still I have one more question: What does Carmen of the Matyrs mean? I'm afraid I don't know the background.

Cheers,
Annika

Suzanne said in one of her interviews that songwriting means to her casting a spell on somebody (this is the interview from 1997 made by Piotr Kaczkowski in Poland). That is what Rosemary means to me – casting a spell. I agree with Spikey that “remember me” isn't the real word in the real world, but somehow a prayer, a spell you want to cast on somebody. They “had met the day before” so it is brand new feeling and love begins in this way. “All I know of you is in my memory” and everybody who loves wants to be loved. So she whispers “remember me” (as I remember you now). At this level love means dreaming only, because nothing has happened yet. Beautiful feeling when new love affair just has come into being, just right now, just in your dreams. Words about daydreaming, promises of luck and all the rest create such beautiful description of state when when you can see in a crowd this one person for the first time. “I know how these things begin”. As far it is something what has happened to me

I agree that some things are better left unsaid in certain circumstances. When a friendship or love ends it is unfair to say “remember me” sometimes. “No hidden catch, no strings attached” -as a song goes - is better solution. Sometimes it is nothing wrong, I think, as I did it myself. My friend was leaving the office and I gave her “Songs in Red and Gray” and told her – Every time you will listen to this record think of crazy Anna Maria K., who loves Suzanne Vega. It works, she phoned me on Saturday

be well

Anna Maria K.

PS information about Carmen of the Matyrs is here

http://www.suzannevega.com/discus/messages/126/104 6.html?1055249972

---

"like a shadow, I am and I am not"

The issue of dreaming:
Suzanne's sister doesn't day-dream. (this is one of the kernels of truth in the song.) Substitue that idea for the relevant line: "My sister says she never dreams at night" and the song makes more sense, but the rhyme and flow go down in flames.
I love the song to pieces, but sometimes it is helpful to flex a truth to weave the tale. It is not like she is recounting a tale of an actual historical event.

Uncwilly (Still catching up, while the post rate is high no less)
Now Playing: My Sister, Juliana Hatfield Three
Cheese: Danablu

Annika, scroll up to some of the earlier posts... there's a nice couple of paragraphs on the carmen of the martyrs.

Hi,

thanks for the links about the Carmen of the matrys - read part of it in the other thread.
And I guess I understand the lyrics a little better now.

Thanks for youe help!

"...some things just don't get through
Into this world, although they try"

below is a poem that, to me, sums up beautifully the core of what i feel "rosemary" is all about. it's by carlos drummond de andrade, a brazilian poet, and i've translated it from the portuguese. it's called "absence":

"for a long time i've felt absence as a lack.
and i'd grieve, ignorant, that lack.
now i don't grieve it.
there's no lack in absence.
absence is a way of being in me.
and i can feel it, white, so close, tight in my arms,
that i laugh and dance and invent happy exclamations,
because absence, that assimilated absence,
no one will ever steal it from me."

"that assimilated absence", to me, is memory - and, just like in the song, it can't be stolen, because, ultimately, it's memory that has us, not we that have it.

with affection,
fatima

Two year's ago (28/06/02) on 'Ye Olde Undertowe' I posted the following message: (slightly edited)

Rosemary

begins with:

Do you remember how you walked with me
down the street into the square
How the women selling rosemary
pressed the branches to your chest,
promised luck and all the rest
and put their fingers in your hair?

and ends with:

All I know of you
is in my memory
All I ask is you
Remember me.

The song, Rosemary, is partly about remembrance, but I was just wondering... was it coincidental that it came to be called Rosemary, because of the reference to the 'women selling rosemary', the fragrant plant, or did Suzanne intentionally include this because of the plant's associations with memory?

In 1649 Nicholas Culpeper published his book 'The Complete Herbal', where he said that rosemary 'helps a weak memory, and quickens the senses.'

The associations with memory continue to this day. The British 'Sue Ryder' charity, which cares for the terminally ill, used to use rosemary as its emblem, underlined with the phrase 'Rosemary for Remembrance'."

On reflection, of course, it seems obvious that Suzanne was linking rosemary with remembrance, in the song.

When someone dies, they may leave behind things of permanence that they've created in their lives, but regardless of this it is the memories of a person that live on for us, and which may live on in future generations as stories are retold.

By coincidence, I recently wrote something echoing those sentiments in memory of Bob Copper, a local folk singer, who died recently, aged 92:

http://tinyurl.co.uk/eq4b (the entry dated 31st March 04:53)

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~tinvic/#top

http://www.thecopperfamily.com/

I attended the memorial service for him yesterday. 'Memorial' - as in 'memory'. It was held in a village called Rottingdean, here on the Sussex coast, near Brighton. A few hundred people came together to celebrate Bob's life, with the service relayed over loudspeakers to those spilling outside the church. People had come from far and wide, including some from America, like Phyllis Barney from the Folk Alliance, and Jeff Davis from Boston. It wasn't a religious service, but a series of readings and recollections interspersed with musical performances, going on for over two hours.

But it was mainly memories of the man, and it is always memories of a person, both individual and collective, that will live on.

I just finished reading "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (i think). The idea of the book is amazing - that there is a cultivated world of "Sameness" where everyone is the same, and very little feelings, emotions, are felt by society.
One very special person is then chosen to be a receiver, the receiver of all the memories, so that all the others could be "the same." There was one potential new receiver who failed, and her name was Rosemary.
The concept here was very interesting: memory relates to feeling and emotion. Too cool!

Miriam K

Hi,

I just saw the film "Before Sunrise" and next week I'm also going to watch the sequel "Before Sunset", which was shot 9 years after the original film.

Here's a short synopsis, taken from the International Movie Data base:

"Before Sunrise is a passionate and intelligent romance between a young American (Jesse) and a French student (Celine). A chance encounter on the train incites intrigue, and Jesse provocatively suggests that Celine postpones her return to France and embarks instead on a spontaneous expedition to Vienna. In the course of their 14-hour relationship, the two share in their love for the unrehearsed and their appreciation for the unexpected as they explore in a powerful meeting of hearts and minds. Dawn breaks. Sad in silence, they make their way to the station. As they bid each other farewell, Jesse is seized by another impulse - another encounter ?"

I think Rosemary would perfectly match this situation, especially the last lines "All I know of you is in my memory and all I ask is you remember me."

I can very much recommend this film. It's intensive, very sad, but also full of hope.

Annika

sometime ago i came across the following quote by peter handke - he is talking about his screenplay, based on goethe's "wilhelm meister's apprenticeship", for wim wenders' film called "false movement":

"the thing that really interested me about the book was that great movement that keeps appearing in the form of rage or an outburst of authentic feeling, but that keeps stumbling and collapsing into the quotidian - not exactly pathos, but into a humdrum realism - when your rage and your desire to lead the life you dream of can suddenly no longer be squared with the piddling constellations of reality".

i think this quote really helps to illuminate one of the aspects dealt with in "rosemary", especially in the stanza that starts with "my sister says she never dreams at night": that hard, sometimes disturbing and frustrating, yet essential movement, toing and froing, between (day)dreams and reality. actually i'd say this theme is pivotal in suzanne's work.

it may seem like a 'false movement' sometimes, in the sense that it doesn't find an expression or an inscription in an external reality, but it is a movement nonetheless, an inner one, recorded and played back at will by memory, and through it made real, since it becomes an indelible mark in an internal reality.

"all i know of you is in my memory, and all i ask is you remember me".

much love,
fátima

It gives me such pleasure to find similar thoughts in different veins, different venues, different people....

I loved the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis when I was a child (ok, I admit, I still love it now, too!) So when I searched for something to read recently, and saw another book by C.S. Lewis, I went for it. It's not the same caliber as the other books, but there is such an amazing paragraph in it that ilucidates the ideas of Rosemary, of what memory and remembrance are about, that I wanted to share it with you:

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The Seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remebering is the last part of the pleasure... When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
(Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. lewis , ch 12)

Well, in my world I have a poet called Suzanne Vega, and she is teaching me this.

Thanks!

Miriam K

we can't undo but we can rewrite. we live in split time. within a room another room. one more impossibility like a second image. a double mirror. i didn't mean to say goodbye. i meant, see you later. but you got lost in the corridors of darkness.

a smile without a seam. the innocence of a stem. naked portrait of a place of imperfection. where everything breaks us and silences us. where everything lies and separates us. remember that i remember. without myself i know nothing of me. or you. without you i climb hidden stairs.

i see you and your poetry. i hear how you said your poems. a sailor without a sea. the wave will still break on the shore within you. a big, red apple on a table in a room overlooking the ocean. i won't forget, sophia. art is the daughter of memory. i remember you. all of you.

the stained glass and clear windows alternate. "neither darkness nor light," said the Swamp Angel, "neither darkness or light can fill my eyes." a woman in the act of walking takes her final steps towards abandonment. there is oblivion here, through which infinity threads itself.

these lines have my breathing in them. also my body is here. what makes the silver bird fly straight up, locking its small eyes on nothing?

i can't be told to remember. that sea is swaying. the circling of the water: where one can't look straight-down-at is, where my eye picks it up just as the silence breaks, where the room splits in two when you smite me.

lure and cast. i wait for your words: moving their meaninglessness on the moving of the waters. the complex mechanism of the break. turning towards or away from memory. as sun goes down, until it glimmers in the tiny darkness and human will comes to the end. the summer at one's back, the path back barely findable.