The cover to I've been working on the rail road

It's on a much larger piece of paper, 10 x 12 or something like that. Meanwhile I continue to expand this theme. I think it is tied into my lifelong frustration with not being heard. I don't get the sense that anyone listens to me: outside of Jami and a few friends. Perhaps you [whoever might be reading this, if anyone] too have had to struggle to insert an observation only to have the conversation continue like nothing was said. Certainly there's a question of relevancy. I ask Am I relevant. Sometimes it's true I'm not. Certainly there's that verse in James that counsels us to be slow to speak and quick to listen.
And I've lived a passive life - because of this? I don't know. I could stand to be more aggressive, more assertive. And I work on that. I work on that understanding aggressive not as ranting or being thoughtless. But standing up for myself. I find that I don't often enough. Defering to others is not my problem. Speaking up for myself is.
I see other people who are good at it.
I wonder what that's like.
In the song, working on the rail road, someone asks for Dinah to blow her horn - which Dinah never does. No one hears the watchman or captain calling - all the livelong day. Do we really hear the whistle blowing? Is it too early in the morning? Meanwhile time passes away. And what is a rail road but two parallel lines disappearing on an horizon - two lines that lead forward, not backward, in time, to a vanishing point, oblivion, the eschaton. Does anyone listen to the singer's warning. Are they caught up, strumming on the old banjo. Dinah trapped in the kitchen [an early feminist critique: women could help if they weren't trapped in the kitchen] by someone - the super ego, the big other. Dinah is a huntress and her skills are being wasted by this someone. The trumpet, the horn, to be blown is the 7th seal, the final blow. The banjo, an instrument of African import, also slaves away, strummed upon, a sturm and drang, and so the Hegelian master/slave dialectic comes to the fore. The eschaton, the millenial kingdom on earth is delayed by human preoccupations with power dynamics.
In the end working on the rail road is a diversion from creativity, a cul de sac, much as my father experienced. A necessity, certainly: food, clothing, housing - such needs, but the humanistic needs, the existential need, goes unmet.
I remember the old commercial "who needs america's rail roads? We do!" which played when I was very young. But do we need this?

I've been working on the rail road images 1-4

The first four drawings in my series of "I've been working on the rail road", a song I sing a lot lately, perhaps for it's simplicity. I alter the melody, this morning for instance singing it altered to the tune of U2's Bloody Sunday. I change the verses around and language, singing the song backwards: The banjo strums in kitchen all alone/ Dinah blows her horn to pass the time/ The watchman rails upon the road I've worked/ all day along. When I take the principle of unreliable narrator to the song, mysteries are opened up. What events does this song chronicle? Is it a veiled reference to a Pinkerton union busting activity, a miners' strike?

How do we account for Dinah's reluctance to blow the horn? That she must be asked repeatedly. Who is this person in the kitchen with her? Is there a person at all, or do we merely suspect? And the banjo strumming. An old banjo and not a new one? Does a person really work on the rail road just to pass the time away? All day long? Early in the morning?

In the second drawing from the top, you can see the banjo player's foot on a bit of rail. The only real reference visually to rail roads in any of the series.

I'm also confused about whether a watchman or a captain shouts for Dinah to blow her horn. This song has been around since I was small, singing it in 2nd grade. Yet it's not the classic that Little Maggie is (another song that as I have worked on this series has settled in; another song that has two sets of lyrics, and I wonder in the end of the song, What is this image of her on the banks of the ocean with a 45 strapped around her and a baby?)

I've been working on the rail road is almost as banal song a Polly Waddle Doodle all Day - which opens The Wild Bunch. Still while that song defies decoding, Working on the Rail Road invites it. And so: I have the dialectice of the chess match: a reference to Jung's notion that the unconscious and conscious exist in a dialectic. The characters around them are not distractions but archetypes, symbols indicating an unknown goal - as Jung also said.