“And So It Is” represents a continuation of, or elaboration upon, the dying in the old person’s home theme announced first in “5150” as it concerns the “the old man.”
More details:
They put him in this big old place where every door is locked
They don’t want no one getting out they might go for a walk
He’s feeling sad and lonely now so far away from home
Not a single person there that he’s ever known.
All of this is pretty much true or as it occurred. But the refrain is mostly made up:
They take him to the window to get a little light
Blind as a bat he don’t know if it’s day or night
But his face like a flower it turns to the sun
And so it is and so it is
Until his day is done.
The last part–until his day is done–is of course a metaphor with the word “day” standing in for the concept “life.” But the other part seems to make an empirical or matter-of-fact claim: that he was “taken to the window” and that he was “blind as a bat.” Maybe he was taken to the window to get a little light. I don’t know, but I doubt it. He had a walker. I know for certain though that he was not blind as a bat. Though he was pretty blind, having suffered over a number of years ocular decay, resulting from something called macular degeneration. I am not sure what this is medically speaking. I only know its effects that one loses vision starting in the center of the eye. So right in the middle of what one should be seeing becomes a black hole which gradually expands taking up all vision except usually on the very periphery. One is left with enough peripheral vision to get about. So he was not blind as a bat.
I think his peripheral vision responsible for suggesting the line I like best in this song: his face like flower it turns to the sun… He walked, during our visit, into a large room, with light streaming at one end, and he cocked his head in a birdlike way, first to this side and then to that, trying to make out where was. He was using, I know, his peripheral vision, but to do that, he had to cock his head left and right as does a bird. Somehow his making that movement touched me. I couldn’t figure out how to get a bird into the song, so I changed his face to a flower.
This I think fitting since as we age the more we regress back along the food chain, so that in end, some exist only in a “vegetative state.”