At first listen, Van Morrison’s “Just Like Greta” might seem like one more late-career blues tune — a man weary of the crowd, craving solitude, mumbling through the familiar refrain, “Just like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone.” But if one listens beyond its plainspoken phrasing and modest groove, the song reveals itself as something astonishingly rare: a blues of post-illumination.
Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” (https://www.vira-chandra.com/2025/11/you-want-it-darker-leonard-cohen-and.html) was the cremation fire — the solemn rite of surrender, where every name, prayer, and illusion was burned to ash.
Morrison’s “Just Like Greta” is the smoke that rises afterward — the everyday life that continues once the soul has already died its ritual death. It hums instead of chants, it laughs instead of prays. The sacred survives, but it has forgotten its costume.
Here the same Goddess — Dhumāvatī, the Smoky Mother — appears in a gentler phase. Cohen sang her as the cosmic widow presiding over annihilation; Morrison sings her as the quiet companion who remains when everything worth worshipping has faded. She no longer speaks in scripture, but in the offhand humour of a man muttering to himself while packing his bag for nowhere.
Every verse carries this alchemy of fatigue into grace. The engine that once drove the human spirit — to succeed, to grow, to understand, to decode the secrets — has stopped. And yet the body keeps moving, the music keeps playing, the voice keeps wandering. This is motion after motive, action after purpose — the state the Kaula masters described as spontaneous play beyond desire. Morrison doesn’t name it; he simply lives it.
There is no rebellion in his withdrawal, no grand renunciation — only the quiet recognition that the search itself had become exile. When he says he wants to be alone, it is not loneliness but sovereignty: solitude as the natural climate of someone who has seen through both the noise of the world and the drama of seeking truth.
Thus, “Just Like Greta” completes the arc that “You Want It Darker” began.
One is the fire consuming the self;
the other is the smoke drifting freely, humming its small, immortal tune —
the humour and calm that remains after annihilation,
the smile that knows the joke was always divine.
Verse 1
Some days it gets completely crazy
And I feel like howlin′ at the moon
Then sometimes it feels so easy
Like I was born with a silver spoon
Other times you just can't reach me
Seem like I′ve got a heart of stone
Guess I need my solitude
And I have to make it on my own
“Some days it gets completely crazy / And I feel like howlin’ at the moon.
Then sometimes it feels so easy / Like I was born with a silver spoon.”
The song begins not in revelation but in rhythm — the seesaw of ordinary human weather. One day feral, the next serene. What might sound like small-talk exhaustion is, on a subtler register, the mark of someone who has ceased to curate his own moods. Morrison isn’t dramatizing instability; he’s describing the psyche after control has died. The howl and the ease are equal now, two waves on the same tide.
“Other times you just can’t reach me / Seem like I’ve got a heart of stone.”
This is not emotional coldness; it’s the unavailability that follows insight. When the fire of meaning goes out, warmth itself feels artificial. Dhumāvatī’s disciples know this chill well — the quiet interval when compassion still exists but can no longer perform. The heart hasn’t hardened; it has emptied.
“Guess I need my solitude / And I have to make it on my own.”
Here the tone settles into acceptance. Solitude is no longer a reaction to pain but a natural law. “Making it on my own” is not defiance; it’s the recognition that no external current can supply the inner voltage anymore. This is the beginning of post-collapse freedom — the self walking without an agenda, the blues singer turned renunciant.
In Kaula language, this first verse marks the transition from rāga (the pull of passion and aversion) to vītarāga — dispassion without dullness. The music keeps swinging, yet the inner motion has stopped. What remains is the hum of existence moving effortlessly through a body that has relinquished the need to steer.
Chorus
“Well, I guess I’m goin’ A.W.O.L.
Disconnect my telephone.
Just like Greta Garbo —
I want to be alone.”
What sounds like an ordinary blues refrain — a man turning off his phone and disappearing for a while — is, in truth, the anthem of sacred withdrawal.
He isn’t running from the world; he’s stepping out of its hypnosis. “A.W.O.L.” here isn’t rebellion against authority — it’s awakening without orders. He no longer needs the chain of command: not society’s, not God’s, not even the soul’s. He simply walks off the battlefield of meaning.
“Disconnect my telephone” might be the most spiritual line ever sung in a bar-blues rhythm. It’s not about technology or isolation; it’s about cutting the last line of transmission between the mind and the noise — the divine equivalent of switching off prayer. When you stop answering every call for relevance, you return to the original silence.
Then comes the invocation — “Just like Greta Garbo.” In that image of the glamorous actress who abandoned the stage to live unseen, Morrison finds a kind of saintly kinship. Garbo’s solitude wasn’t bitterness; it was refusal to perform. Dhumāvatī, too, is that refusal made divine — the goddess who has no stage, no audience, no beauty left to maintain.
And “I want to be alone” lands not as complaint but as mantra. The rhythm still swings, the tone remains playful, yet beneath the humour is a realization that few mystics reach without a lifetime of burning: being alone is not a condition — it is reality.
So the chorus repeats the eternal blues paradox: laughter as liberation. This isn’t nihilism, it’s the smile after enlightenment — the lightness of someone who knows the phone will never ring again and, for the first time, doesn’t mind at all.
Verse 2
Need to make some real connection
Baby, something's just got to give
′Cause I′ve been too long in exile
I've been grindin′ at the mill
Too long to decode all the secrets
Have to get some elbow room
Most people think that everything
Is just what they assume
“Need to make some real connection / Baby, something’s just got to give.
’Cause I’ve been too long in exile, I’ve been grindin’ at the mill.”
This verse opens like a confession — a tired acknowledgment that the rhythms of effort, even spiritual effort, have become exile. The “mill” is not work; it’s the endless turning of mind upon itself. He isn’t asking for connection in the worldly sense — he’s speaking from that strange middle ground where the hunger for depth remains, but the tools of depth have turned to dust. This is the ache after enlightenment, when the heart still moves but there is nowhere left to reach.
“Too long to decode all the secrets / Have to get some elbow room.”
This line strikes like a bell. The “secrets” are not hidden truths of the universe but the endless interpretations, the mystical decoding of one’s own life — the “machine of meaning.” He’s spent too long trying to understand what only wanted to be lived. And now, with a smile that’s half weary, half liberated, he sets the scholar inside him on fire. “Elbow room” is his new theology — the space where understanding is no longer needed.
“Most people think that everything / Is just what they assume.”
This could sound cynical, but it isn’t. It’s observation without judgment. Once you’ve stepped outside the wheel of assumptions, you see how life sustains itself through shared fictions — money, identity, destiny, belief. Morrison doesn’t mock it; he just knows he can’t go back.
The verse closes like a quiet shrug. No revelation, no rebellion — just the recognition that exile was self-created, and the gate back to freedom is nothing more than refusing to decode another line. This is the moment when the mystic stops seeking symbols and begins to live without commentary. The bluesman becomes the sage, and the song keeps moving on its own.
Verse 3
Well, I’m goin’ out to L.A., I wanna get my business done.
Then I’m goin’ on to Vegas, then I’m goin’ on the run.
If anybody asks you have you seen me, please just tell them, ‘No,’
’Cause I’m livin’ on the outside and I have nowhere to go.
At first glance, it’s just a travel plan — a road verse straight out of the American songbook. But behind the geography, there’s a spiritual map: movement without destination. The cities are names for momentum itself, for life still turning after purpose has ended. “Business,” “Vegas,” “on the run” — these are not ambitions, they are the echoes of old habits still unwinding after the self that needed them has quietly died.
“If anybody asks you have you seen me, please just tell them, ‘No.’”
This is the death announcement of the persona. The “me” has left the stage; what remains is a silhouette that keeps walking, breathing, singing. Dhumāvatī smiles through this line — the one who outlived everything recognizes her own gesture in the man who disappears politely, leaving no forwarding address.
“’Cause I’m livin’ on the outside and I have nowhere to go.”
This is the line where all pretense falls away. There’s no tragedy in it — only the calm of one who has crossed to the far bank and sees that the shore was illusion all along. “Outside” does not mean exile anymore; it means freedom from inside and outside both. To have “nowhere to go” is not despair — it is the consummation of arrival.
In the higher tantras, this state is described as akriya — action without doer, motion without motive. Morrison has stumbled into it with the humility of a wanderer rather than the vocabulary of a mystic, and that makes it even purer. The blues shuffle continues, the voice keeps swinging, but everything essential has stopped.
This final verse is not escape — it’s motionless motion: the song of life continuing by itself, the small, holy drift that follows illumination. It’s the sound of a man who has gone A.W.O.L. from meaning — and found, in the middle of nowhere, perfect peace.
Final Chorus
“Well, I guess I’m goin’ A.W.O.L.,
Disconnect my telephone.
Just like Greta Garbo —
I just want to be alone.”
By the time the chorus returns for the final repetitions, it no longer feels like a declaration — it has become a mantra of completion. The line that once sounded like escape now breathes like acceptance. “A.W.O.L.” isn’t rebellion anymore; it’s shorthand for emancipation. The soldier has left the battlefield, but there is no war left to fight.
“Disconnect my telephone” now carries almost liturgical weight. Each repetition severs another thread — obligation, performance, conversation, even prayer. The voice that once reached outward for recognition is now turning entirely inward. The bluesman has become a renunciant humming to himself in an unseen monastery of solitude.
And “Just like Greta Garbo — I just want to be alone” lands no longer as a wish, but as a fact. There is no tension between wanting and being; the words are fulfilled as they are sung. The rhythm softens, the humour remains, but what you hear underneath is the peace of someone who has completed his orbit.
This final chorus is not melancholy — it’s the sound of the world receding at last without loss or nostalgia. The man who once howled at the moon now hums to the silence. Dhumāvatī smiles faintly: the song has ended, but the movement continues, effortless, free.
The Calm After the Fire
Van Morrison’s “Just Like Greta” is not a song about escape, depression, or disillusionment. It is the quiet hymn of someone who has already died to striving and discovered that life still moves. Where Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” was the cremation fire—the lucid surrender to annihilation—Morrison’s song is the smoke that drifts afterward, humming to itself, half amused that the world still turns.
Everything here breathes of Dhumāvatī’s lighter face: the post-collapse calm, the tenderness that comes when even meaning has burned away. There is no sermon, no mystic drama, only the simple wisdom that solitude is not exile but the natural climate of freedom.
To say “I just want to be alone” is not complaint—it is the calm that follows revelation. The self has resigned its post, yet the body keeps tapping its foot, the blues keeps swinging, and consciousness continues its effortless drift. This is the music of motionless motion: existence ungoverned, lucidity unburdened, devotion expressed as a shrug.
Thus the song completes the arc begun by Cohen.
One burned everything down; the other walks through the ash smiling.
Both belong to the same Goddess—the widow who teaches that after the flame dies, what remains is not silence but a small, divine chuckle that knows the joke was always Her own.
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