The fantasy echo, and my Ashokan farewell
Can a misunderstanding lead to a deeper understanding?
Rob James
July 14, 2026
My wife, Sarah, and I traveled to the Catskills of New York last weekend to see old friends including Ed Gallagher, Lee Kyriacou and John Morris, and to meet new ones. Along with a joint retirement party for John and me graciously hosted by Ed, and hearty meals, John spirited us around to notable sites in the vicinity, including the Ashokan Reservoir.
I knew that name! (Though I had long pronounced it incorrectly, typical of what I call my “Jeopardy! knowledge,” words that I, like many embarrassed TV-show contestants, had seen in print but never heard out loud. It’s apparently uh-SHOW-kan, mas o menos.) But at least I knew it. I had been an enthusiastic viewer of the Ken Burns Civil War series, every episode of which began with the plaintive strains of a waltz of that name composed by violinist Jay Ungar.
From placards and a superb regional history I learned the lake’s origin story. New York City had been thirsty for water since New Amsterdam days, and by the twentieth century plans were afoot for several reservoirs in the region. One, the Ashokan (Iroquois for “place of fish”) reservoir project, was launched in 1907 as a damming of the Esopus Creek, inundating some fifteen square miles behind the ramparts of rock and earth.
Within eight years some two thousand people were displaced from their homes. Houses, barns, churches, schools were relocated from eleven “hamlets,” some of whose names remain on the land in upended spots (Olivebridge, West Shokan). 2600 graves were dug up, many now with markers engraved not with names but with burial places.
I knew from the TV show credits and sheet music that the song was “Ashokan Farewell.” Why farewell, I had long wondered. Immediately upon learning this history of heartbreak, I grasped the meaning of the poignant tune. It was a farewell to the beauty and the heritage, to the barns and the churches, to the refugees and the hamlets! The melody obviously had been composed as a reverie by or for those uprooted from their roots. Their past livelihoods had been sacrificed upon the altar of that “bitch-goddess” we revere as Progress.
Uh, nope.
Nope, it turns out “Ashokan Farewell” was the last song performed at sessions of the Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Camp, founded in 1980 adjacent to a property in the new Olivebridge used by the New Paltz campus now part of the State University of New York. Ungar and his wife Molly Mason composed the tune in 1982, but it was composed to say goodbye to the visiting campers before they got back in their cars and headed home on the New York Thruway. It had no tie to the rural renewal project.
And yet.
And yet I still felt and still feel that my story is true in some sense. I think the Ashokan Farewell of my imagination is at least as real as the Ashokan Farewell the finale to a music-instruction program.
Can a misunderstanding lead to a different understanding, even to a deeper understanding? I know of some parallels.
We all have heard of mondegreens—mishearings of sung lyrics and spoken poetry and prose. The term originates with Sylvia Wright, who wrote in 1954 of having heard the line “laid him on the green” in the folk-song “Bonnie Earl O’ Moray” as Lady Mondegreen. As the rock era brought forth singers of, uh, variable quality of diction, they proliferated. To someone’s ears, Jimi Hendrix made the oddly intimate aside “’scuse me while I kiss this guy” and Creedence Clearwater Revival advised anxious leg-shifting concertgoers that “there’s a bathroom on the right.” My Stanford freshman roommate Allen Nelson and I puzzled over Manfred Mann’s version of “Blinded by the Light” that sure sounded like “wrapped up like a douche, another rubber in the night.” In childhood I was struck by the Johnny Rivers spy tune “Secret Asian Man,” a pretty slick disguise and later a comic book.
There are more mondegreens in many languages, not just English of course. And there are variants such as intentional ambiguities (for me, Mairzy Doats from my mom and Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames from college). Steven Pinker and James Gleick among other serious writers have examined the phenomena. They derive profound significance from what mondegreens tell us about the brain and the processing of information through both human and artificial intelligence.
What about mishearings (intentional or accidental) that extend beyond amusing absurdity, though, ones that lead somewhere more creative? They exist too. From the Christmas song came the children’s book and film “Olive, the Other Reindeer.” A Joe Cocker song referring to a “lovely planet” was the genesis of Lonely Planet, giving rise to a corporate travel empire. A high-culture example comes from français: a 1983 novel and 1985 movie Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (“Tea in the Harem of Archi Ahmed”) stem from the protagonist mishearing le théorème d’Archimède (“the theorem of Archimedes”) in a boring math class.
And now for my favorite. Some may already know of the Fantasy Echo, since it’s been around for decades. Forgive me, or skip me, if you know this long shaggy-dog story. I only learned of it a few years ago.
It involves a distinguished German-born professor named George Mosse. He taught an undergraduate lecture course at the University of Wisconsin on modern European intellectual history in 1964, with a teaching assistant named Joan Wallach Scott. She was reviewing the students’ term papers on the usual suspects—Nietzsche, Joyce, Proust, Wilde, Yeats, I suppose. I imagine her at her dining-room table, drinking cups of coffee all evening to keep awake and get through them all.
One stood out. I will take license since I haven’t seen it. This fellow had been captivated by what he learned from Mosse’s lectures about the “fantasy echo.” It made so much sense to him. Could intellectual development be nothing but a chimera, an apparition that exists only in the wild imagination of the reader? And might not that chimera reverberate against the corridors of cognition and memory? The two concepts were inextricably intertwined—the fantasy and the echo were groom and bride in a devil’s dance around the mysteries of sensory and rational experience. The paper ended in a glorious climax crediting Mosse’s brilliant concept, which the student found in no other source in the literature cited in his copious bibliography.
Uh, nope.
It took some time, Scott recalls, but there were enough clues in the paper to figure out what the student had done. He had captured the French-word sounds he heard from a professor with a super-heavy German accent and put them in a construct into which he poured life. Nope, what Mosse had been talking about all that time was not a “fantasy echo” but rather the “fin de siècle,” the “end of the [nineteenth] century,” and the emergence of modernism. A time period had become a cosmos.
So far, it was just another mondegreen. Scott neither ratted on him nor connected with him. She imagined he had long ago completely forgotten the course.
And yet.
For her, the graduate student Scott, “there was something about the student’s choice of words that appealed to me—perhaps their sheer linguistic creativity or that they could be construed to have a certain descriptive plausibility….It may be that fantasy echo could become one of those clever formulations that also does useful interpretive work.”
And boy howdy did she ever go to town. She published “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identities,” first as an article in the Winter 2001 issue of Critical Inquiry (I may have let my subscription lapse, durnit) and later in a book collecting her broader work. At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, she constructed an entire theory of feminist interpretation around the concept:
Like an echo, things that seem familiar in fact are only impartial returns….In exposing the underlying premises that organize our ways of seeing things as if they were natural, as if they were eternal, the possibility for thinking differently exists… [T]hen we can imagine that they can be changed.
Her feminist concept of a fantasy extracts coherence from chaos, simplicity from multiplicity. It allows women or holders of other sectional or intersectional identities to create the space in which their lived experience can be examined, criticized and indeed transformed. And how does that fantasy instantiate? By echoes, of course. The world as fantasized has resonance from past to present to future to present to past. They are repeated yet they are transmogrified until one can no longer tell which is the original and which is the echo. They remind me of the iterative products of artificial intelligence we see in the recent Backrooms movie.
Hunh.
I don’t know about you, but I think she owes that unknown (hypothetically beer-drinking frat-bro) Badger student some royalties. His Fantasy Echo ricochets to my Ashokan Farewell. If he could mishear, and I could guess wrong, our blunders might nonetheless wind up with something that houses meaning.
We need fantasy echoes. We live our lives willfully ignoring the fact that the universe arose from a slight excess of matter over antimatter. And that there is a unitary quantum field, fluctuating from time to time and place to place into particles of you and particles of me and particles of that feller behind the tree.
No, we don’t think about any of that. What gets us through life is not only hearing the music of the spheres, but also mishearing the fantasy echo and misdedicating a song to the memory of those early Ashokan settlers. And listening and mislistening to Hendrix and Creedence.