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As I write this, America is just about done with its midterm election day. I might be in Canada, but that doesn't mean I don't know what's going on down there. Most of us here are pretty good about keeping track of who's running the show where. Especially places right next door.
As someone a bit removed from the everyday implications of a bad United States government (though not immune to its adverse affects on the planet in general), what always irked me the most about political tensions in the US was the extent to which they have turned religion into a vapid shadow of what it should be.
By religion, I don't mean blind fundamentalist worship, because to some extent that's a problem that has been brewing in all of Western civilization for a long time. I'm talking more about how America was founded on principles of pragmatism and liberty, free of "thou shalts." People like Walt Whitman knew what "America" in this sense was supposed to be about — what it could accomplish.
Sufjan Stevens
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I don't have reservations saying any of this as a Canadian, partially because it's a concept that's antithetical to borders. Religion used to be about groups of people getting together for a big therapeutic party, for a show. There may have been ritual around the mythology, but it wasn't about laws. It was about wonder, and reconciling ourselves with the scary and beautiful reality and rhythm of this world.
If anything in America has been quietly carrying the torch of Whitman's hope through recent years, it's music. I was watching Sufjan Stevens perform "Say Yes! to Michigan!" on Austin City Limits the other night, and it really captured what I think religion in America was ultimately meant to be about. The whole song is a kind of celebration of being from a place, and its everyday touchstones, with the repetition of lyrics giving the whole thing a sense of exclamatory wonder. Watching Stevens and his band go, "Cadillac! Cadillac!" it's hard not to be hit with a kind of atheistic religious ecstasy, if such a thing is possible. It's the idea that there doesn't have to be anything beneath these simple things for them to inspire awe and celebration. It's possible to have religion and ritual whose real worth and content comes from the people around you who are also singing.
Joanna Newsom
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Forget the political landscape; politics will always disappoint because the kind of therapy we're taking about is beyond language and science and politics. If you want to hear America's hope, listen to Joanna Newsom's Ys, which comes out November 14 on Drag City.
Once in a while these poets come along that seem tapped into a century's worth of wonder. Forget what you thought you knew about Joanna Newsom — just make sure you hear these five epic new songs of hers, and hear them over and over. Words, fittingly, don't really do the thing justice. But I could do worse than to quote the last verse of "Emily," the first song on Ys, to avoid making my final point at all linguistic, scientific, or political…
Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow
Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow
With hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up-a their brow
And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk, and dour
The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines
Come on home now! All my bones are dolorous with vines
Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light
Squint skyward and listen
Loving him, we move within his borders
Just asterisms in the stars' set order
We could stand for a century
Starin'
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be
Told, take this
And eat this!
Told the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire
That propelled it to thee
And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void
That lies quiet in offering to thee
Posted November 2006
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