I believe in as little as anybody alive. OK, as anybody I know personally. Not in god, or the soul, or religion, or mysticism; not in the spiritual side of human experience, or transcendentalism, or the broad consciousness of all existence.
I view all as material, from the ground (sub-ground) up.
Then why am I so affected by religious music?
I was listening to Willie Johnson a few days back, a Black street singer from the 1920s and ’30s who’s influenced every folk or blues singer since. Most of what he recorded was evangelical-religious, yet it’s like hearing the walls talking to me – as elemental as the studs, the lath, the overlay of plaster and paint. No one could tug me any closer to the truth.
But what truth?
Nothing that’s spoken to me outside the context of music.
Johnson’s liner-note writers tend to exude a snottiness toward his religiosity, heckling his “naive” outlook, as though he was a low-grade spiritualized idiot savant.
But how about this, from “God Don’t Never Change”: “God way up in Heaven, God way down in Hell…” Are you listening, John Milton? That simple line turns over a couple millennia of Christian philosophy and examines it for fleas.
As modern Americans, we’re in a time and place where religion is either marketed in amorphous globs – Christian Contemporary music as Hallmark sentiments wrapped in weeping slobber – or pushed through an increasingly microscopic sieve to strain out the smallest lumps of heresy. In much of Europe, you can believe in nothing more spiritual than the asphalt roadway and still be considered Christian. In much of the U.S., if you don’t stoutly refute evolution, you’re the devil’s buddy.
So what’s happened with me – my love of Willie, of the Bach B minor Mass, of the Mozart Requiem, of the Staples Singers, Clara Ward, the Coleman Hawkins Singers, the Congolese Missa Luba, Elvis and Little Richard in their quieter Christian guise?
In Catholic grade school I joined the choir, not because I had an amazing voice or could play so much as the simplest instrument, but because I loved – and still do – the haunting melodies of Gregorian chant, especially the liturgy for the midnight Christmas Mass. There’s nothing today that can beat the sheer beauty of “Veni Creator Spiritus,” though I believe in not a word of it, in Latin or English.
I’ve been trying to figure out why, when people bring up god or “spiritual experience”or “there has to be something more” or “there are other aspects to existence” or “you have to expand your idea of consciousness,” I have trouble keeping a quiet, accepting face, yet Negro spirituals, bluegrass hymns, and Renaissance masses elevate me.
Is it enough to say, “It’s all an evocation of the spirit, religious or otherwise”? Or should I file it away under “Beauty” and forget about it? Or is it that it’s more difficult to write a tuneful, soaring celebration of the second law of thermodynamics – “Oh Newton, may the joules of thy knowledge and the prism of thy light illuminate each wayward quark of eternity.”
I wish I knew.
No, I take that back. Knowing doesn’t necessarily make everything clearer. I know how my vacuum cleaner works, but that doesn’t explain the delight I take in the way it sucks up stray dog hairs or desiccated moths.
Maybe it’s just that we’re each the sum of all the accidents of our lives, of both our experience and our internal hodgepodge. I don’t limit “internal” here to anything as explicable as genetics. It might have been the emotional effect of a passing cloud on my mother’s horizon the moment I was conceived. It might have been a random radio broadcast when I was in my crib that stimulated my beta waves.
Most likely it’s a conglomeration of little things that I could not, even with a tunneling electron microscope, hazard to identify.
I hope so.
* * * *
Song of the Week:
The old oaken bucket,
Where once I yelled, “Fuck it,”
That rotten old bucket,
That stank to all hell.
I really think I should
Scrap the songs of my childhood,
Which started out lousy
And didn’t end well.
lickhaven 