Scatter, scatter. A new post is made.
A couple of songs take over my earbuds lately… sure to insinuate themselves into the Top of 2006 list.
Work by Jars of Clay. Over the years, Jars has been responsible for quite a number of songs that make me drop what I’m doing and just listen. This is one of them. Do you know what I mean when I say, ‘I don’t want to be alone’? The song drives hard from end to end, in a pleasing brit-pop fashion that I’ve not heard this band own so well ever before. Do all the demons look like prophets and I’m living out every word they speak? The song is about work. It’s about striving. It’s about failing and reaching the end of the rope and throwing up your hands and laying down and desiring to be yoked with brothers and sisters in this madness we call living. I have no fear of drowning, it’s the breathing that’s taking all this work.
Our Homes Are Graves by Colour Revolt. After Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a young band comprised of college students was forced to build their own Pro Tools studio from nylon, cardboard and broomsticks. They had intended to record in a proper studio… but the storm had other plans for them. After catching the attention of some bigwigs, they tracked an EP and released it. Our bodies have torn in places, I see a darkness, so I’ll just face it. I feel rocked about in the tumult a lot. I feel cradled and held… and I feel like I’m free-falling too. I feel like I’m facing some darkness… but the pinprick of light grows brighter all the time. We’ve heard the things that God said, we’ve got the marks on our heads, our houses turned into graves, some peope better left for dead. Why do I forget that I have only one certain thing in this life? Why do I pin my hopes and fears on a letter grade? Why do I fritter away the hours of the day, worrying that I’ll ever make it? I’ll just face it. God speaks, it is. We are the things that God said. Everthing’s moving… everything changes so fast. The impassioned pleas of Jesse Coppenbarger stay with me when I walk through the rain stained campus each day.
And when I take those earbuds out… in the din in the distance I can hear another tune. And it’s not really melancholy. And it’s not really somber, pining or catastrophic. It’s begging the question, as Kierkegaard famously did in The Sickness Unto Death, “Eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you have despaired in such a way that you did not realize that you were in despair, or in such a way that you covertly carried this sickness inside of you as your gnawing secret… or in such a way that you, a terror to others, raged in despair.”
I know I cannot answer the way, say Nietzsche might have, “There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy — contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, who I despise: it is the man of today… I suffocate from his unclean breath.”
I can here the faint rhythm of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famed Symphony No. 9 in D minor, opus 125, the fourth movement, gaining momentum. Let me never be enslaved to any happiness I think is to be derived from things that rot and decay. Let it come from real life, momentum, the world robed in light that peppers my dreams each night with indescribable visions.
“For example, if a man is presumably happy… although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy… Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit.”
I think I’m ready to take the plunge… like Will Oldham’s character in Old Joy, into the wilderness with a friend, to find the hot springs, to see the place where the treeline ends, to camp on the edge of civilization. And come back to it. Ready to change it.
Ode to Joy.
Oh friends, not these tones!
Rather let us sing more
cheerful and more joyful ones.
Joy! Joy!
Joy, thou glorious spark of heaven,
Daughter of Elysium,
We approach fire-drunk,
Heavenly One, your shrine.
Your magic reunites
What custom’s sword separates;
Beggars become princes’ brothers
Where your gentle wing alights.
Whoever succeeds in the great attempt
To be a friend of a friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Let him add his jubilation!
Yes, whoever calls even one soul
His own on the earth’s globe!
And who never has, let him steal,
Weeping, away from this group.
All creatures drink joy
At the breasts of nature;
All the good, all the evil
Follow her roses’ trail.
Kisses gave she us, and wine,
A friend, proven unto death;
Pleasure was to the worm granted,
And the cherub stands before God.
Glad, as his suns fly
Through the Heavens’ glorious plan,
Run, brothers, your race,
Joyful, as a hero to victory.
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Do you bow down, you millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek Him beyond the star-canopy!
Beyond the stars must He dwell.
Be embraced, ye millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Be embraced,
This kiss for the whole world!
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods
Read more cool stuff: Kierkegaard vs. Nietzsche
