Going to Graceland (Again)

My body rhythms don’t allow for late night talk television, though some time ago after staying up watching an NCAA playoff game, I flipped channels to see what might be in the offing and learned that the very exceptional Paul Simon was to appear with the inimitable Stephen Colbert (you can see the extended interview at  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmP3rzBeXkw). What followed was, well, sort of remarkable, at least for network television—as they talked about themselves and, not to overstate the point, the universe itself, or at least their views of this place, what good it is, and their lives within it. As I said just now, remarkable.

The occasion for the visit to Colbert’s program was the surprise appearance of yet another album, Seven Psalms (2023), this one appearing at age 81 and years after Simon thought he was done making music, deeming his work complete and himself tired. And so it would have been, he explained to Colbert, if not for a dream telling him to make an album with said title (Simon identifies this voice as his father‘s in his engaging 2021 audio book conversation with Malcom Gladwell, Miracle and Wonder; the book is only in audio form because Simon frequently picks up a guitar to illustrate points he’s making in their discussions of just about everything). In any case, so surprising and strange was this nighttime “intrusion,” Simon climbed out of bed to make note of the instructions with time and date (he still has the note).

Over the next months, snatches of music came in dreams, usually between three and five a.m., and Simon dutifully rose to write these down.  Eventually fragments of lyrics came (throughout his career Simon has first written the music for his songs and then later found the lyrics to overlay the music). Another surprise, a bad one, came late in the process when Simon quickly lost all hearing in one ear, an event that shook him deeply and prevents him from performing with a band. (See trailer for album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiDc4DbFQZY). 

That Simon would so late in life brood upon weighty matters is not really surprising, for throughout his long career (his first album with Art Garfunkel came in 1964), much of his music has been at once deeply introspective and simultaneously observant of the world and the people all about him who, human creatures that they are, inveterately quest for love and meaning, albeit usually in all the wrong places. The dramas that are his songs show people, often desolate, yearning for some sort of home somewhere somehow. And that thirstiness has been at the center from the start with incisive and moving sketching of souls adrift or numb in the “The Sounds of Silence” (with Art Garfunkel a megahit out of nowhere) and the crumpled “Mrs. Robinson,” both appearing centrally in Mike Nichols’s comedic masterpiece, The Graduate (1968). Later comes his own plaintive confessional “Homeward Bound” and later still the doxological “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” And the long drive to Graceland is for a lot more than a visit to Elvis’s mansion. Moreover, his 2003 album So Beautiful or So What indicates he has long been thinking about the larger questions of being alive. Now, though, with Seven Psalms, an introspective canticle of longing and praise, there is a sort of completion.  

All of that from a Jewish fellow who grew up in the Bronx about as secular as can be. And this thirst and soul comes from where? Simon wonders, and wonders, and hopes, hungering for he knows not what. In any case, Seven Psalms again broods, though this time it is upon the mysteries of what he everywhere sees, amid dark and confusion, as the beguiling and even sacred press of a radiant sort of divine presence, a mystery that, seemingly, engulfs and gilds all that is. 

The Lord is the earth I ride on

The Lord is the face in the atmosphere

The path I slip and slide on

A crystal comet

Starlit night

Silver moon

To smooth the edge of daylight

Now tuned to evening rose

Indeed, to this ear the sound and texture of much of the album echoes the thrum of chanted mass or a cantor at work on the Hebrew psalms. All in all, the album seems a musical raid on the inexpressible, an assault very much akin to trying to scale the unattainable, like doing Everest in bathing suit. And that with only the “shabby equipment” poet T. S. Eliot bemoaned in his own resolute assault. For us all, ordinary humans and poets alike, “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” (The Four Quartets, 1936-42).  Nothing new in that. In The Centaur (1963) John Updike’s father’s lecture on cosmic history to a ragtag lot of high schoolers culminates with the emergence of the human: “It all began…when some dumb ape swung down out of a tree…and wondered what he was doing here.” And so it is with Simon, “grateful and in awe,” pumped full of wonder and inexpressible thanksgiving. Easy enough on his gazillions of dollars, though he now lives quietly in the woodlands north of Austin. 

So late in the interview, after Simon has been going on about his appreciation of the gift of existence, Colbert asks Simon flat-out point blank, “Are you yourself a man of faith?” And then, “I would say yes. Let me put it this way.” What follows we would in the old days have labelled confession: “I think we are in an unbelievable paradise on earth and life is so mysterious…like in the rest of our galaxy there’s really no other life and so we don’t know what’s going on, and life is incredible, so I think ‘what a great job you did with this planet….fantastic universe. Hats off to you, God.’” Belief, then, emerges from apprehending the world in a way that elicits, plainly and simply, “an act of gratitude” for the abundant majesty of what is.  In the album, Simon in one of his psalms easily identifies with the great psalm singer:

The sacred harp

That David played to make his songs of praise

We long to hear those strings

That set his heart ablaze…

[For] God turns music into bliss. . .

And then, as if these two guys were in a bar amid a second round, Simon casually flips the script, straight on asking Colbert a simple “You?” To which Colbert asserts his own “heartbreaking gratitude….enormous, overwhelming, uncontainable,” a profound and radical sort of apprehension of the world that yanked Colbert from years of stalwart atheism. Simon replies, “Yes, I understand it completely.” Again, this is not any camp-meeting confession time, but it could pass for one for all of its intensity, candor, exultation, and even actual-factual light—meaning here a profound sort of exultant wonder and blessedness.

And so it goes. The takeaway is that the elder Paul Simon, the great music man of his time (move over, Bob), though now gray, half deaf, and of raspy voice, professes the mystery and allure of beauty amid the perplexing mystery of the human capacity to relish, exult, know, and express. Throughout Seven Psalms, in multiple forms ranging from chant to song story, Simon meditates on the strangeness of the reign (or rain) of the marvel of being alive in this resplendent cosmos. That sort of recognition is in itself, indeed, a strange thing to behold amid this presently frenetic, desacralizing world of dizzying hedonism that ever more ravages an already burning planet.

The great modern poet of the last century, T. S. Eliot, in the great religious poem of the 20th century (and beyond), The Four Quartets (1936-42), chronicles much the same. Eliot begins (and how could he not) with the “still, sad music of humanity,” now the norm of all things, as invoked in Matthew Arnold’s grim “Dover Beach” in the middle of the previous century. And Eliot’s time was already all the more “sad” many times over, having endured the vast slaughter of World War I and, in Eliot’s own present, the frontal assault of Hitler’s rapacity. There, though, amid the dark, Eliot recalls the surprise and wonder of the outbreak of splendor: 

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

The question of what to make of Mr. Simon’s journey remains. Simon sees the world “ablaze” in the ordinary and ever-surprising grace of living where we do. Nor is he the first to think it, to be sure. There were psalmists and Homer and Dante, and more recently this by an obscure British priest: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out like shining from shook foil…” (G. M. Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” 1877).  For Simon too there seems to be an insurmountable grace of surpassing beauty that abides within the very fabric of being within which life happens. Of which the church, or what’s left of it, should take due note and forthwith proceed to invoke splendor far and wide. After all, amid the desecration of being, “God so loved the world…”