Further Adventures in Hitch-Hiking

(A continuation of previous adventures, obviously).

I'm not entirely prepared to rule out the possibility that he was some sort of Field of Dreams-esque traveling ghost from the 1920s.

He was a fiddler, you see.  A fiddler.  That's what he seriously called himself.  Had his violin with him, and there were patches on the case and everything.  He wore actual overalls.  Had a big black bushy beard and a cap.  I picked him up somewhere east of Boise, and he said he was hitching over to Nampa in order to hop on a freight train (yes, a freight train, like some tramping hobo with a knapsack tied to a stick over his shoulder) to West Virginia, to attend a Bluegrass festival.

Mind you, this was not some aged transient, not some relic and holdover from another long-lost era, the last of his kind or something, no; he could not have been older than 23 or 24, I swear.

He described to me his adventures busking back-and-forth across America, playing such long-forgotten instruments as the mandolin, the banjo, etc--and not in Mumford and Sons cover-bands or Arcade Fire-esque Indie experiments, no!  He told me of a dixie-land band he jammed with in New Orleans of all places, because of course he did.  I'd have been disappointed if he hadn't.

Yet for all his transient lifestyle, he did express a desire to settle down--he told me of his plans to return to Washington this Fall for "cherry-picking," which he straight-faced claimed one can "make good money on!"  He said he wanted to "buy a piece of property," just a place he could always call his own, as though he were some migrating Okie in the Depression or something, or some Oregon-trail pioneer or wandering mountain-man seeking a place to call home.

Maybe I should have asked him about the current President, whether he favored Harding or Hoover in the next election, just to make sure.  Who knows.  But I won't get a chance to call him up and check, because he had no Facebook account, nor cell-phone.  By any standard you could devise, he was a young man out of time.  Maybe literally.

I picked up another hitch-hiker just across the Oregon border, and I took him the rest of the way to Portland.  This man was more middle-aged, and much more Hemmingway-esque, what with the stoic manner in which he was defeated but his spirit was not defeated and so forth.  He casually mentioned his time in the Navy along North Africa (I wonder if he dreamed of the lions on the beach), of his years as a country-crossing truck driver; and when a wildfire blocked the I-84 for a couple hours (because mother nature likes to remind us that she's still in charge, and that we cannot disrupt her weather patterns with impunity), he mentioned his "greenhorn" season as a firefighter in Yellowstone, back during the legendary fire of '88.

That is, he was a strong man, a mighty man even, in his youth; but now his wife was leaving him, so he was hitch-hiking back to a home he hadn't seen in 15 years, "to work on the docks" if he could, broke and with little more than a backpack and a terminal cancer diagnosis.  I dropped him off at the Mission on Burnside in downtown Portland past midnight, then kept on driving back to Washington.

We like to think our world is getting smaller and more connected everyday, but there are still whole worlds of people out there who resist and escape our every post-modern impulse to account for everything, and Heaven bless them for it, for they are who keep this world big. 

Against Streaming

Several months ago, a young undergrad looked at me quizzically when I mentioned off-hand a CD I had just bought.  "Wait, you buy CDs?" she asked in disbelief, "You mean you don't just stream Spotify through your smartphone?"  When I protested that I downloaded music onto my iPod, she said, "Wow, that's like hipster status right there!"  I was about to guffaw that iPods hardly qualify as vintage tech, but then I realized that iPods are now 10 years old.  Oh, man.  That's where we are now, folks.

I worried that my general ambivalence about Streaming services signaled the early-onset of premature, get-off-my-lawn old-man crotchetiness; but then I thought about it for 10 minutes and promptly snapped out of it.  For what I quickly realized is this:

If you're gonna get all your music from the internet, then just download it illegally and be done with it--at least then you'll be an honest thief.  Serious, Streaming services notoriously only pay the artists (i.e. the only reason you're on Pandora or Spotify in the first place) fractions of a cent per play--not dollars, not even pennies, but fractions of pennies!  You know, the denominations so small and worthless that there are movements to get rid of them altogether.  Indeed, even thousands of plays on a Streaming site can net an artist less than one whole dollar (as illustrated in this illuminating article by Galaxy 500's Damon Krukowski).  Statistically speaking, file sharing rips off the artist no more than paying the monthly fee to Pandora or Spotify.

In effect, all you are paying for with Streaming is yet another middle-man to rip off the artist for you--as though we didn't already have labels and venues and all the internet to do that!  Really, Streaming services are the music-equivalent of shopping at Whole Foods--just another luxury charge to soothe your worried conscience, to add a veneer of legality and respectability to these whole sordid proceedings, while you continue complicit in the same exploitative practices that troubled it in the first place.  If you're gonna screw over an artist, at least have the decency to own up to it and just file share.

What's more, in file sharing you can at least keep the music!  You are no longer reliant upon the whims of labels, contracts, artists, or others as to whether you will be allowed to pay someone else to hear their music (being able to control what I listen to is a huge reason why I finally quit listening to the radio years ago, too--and I will be cursed before I let another corporation control what I can listen to under the false guise of "better serving" me).  Moreover, with Streaming, if your internet or phone service is spotty (as it is in many rural areas, or on long road trips), or shoot, if we're just hit by the EMP pulse of some unusually large solar flare, then Amen to your grand internet library!  The Library of Alexandria burned longer than it would take for you to lose all your music. 

Or, you know, you could actually buy your favorite artists' music, and compensate them directly for goods and services rendered.  What a novel idea.

Honesty as a Secondary Virtue

I gotta be careful how I phrase this, because I do sincerely believe in the grave importance of honesty, for I have been around enough salesmen to know how dishonesty can corrode your soul.  Nevertheless, in my years teaching, I've come to realize that honesty is only the beginning, not the end--that it is a secondary virtue perhaps, not a primary.

For example, near every semester I've taught, I've at some point started class by asking off-hand if everyone's done the reading, and inevitably some student blurts out loud, "I didn't, I'm gonna be honesty with ya"--as though that made it better!  I tell my students this, and they protest, "Well, what do you want us to do?  Be dishonest?"  To which I reply, "I want you to do the readings!"

What I've come to realize is that honesty must be married with some other virtue for it to matter--e.g. you can maybe be totally upfront with someone about their flaws or mistakes, be utterly tactless and downright mean, fail to encourage or even recognize their better angels, and then justify your needless cruelty under a veneer of "I'm just keepin' it real" or "I'm brutally honest" or whatever--but that doesn't make it better, either!  It's but a negative honesty, destructive alone, absent anything worthy to redeem it or rebuild atop of it, and your soul is not saved.

Not for nothing do both Paul and Mormon write "If ye have not charity ye are nothing"--all the honesty in the world won't make up for a lack of basic human decency, kindness, and compassion; your moment of truth will be but a Pyrrhic victory, for your "brutal honesty" fails to make the world a better place.

If we sometimes bemoan the thousand petty hypocrisies we must daily commit to keep up our facade of polite society (Mark Twain has a hilarious essay on just that topic), well then, maybe that speaks less to our terminal lack of honesty than it does of our compassion.  Because let's be clear: when we tell someone an ugly outfit looks great on them, we're not sparing their feelings, but ours!  But "keeping it real" is just a flip side of the same coin: for if we take a sadistic glee in telling others they look awful, we're also only telling them for selfish reasons!

But in my experience and observation, people who are genuinely full of love and compassion (rare folks indeed, but they do exist--and it's something you can't fake if you don't have it, but also can't hide it if you do) are actually able to be completely honest, to say "yeah, you look terrible today!" and say it with such love and joviality and real friendship that it's impossible to get mad at them.  Perhaps what our world needs most isn't honesty, but a true love that enables honesty to exist!

Again, I rush to emphasize the dire necessity of honesty--if we lack even base-line honesty, then our world is in a dark place indeed.  When one feels the corrosive acid of dishonesty darken one's soul, a simple act of real honesty can be the first step towards healing one's self.  But honesty still is only the beginning of your journey into the light, not the end.  In your quest to be a decent human being, don't stop at that starting line.

Heavenly Mother

"In the heav'ns are parents single/No, the thought makes reason stare/Truth is reason, truth eternal/tells me I've a Mother there"
-Hymn #292 "O My Father," by Eliza R. Snow 

So I was invited to present at Sunstone Symposium a week ago, which was a fun experience; it being my first time, I often felt like an anthropologist, observing a whole new culture of sorts.  To a lot of leftie LDS folk, Sunstone is clearly kind of a safe place, to gather and share and support one another; for others, its clearly more of a confrontational place, to argue and debate and vent.  Often it's both, as was the case with all the Ordain Women panels there in the aftermath of the whole Kate Kelly debacle.

A lot of ink has been spilled (or, more accurately, blogs have been typed) about Ordain Women and Kate Kelly's unfortunate excommunication recently.  I'm of two minds about it.  On the one hand, the whole Ordain Women movement was always kind of a non-starter: gender identity and gender roles are far too essentialized and central to LDS doctrine to ever get seriously re-evaluated by Church leaders (we believe that one must sealed in a biologically heteronormative Temple marriage to attain the highest level of heaven, for example).  But on the other hand, if Kate Kelly's worst sin was preaching false doctrine, well, I know some folks who still preach that white Americans were more valiant in the pre-existence, and I don't see any disciplinary counsels convening to rebuke them.   Besides, it is a matter of historical record that Joseph Smith did in fact allow and encourage women to perform priesthood blessings in the early Church--that is, Ordain Women is perhaps on firmer doctrinal ground than the idiot BYU professor who claimed black people were fence-sitters during the War in Heaven.

I could go on, but most the major points have already been made repeatedly and made better elsewhere.  Rather, I'd only add this: I know a number of LDS young women who are, by any metric you could devise, conservative, faithful, believing, Church-attending, Priesthood sustaining, Temple-recommend holding, returned missionaries, aspiring moms and home-makers, etc, etc.  You know the type.  They are as far from sympathetic with Ordain Women as can be. 

Yet even amidst these most conservative of LDS young women, I've heard: "You Elders have something I wish I had: the Priesthood" (I heard that from a conservative Sister missionary once in Puerto Rico);  or, "when I get to the other side, Heavenly Father and I are going to have a long talk about why women get the short end of the stick so often" (I heard that from an RM and Relief Society Instructor);  or, "I wonder what Heavenly Mother is like?  The Prophets and Apostles and God the Father and Jesus Christ are all men, I want so badly a feminine model I can look up to and emulate, to know what it looks like to be a divine woman" (I heard that one most recently from about the most conservative, modest Midwest girl I've ever met).  Again, these are hardly the target audience for Ordain Women, these are not liberal agitators or whatever, no, these are the conservative ones, the faithful, believing ones!  If they have questions, then what of the rest of the Saints?

I think this anxiety comes down to the Heavenly Mother, whose very absence from our present discourse looms large in a manner that would delight Judith Butler or Luce Irigaray; the feminine lack is all the more present in its absence.  For if we truly believe that the highest exaltation is possible only in the Temple marriage between a man and a woman, then we perforce believe God the Father is married as well--and that He therefore has a wife.  Heavenly Father has a Heavenly Mother.  We don't bring it up much, it's one of the high heresies of Mormonism as far as mainline Christianity is concerned.  It's mostly just preserved nowadays in verse 3 of the popular hymn "O My Father" (written by a woman, no less)--and given the sheer volume of hymns that have been dropped from rotation over the years for being doctrinally false or out-dated or too controversial, it's significant that that one has stuck around.

My point, simply, is that not just the radicals but our most conservative female members would love to know more about this Heavenly Mother (I would too, while we're at it).  And I suspect that much of the agitation centered around Ordain Women sprouts up from this very deep-seated, primal need to know our Mother in Heaven--men have a Man to look up to, the women would like a Woman as well, and some generic, genderless, bloodless Protestant God just doesn't cut it--but we know so frustratingly little about Her.  If women had the priesthood, then maybe they could finally know her as well, is perhaps the unconscious hope, I don't know.

Back at Sunstone, one panelist noted that in every extant version of the First Vision, Joseph Smith not once mentions the gender of the "two personages" that appeared to him; only that one says, pointing to the other, "This is my Beloved Son, hear him."  That is, this panelist proffered the wild theory that Heavenly Mother is maybe who introduced Christ Jesus to Joseph Smith.  And indeed, the Old Testament, New Testament, and Doctrine and Covenants all state that husband and wife become "one" in marriage--and what exactly does that even mean?  That is, perhaps that panelist wasn't as far off as might first appear in trying to locate Her in the First Vision.

Now, I'm not saying I buy that theory, I feel like Joseph Smith would have brought it up at some point--he introduced so many radical, mob-enraging religious ideas in his short life that I think he would've just gone for broke on that one, too.  Rather, I found it significant how someone was trying to locate the Heavenly Mother within that foundational moment of the LDS faith--it shows a very real maternal need that is not currently being met.  Kate Kelly may be out, but that need is not.

Low and the Hermeneutics of Silence

(A version of the paper I was recently invited to deliver at the Sunstone Symposium, held at the University of Utah, 7/31/14, as part of a panel on Mormonism and Pop Culture . I first presented it over a year ago at the Association of Mormon Letters at Utah Valley University; the original version first appeared on shipsofhagoth).

The Minnesota-based indie-trio Low, when they are noted at all, are typically noted for two points: 1) for being “that slow, quiet band” that produces minimalist music at a deliberate pace and hushed volume; and 2) that the husband-wife duo at the band’s core are practicing Mormons.  Point 1 has not been strictly true for about 3 albums now, though their slow embracing of the distortion pedal and amplifier has not apparently harmed their minimalist ethos (nor their critical love or the devotion of their cult following).  Point 2 tends to come up only in passing, to explain such oblique lines as “Oh speak to me/Adam and Eve” from the song “Missouri,” off their 1999 album “Secret Name.”  But these discreetly-LDS references are few and scattered across their 20-year, 10-album discography; and though band-leader Alan Sparhawk has said in interviews that he doesn’t differentiate between his spirituality and his art, Low is not a proselyting group (no pass-along cards are to be found at their shows).  Few if any would classify Low as a “Mormon band.”

Nevertheless, I would like to explore how point 2 bears on point 1—that is, I suspect that Low’s Minimalism and Mormonism go hand in hand (and not just for the handy alliterative quality).  Specifically, I argue that it is Low’s minimalism, their fearlessness in embracing the silences between notes, that allows Low to interact with the very things that can’t be said, that can’t be represented, the “unspeakable” thing outside discourse that is most responsible for Mormon spiritual conversion.  Low does not fear the silence, for the silence for them is not nihilistic void, but where the religious experience lies.  Low’s music doesn’t try to speak the unspeakable, but instead creates a space for it that calls attention to it.  It is this ethos of silence that I argue is quintessentially LDS, more so than much LDS-themed art currently extant. 

Paul Signac, the neo-impressionist painter, is attributed to have said, “The anarchist artist is not the one who creates anarchist paintings.”  That is, it’s not the painting’s content that renders it anarchistic, but rather the manner in which the painting’s style violates convention; for example, a Soviet Greco-Roman propagandist mural may be radical in its politics, yet utterly conservative in its traditional form.  Similarly, a Mormon artist may produce art that is “Mormon” in content yet devoid of a Mormon spiritual ethos in execution; hence we have Michael McClean producing LDS-themed “Forgotten Carols” in the mawkish style of Broadway musicals, a style so contrived that the hacks behind “South Park” were able to ape it to Tony-sweeping effect in their mocking “Book of Mormon” musical.  (Seriously, “The Book of Mormon’s” show-stopper “I Believe” could, with only a few slightly-less-ironic lyric changes—and not even that many—be featured on an EFY CD).  McClean is Signac’s faux-anarchist, LDS in content but not form (which is a sentence which has probably never appeared before); but Low, I argue, while only rarely LDS in content, is distinctly LDS in a form that Trey and Matt couldn’t even conceive of copying.

But how, then, is Low’s minimalist form distinctly LDS?  Certainly there are no Mormon groups I’m aware of (admittedly a small list) trying to do anything remotely similar to Low’s artistic ethos.  The closest act I can think of, tellingly, is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. 

In the days before CDs, I recall having to hit the Seek button on my car’s cassette-tape player to find the next song—the player would find the next empty space devoid of music on the tape, and assume that that was the space between songs.  This feature usually worked well, except with my Tab choir cassette.   The song “O Divine Redeemer,” for example, was so full of silent lulls, that my tape-player kept stopping in the middle of that song.

It is this embracing of the silence, of the spaces between notes, between words, that for me sets apart both Low and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as distinctly LDS in form.  This is because Mormons, unlike many Christian denominations, are not Biblical literalists; we believe the Bible only insofar “as it is translated correctly,” implying that its words often fail to transmit meaning correctly, as do all words.  Even our own Book of Mormon is filled with laments of the inadequacy of language— of “our weakness in writing” (Ether 12:23), that words cannot communicate even “a hundredth part” (3 Ne. 26:6; WoM 1:5; 3 Ne. 5:8; Jacob 3:13; Ether 15:33; Hel. 3:14) of intended meaning, of the “imperfections” (Morm. 9:31, 33) inherent in any text, of how “Neither am I mighty in writing, like unto speaking, for when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost…it carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men” (2 Nephi 33:1), clearly delineating how Spirit is often communicated in spite of the words, not because of them.  The Holy Spirit merely accompanies words, but is not contained in them; and this Spirit is a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12) that often requires complete silence to be detected—though “often times [the Holy Spirit] maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest” (D&C 85:6), and grows in amplification to overpower all else, much like the later music of Low.

Mormon missionaries are trained to “preach the gospel; and if necessary, use words” (as says Elder Holland quoting St. Francis), implying that words are the least relevant element of Spiritual conversion.  The trend in recent Mormon missionary programs has been towards less speaking, fewer discussions, for the Spirit itself does “not multiply many words” (3 Nephi 19:24), since words just get in the way of Spiritual experiences.   LDS missionaries proselyte with the word-filled Book of Mormon, but they do so in hopes not that the potential-converts will be convinced by well-worded arguments, but by a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that accompanies these words, the “unspeakable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15; D&C 121:26), that “maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26)—in short, in Mormonism, the Spirit is a thing outside discourse, beyond words, beyond utterance, that exists in the silence spaces where words fail to mean.  It is not a hot emotional surge, it is not a sudden outburst; though the Spirit may produce these things, it is not these things.  The best missionaries understand that their words must get out of the way of the Spirit—as so understands the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—as does Low.

This philosophy of embracing the silences that bypass words is perhaps best enacted in “Words,” the first song of Low’s first record (1993’s “I Could Live In Hope”), which song may very well function as Low’s mission statement.

As one can see, actual words make up very little of “Words,” for words are the least relevant part of experience.  The arrangement is simple to the point of austere.  The strange verses communicate a mood more than a clear meaning.  The most clearly discernible line among these cryptic lyrics is “too many words/too many words,” expressing a desire to be free of the cluttering words that impede religious-aesthetic experience of silence; and the chorus line of “And I can hear ‘em…” acknowledges the presence of the words without ascribing them meaning, thus keeping the words out of the way of the unspeakable beyond utterance.  In the video, the band members stand far apart from each other, in a large room that calls attention to the spaces between them.  The song alone fills the empty spaces between the band members, just as the notes fill the unbridgeable gap between word and meaning, just as the silences bridge the gaps between the notes.  The silences are as integral to Low’s songs as the instrumentation.  In fact, the silence is where Low’s music actually lies.

As mentioned earlier, Low would go on to embrace the distortion pedal and amplifier (on 2005’s “The Great Destroyer”), as well as strings and horns (on 2001’s “Things We Lost In The Fire”), and electronica (on 2007’s “Drums and Guns”).  But as more competent music reviewers than myself have noted, Low’s ultimate increase in volume, while perhaps a surprise, was not necessarily a shock, for there had always been a menacing “violence” lingering beneath the silence.  But I’m not even sure violence is the right word, though—“violence” implies a nihilistic threat to the self, and as Low made clear on the first song off their second record, “You can’t trust violence.”  One can feel a nihilistic threat from the all-consuming silence, to be sure, but only if one believes that silence is equivalent to the void.  Nothing could be farther from the artistic ethos of Low: for them, silence is not where the threat lies, but the redemption.  The words were the threat, what separate us from each other; outside the words is where one becomes reconciled, at-one, with the silence that contains the groanings beyond utterance.