From the Barbaric Heart: Sufjan Stevens’ Vengeful Play

I was listening to Sufjan Stevens’ song “I Walked” on his new album The Age of Adz when it occurred to me how much in keeping his work is with the project of Romanticism. Like the Romantics, Sufjan is alienated from the values of the culture into which he happened to be born. He is so alienated from it that it doesn’t occur to him to “rebel;” rather, it is as if he has simply never heard of that culture. He says, “America? Christianity? Sorry, I’m from Adz. Things are arranged differently there.” This is the Romantic strategy par excellence: not a confrontation but a purposeful wandering away from the oppressive reason for alienation. Like William Blake, Sufjan creates his own religion in order not to be condemned to another’s. As the song announces, “he walked.”  He’s “down the road a piece.”

In this, Sufjan is both thoughtfully naive and innocently knowing. His work rests not only with Blake but with other straight-faced art-mystics who articulated their revolution with gorgeous nonsense. Nina Hagen’s Nun-Sex-Monk-Rock (the Antiworld of Cosma Shiva), Sun Ra’s Arkestra and their “Gods of the Thunder Realm,” Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love (“Just ask the Axis, he knows everything”), Piet Mondrian’s theosophical paintings (“Passion Flower,” “Devotion”), William Butler Yeats’ A Vision (The Subdivisions of the Wheel: Will, Mask, Creative Mind, Body of Fate), Blake’s Urizen, Los, and Orc, Jacob Boehme’s De Signatura Rerum (“if he has the Hammer that can strike my Bell!”), John’s “Book of Revelation” (the Seventh Seal, the Wrath of the Lamb), the salvific Arcanum of the Gnostics, Plotinus’ emanation of the Nous and World Soul, and, finally, Plato, nonsensical origin of all these blessedly daft spheres.

These are the folk what begat the folk what begat Sufjan.

But what draws me inside Sufjan’s music is not its iconoclastic teaching but its harmonics. (For nature mystics, all of the elaborate systems of Gnosis can be reduced to the right vibration or wavelength, the ringing of a bell.) The song “I Walked” is accompanied by an icy pure chorus of female voices. This music is anything but avant garde or even avant pop; it is an appeal back to the spiritual music that was once the Church’s proudest ornament: Palestrina or Bach or Handel. Like them, the voices on Adz restore faith’s “abstract purity” (Shelley). Disabused of the world’s wisdom by the world itself, Sufjan creates his own world and “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” (“A Defense of Poetry”)  Like Shelley, Sufjan seeks to speak the divine through the artwork and thus preserve it not as catechism or credo but as something that could be lived, certainly lived for the duration of the work itself, but also lived after as a kind of light blue wash over our lives, art’s promise of happiness. Against such an experience, the world-as-it-happens-to-be looks poorish.  We experience the real world as disenchantment. Art longs for a counter-world, be it a house full of English poets in Geneva in 1816 (parsing the numinous and telling each other ghost stories about the monsters science makes), or an enclave of refuse-niks, playing guitar, reading Walt Whitman, cranking Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut,” and in most other ways thriving just off Burnside near Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, circa 2011.

Sufjan delivers all this with the childlike modesty of the folk singer. His primary message is: don’t take this too seriously, just seriously enough that you can walk with me away from the wreck of this world and into another.

This may seem as if I am glorifying Sufjan in a way that his music will not support. And perhaps it is true that his music will not bear comparison to the music of Beethoven or Mahler.[1] Well, assuming that’s true (I have my doubts about knee-jerk deference to the classical masters), so what? My point is not evaluative; my point is syntactic. My point is that the deep historical forces that make Sufjan possible include Beethoven as well as Plato. I’m also saying, as I said in The Middle Mind, that like it or not Indy pop/rock is about the only green and living perimeter, like the stuff just beneath the bark of a tree, that we have left.

Millions of (mostly) young people eagerly await the next album from of Montréal, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Books, Sleigh Bells, Animal Collective, Ween, Deerhunter, or Radiohead just so that they can be reminded again of what it feels like to be alive, and just so that they can be in touch with something worth being loyal to.

And that ain’t nothin’.

The people who live this loyalty have gathered in cities like San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle in order to be among their kind.  Unhappily, unlike their communal brethren of the 1960s, they feel mostly helpless before the money system. They can’t imagine what it would mean to create an alternative economy (not that hippies ever actually did or we wouldn’t be where we are now). So they work in local bookstores, organic groceries, or in bars and restaurants. They try to stay in grad school as long as possible.  They temp in local colleges, or work for social welfare non-profits. Or they take it on the chin as the “useful smart person” who checks the investment banker’s grammar and does other things that useful smart people do…while feeling guilty and defeated by Necessity.  But their real life is their local music and performance culture. They live in a word-of-mouth utopia (now greased by social media). Their utopia is privately networked: “You’ve got to hear this band,” reads the Facebook post, “they have a new cd and they’re playing downtown this weekend.” It’s a form of love, really.  In giving me The Age of Adz, my daughter said, “I’m obsessed with this album.”  She thought I could be too.  If it enriched her inner life, she imagined generously that it could enrich mine. She gave it to me out of a desire that all beings should be happy.  Especially her father.

Now you might say that that’s an easy thing for her to do, me being her father and all.  But how common is this scene: you see someone in an airport listening to her iPod.  You ask what she’s listening to.  She says, “I’m listening to of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping.”  You say, “That’s a fucking great album.”  (You are both now bonded in some pleasant part of the posterior region of the cortex.  If someone scanned their two brains with magnetoencephalography at just that moment, it would look like they were in love with each other.)  So you say, “Hey, do you know Deerhunter?”  (Of course, anyone who knows of Montreal knows Deerhunter.  I’m trying.  It’s not easy being hip and sixty.  I need a lot of help and forgiveness.)  She says, “No, are they good?”  You get really excited now because you’re going to give her something joyful.  “It so rocks!  The song ‘He Would Have Laughed’ is a whole reason to live in itself.  I can’t wait for you to hear it.  Here’s my cell phone number.  Text me and tell me how you like it.”[2]

The best part of this exchange is that you come away from it feeling happy and alive.  I mean, here you were on this shitty trip, in an airport, eating yet another doughnut, but now you’re just smiling.  You feel as if you have just participated in something that was one part recruitment for a revolution and one part wisdom event.  For a half-hour or so, your neurotransmission is a faucet of pleasure enhancers, especially when you say, “Shit, I’m going to listen to that song myself,” and in go the ear buds.  Yeah!

This loyalty through art is very different from loyalty to a political party, or movement, or struggle. This counterculture reclaims the right to pleasure and play now and not in some distant time when the victorious Party has made the world once again safe for Eros. Dress up now, put on the funky feathers and beads now, dance now, fuck now, laugh a lot, have friends now.  Be happy right now!  So, it’s a word-of-mouth utopia, but it’s also a refusal of the mass loneliness of the money system.

That’s all.