"We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship."

A church that I often pass by on the way to and from work has, as churches often do, a sign upon which someone writes pithy and pseudo-profound statements about faith—the religious version of by-lines for the week’s sermon or something. (Can you tell that I’m not really impressed with what tends to get written there? I may appreciate the fact that church is a place where people openly try to discuss some of the more important things about human life, but the mere fact of that attempt doesn’t make up for the fact that the framework within which that discussion takes place is, to put it charitably, outmoded and incoherent given what we know about the world.)

Diatribe aside, for several weeks the sign outside the church said the following: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship.” I am trying hard to be as accurate as possible but I can’t guarantee I have the wording exactly right, but I think this captures the spirit of it, Now, if I want to cut it some slack, it seems that the most charitable (but the least philosophically interesting) interpretation is simply that we need to evaluate our priorities and make sure that they are good. In this form its bland but inoffensive, but in the form posted on the sign itself, there are some problematic things suggested by its phrasing.

The first problem, then, has to do with the idea that “We all worship something.” Well, I’m not sure if this is true. After all, worshipping is not just a generic human activity, but a very specific and very historically inflected complex of beliefs, emotions, and practices, and I’m not so sure everyone—or maybe even very many people—actually “worship” in this strict sense. In particular, the religious and indeed, ritualistic, connotations of worship, especially of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort, means that it is already dubious that everyone worships something. Do Buddhists or atheists do anything comparable to worshipping? Can relatively irreligious people who might only go to church on Christmas, but still vaguely identify as Christian, be said to worship God?

While I think that the answer to the above questions is probably “no,” or at least a very qualified “yes” in which the differences involved are pretty sizeable, maybe I am just being too strict about what is meant by “worship” here. Maybe all the sign means by “worship” is to “value highly, or to actively recognize as an authoritative value or set of values.” After all, the point of the sign does seem to be a matter of identifying what our priorities are. But this doesn’t really save the sign from incoherence because it still runs into the second problem concerning the idea that we can choose what we value, much less worship. Now, I am not saying that worshipping is something done involuntarily, since one element of worshipping is an intentional commitment to what is being worshipped (and to worshipping itself). As a rule it doesn’t make sense to worship against one’s will: you wouldn’t worship something you didn’t admire or revere (and therefore want to worship) because those feelings are integral to the motivation of worship and are part of what give it its meaning.


But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that worshipping is the result of an intentional choice, or is something that we can just will to do. Like so many aspects of our lives, the truth of such a choice lies somewhere in the middle. And its here that we get into the difficult territory, where it is not clear-cut at just what point the will—where what we can said to be responsible for—begins and ends. Now, we often think it would be nice to be able to say that every decision that we make is the result of a process that was absolutely under our conscious control. However, not only is that not the case, but that is probably a good thing since that would likely make everyday living quite overwhelming. But everyday things aside, we would still like to think that the big things like what kind of people we are to become, and what we value, are in some way up to us. And I wouldn’t deny that they are in a large part up to us, but they are not so in the sense that we can just sit down, deliberate about them for awhile, and then simply choose and be done with it.

To use worship as the example, consider how you can decide to adopt all of the outward forms of worship—perform all of the rituals, say all the words—while remaining inwardly unconvinced or unmoved, just as you can do all the things to try to get your mind into a “worshipful zone,” but still fall short of feeling it. One reason why a choice like that doesn’t stick, I think, is that it gets the role that such a belief plays backwards: it is against the background of such a belief and on its authority that we make decisions. If you choose to worship something it is not the choice as such that makes the difference, but whatever it is about the thing that made it worth worshipping. Think about it this way: it makes no sense to say that people who become born again Christians accept Jesus as their personal savior because they choose to (that’s just a tautology that really doesn’t explain the choice itself), no, they choose to accept him because (and here I’m worried about not getting the language right) the Holy Spirit enters their hearts and lifts them up to Jesus. There are undoubtedly lots of preconditions for being able to have such an experience, and some of those are under our direct control, but that’s pretty murky territory in terms of conscious and unconscious decisions, motivations, etc. (And that’s coming to worship something else as an adult in full command of one’s rational capacities, things are even more complicated when it comes to the determination of what we have grown up worshipping since so much of the determination of that lies hidden in the mists of childhood prehistory.)

But to return to the slogan that instigated all of this: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship,” I think what I’ve said does confirm one element of this, namely, just how important it is what we choose to worship. But even if we treat this charitably as a call for self-reflection about our values (and ignore the misunderstandings about the relationship between choice and worship that it seems to flirt with) I still think the sign is far too optimistic about our ability to intentionally effect self-change. The point may seem pedantic, but that misguided way of thinking about the will and choice is longstanding in the Western philosophical tradition. Plus, this discussion sets up the next song I wish to examine.

The Mountains Goats - "The Birth of Serpents"

Anyway, to finally get back to The Mountain Goats, the song I’d like to discuss first is the one that, if it didn’t exactly serve as a gateway to them, it was at least the first of theirs that really got under my skin and earned my devotion: “The Birth of Serpents.” 

I’ve linked the David Letterman version because it’s really awesome (the live performances I’ve seen on YouTube are pretty electrifying, Darnielle, the lead Goat, really inhabits them emotionally). So, speaking of getting under the skin, the first thing that struck my about this song was this stand-out line about halfway through the song: “See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest.” There is a lot to unpack about this line alone, not only in itself but also in how it connects to the rest of the song.

To begin with, the line itself is a psychologically astute description of a certain kind of (somewhat self-inflicted) misery. There are a variety of ways that someone can be at odds with themselves in this way. Drug abuse is a particularly relevant example, esp. considering that the content of practically an entire Mountain Goats album, “We Shall All be Healed,” is drawn from Darnielle’s experiences as a meth user. Anyway, the kind of damage that drug use can inflict on one’s body (along with the damage that comes of the accompanying lifestyle) certainly resembles the careless destruction (or at best neglect) of an uninvited guest. But being at odds with oneself is not limited to drug abuse, I have certainly seen people who are not comfortable with their bodies in all sorts of ways: those with self-esteem or self-image problems; those who are uncomfortable with the bodily or the sexual, often for religiously-derived reasons; and those who, for whatever reason, have never developed their physical capabilities but then are called upon to use them (I can recall having to help teach a fourteen year-old boy who styled himself a cultured aesthete how to run—something that is difficult to teach precisely because the details of learning it lurk so far back in most of our histories).

The very title of the song does offer hope: insofar as the song is about the “birth of serpents,” there is the possibility of shedding one’s skin, growing out of one’s problems, being reborn or regenerated. At first sight the image of shedding one’s skin doesn’t make sense here: surely the solution to “dwelling inside one’s body like an uninvited guest” is to learn to properly dwell within one’s body, so that the fault lies with oneself, not with the body. However, particularly if drugs are involved, the opposite may also be true. The degree to which drug addiction is a physical force and operates on a physiological level, means that to a certain extent it could be said that the fault could very well lie with the body, that one’s body might no longer be hospitable and that we can only dwell within it as a uninvited guest. In this case, the therapeutic possibilities of shedding one’s skin, i.e., cleansing or detoxing the body, are clear. (Of course, you could simply say that what you have to shed in this case is simply one’s way of life or something like that, and you wouldn’t be wrong to say so, but what I think that explanation misses is the extent to which a very bodily form of self-relation is at stake here.)

Anyway, the interesting this how the song proposes this detox as a literal form of shedding one’s skin by getting outside of oneself. Consider the first two verses of the song, which are about self-reflection in the form of reflecting on one’s (literally) external image by way of photography:

Let the camera pull back till the fullness of the frame is clear 

and plain

Peer into the screen until you see it all

Like a vision in a crystal ball

Let it all fill with smoke

Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?

The very first line introduces the camera as a tool that brings things and their context (their frame) into focus. The last line about it being a joke points to the kind of defensiveness and disbelief that meets such a process at the outset (and thereby points to the need for such a process). The objectivity of photography promises a picture of how things are that is not clouded by the vagaries of a biased (and potentially drug-addled) memory. The song dwells on the process of developing a picture—of exposing it—as a process of being exposed to the truth about oneself:

Let the fixer work until the silver’s washed away

And take the picture from the tray

Look hard at what you see and then remember you and me

And let the truth spring free

Like a jack in a box

Like a hundred thousand cuckoo-clocks

The lesson in this seems to be that one actually has to shed one’s skin in order to properly inhabit it, or to put in an amusingly paradoxical way, sometimes in order to become who we want to be we have to stop being ourselves. Self-reflection sometimes requires self-estrangement, which is the triumph recorded in the following lines:

Let the camera do its dirty work down there in the dark

Sink low, rise high, and bring some blurry pictures to remember all your darker moments by.

A Return?

It has been a long time since I have written here. For those who know me personally the reasons are no doubt obvious—hundreds of pages of dissertation (only some of which actually made it into the final draft) needed to come first. But I want to keep writing, to keep practicing my writing, and to practice keeping on writing, so this is an outlet I would do well to take advantage of to keep up that practice up when other avenues are not so fruitful.

While I have a line-up of topics I had already begun writing about before my long hiatus, I think a return to this forum needs something new—something that inspired me a great deal while I was absent from this space. That something is the band The Mountain Goats, who I will write at least a little about here and probably a great deal more in the time to come (if it comes).

But before that, another (long) preliminary: I should like to talk a little about why I think and write about music in such a long, drawn-out, and overly intellectual way. I’m not sure when it began, but for as long as I can remember I have always cared about musical lyrics and the meanings of songs. I listen to a song well enough that I try to interpret it like a poem—to be able to say what it is about, but also to be able to comment on what it is about is all about. Thinking about how The Posies’ “Please Return It” is about the inevitable vulnerability that goes along with all human relations, is to also think about the extent to which that is true, to gauge the accuracy and scope of that idea as it occurs in the song and in life, and to try to understand what particular spin and particular pathos the song brings to these recognitions. I enjoy exploring this side of music—indeed, to me this kind of understanding is entirely bound up with my enjoyment of not just music but virtually all art. 

I guess this makes me an inveterate intellectualizer, but the thing about art is that when it is successful it goes beyond mere intellectualization, that’s the point of making a work of art rather than an essay or treatise. And I don’t really mean to disparage intellectualization, as I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as such (and tend to engage in it myself), it’s just that it can be in danger of becoming abstract or arid without something to liven it up. This kind of position is also part of what makes me an inveterate Hegelian and makes this a blog about the speculative content of music, because it is, I think, reaching after a form of reason that is a more thoroughly holistic form of thought which is the hallmark of the “speculative” for Hegel.