Spirit of My Silence

Sufjan Stevens, Ann Powers,
​  and Alfred North Whitehead

​​

Spirit of my silence I can hear you, but I'm afraid to be near you.

-- Sufjan Stevens, Musician


It's a challenge Stevens poses to himself, to make space for a presence that continually gets lost in the human shuffle...Tracing the confusion and the enlightenment that mourning and isolation invite, Stevens joins a handful of other artists returning solitude to the center of the musical conversation this year.

-- Ann Powers, Writer
​

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness...It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.

-- Alfred North Whitehead. Philosopher

---

How To Be Alone: 
Musicians Confront Solitude
by Ann Powers

APRIL 01, 201512:50 PM ET
NPR: excerpts from column, click here
for entirety

​In his formal, disarmingly humble way, Sufjan Stevens accomplishes something remarkable in the first notes of his new album, Carrie & Lowell. After a Bach-like interlude plucked on a ukulele, Stevens opens this confessional meditation on mourning and reconciliation with a characteristic whisper. "Spirit of my silence, I can hear you," he sings, going straight up a major scale as if this were a morning matin in some folk mass-obsessed abbey. "But I'm afraid to be near you, and I don't know where to begin." It's logical to assume that the spirit he invokes is that of Carrie, the mentally ill mother who abandoned him as a child and died, still mostly a mystery, in 2012. It's she, along with the second husband she also abandoned, who gives the album its title. 

The Presence of the Unnameable

But reviewers have been picking up on that first line for a different reason. It's a challenge Stevens poses to himself, to make space for a presence that continually gets lost in the human shuffle. This idiosyncratically Christian artist might call that presence God, but he could also call it beauty, or inspiration, or vastness, or solitude, or even nothing — all the names for the unnameable that artists and holy people have conjured over the years.

Hymns and Plainsong

Its minimalist arrangements...invoke not folk music so much as the sources that signal introspection for many listeners: hymns and plainsong; Brian Eno's ambient soundtracks; the yeshiva school solemnity of early Simon & Garfunkel.

Moments of Grace

Songs like "Beloved of John" and "All Of Me Wants All of You," intentionally or not, recall the holy perversity of works by Baudelaire or Jean Genet, or even James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, in which erotic encounters are a kind of cleansing by fire. In "The Only Thing," Stevens recounts himself as saved from suicide through moments of grace conveyed within the shape of the stars or a water stain in a hotel room bathtub. But it is his clasp of the razor, of the car wheel almost taking him off the road, that allows for redemption. Negating piety, admitting perversion, Stevens opens himself up to the salvation of emptiness: "Blind faith, God's grace, nothing else to impart."

Solitude

Tracing the confusion and the enlightenment that mourning and isolation invite, Stevens joins a handful of other artists returning solitude to the center of the musical conversation this year. It's a difficult subject to approach honestly, not only because being alone often feels impossible within contemporary society's wireless matrix, but because the experience is so often commodified, reduced to the price tag on a yoga mat or the itemized bill for a faux-monastic spa retreat. Yet the best albums of this season consider both the costs of isolation and the value of pursuing it.

- Ann Powers

Religion is what the individual does with his solitariness
​
by Alfred North Whitehead

​from Religion in the Making

​"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. It runs through three stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.

Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms.

They may be useful, or harmful; they may be authoritatively ordained, or merely temporary expedients. But the end of religion is beyond all this.

Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality.

In considering religion, we should not be obsesses by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. The point to notice is its transcendent importance; and the fact of this importance is abundantly made evident by the appeal to history.

​Spirit of my silence I can hear you, but I'm afraid to be near you
And I don't know where to begin
And I don't know where to begin

Somewhere in the desert there's a forest, and an acre before us
But I don't know where to begin
But I don't know where to begin

Again I lost my strength completely, oh, be near me, tired old mare
With the wind in your hair

Amethyst and flowers on the table, is it real or a fable?
Well, I suppose a friend is a friend
And we all know how this will end

Chimney swift that finds me be my keeper,
Silhouette of the cedar
What is that song you sing for the dead?
What is that song you sing for the dead?

I see the signal searchlight strike me in the window of my room
Well, I got nothing to prove
Well, I got nothing to prove

I forgive you, mother, I can hear you,
And I long to be near you
But every road leads to an end
Yes, every road leads to an end

Your apparition passes through me in the willows and five red hens
You'll never see us again
You'll never see us again