When Darkness Comes
A poignant conversation happened between friends this week. The occasion and opportunity for the exchange of words was the death of a renowned self-taught improvisational pianist Michael Jones. Jones lived in Toronto and was an international recording artist.
This morning I thought about other losses. Upon waking I learned of the death of Meatloaf, an artist whose music changed my life. I will always be in his debt. The storytelling of Meatloaf’s Wagnerian operatic lyrics were often the work of Jim Steinman. Steinman died on April 19, 2021. Finally there’s the loss of Joan Didion, a writer who died December 23, 2021. I’ll never forget reading Didion’s prose in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, echoing the lines of a poem by W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming : “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”
When word of these losses reaches me, I feel a twinge of existential nausea. Mentors, interpreters of my time and place are passing ahead of me. Didion once said:
“I’m a rather slow study, and I came late to the apprehension that there was a void at the center of experience.”
I could not agree more. It is something that I do not wish to think about, something that makes me shudder. Which brings me to my point. Do we not ask the question, “what endures?” What of our works resists the erosion of time? What about the Column of Trajan, commemorating his military victory over the Dacians? The Column of Trajan (dedicated in May of 113 C.E.) was celebrated with great fanfare and spectacle… What of our Declaration of Independence, the songs of Elvis, etc… I recognize that every work and every deed becomes irrelevant, as time “moves on” and the context changes. Does it matter now that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions?
Yes, the center does not hold. Death points to the void, which for a while, our works fill with shape, which we label good and evil. In truth, a void is at the center of everything.
I remember when I was 21, living in Tokyo, struggling to learn a language, away from home, apart from friends, I would play this song over and over. I held on. Sometimes as I listened the tears would come. The lyric lines were the colors of my life: The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel.
The Sound Of Silence
by Pentatonix
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you.”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
2 thoughts on “When Darkness Comes”
Beautiful…words…thoughts and music. I have always loved S&G and this song in particular. The Pentatonix version is superb.
It is true that nothing endures…and everything endures. Every word, every movement, every thought changes the initial conditions on which the future erupts. Each becomes a small part of the foundation of tomorrow.
Every word, every movement, every thought changes the initial conditions on which the future erupts. Each becomes a small part of the foundation of tomorrow.
Your statements describe clearly what is the case, whether an afterlife is in store or not. Each of us lives on in ways that we did not anticipate.