"If It Be Your Will": From Beauty to Apocalypse

[The poem in its entirety is at the bottom of this page. Here's Cohen singing it and here is  Antony Hegarty's cover of it.]

The title of Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will" identifies his song as an invocation, a convention seen most often in the epics of yore, in which their authors sought divine assistance -- co-authorship, in a sense -- in completing their work.

But Cohen's title is in the conditional tense, and we don't expect that from invocations. In the Iliad, for example, Homer says "Sing goddess"; in the Odyssey, it's "Tell me, Muse"; and Milton's invocation in Paradise Lost is "Sing Heavenly Muse." No ifs, ands or buts there.

Cohen's deferential conditional clause is followed, three lines later, by "I will speak no more," then "I shall abide until / I am spoken for." Roughly paraphrased, "O source of my inspiration, if you want me to keep quiet, I will." Roughly, I say.

Between lines 1 and 5, there is an implied backstory: "If it be your will / That I speak no more / And my voice be still / As it was before / I will speak no more."

In an earlier time, "before," his voice was "still," a word whose frequent use belies its power. "Still" is really still, like the sound of the Grand Canyon's silence.

In the medieval lyric "I Syng of a Mayden," "still" is the sound of dew "falling" on grass, on flowers and on the stem from which the flowers grow -- each of which are similes for Mary's extraordinarily quiet, unruffled virginal conception.

"Still," in poetry anyway, can be a sacred quietness, a reverent hush, a break or gap in sound, and that's how the light gets in.

After this stillness, Cohen has spoken, but is now agreeing to "speak no more" and to "abide until / [He is] spoken for."

We shouldn't race past "abide," a word rarely used outside poetic or religious writings or university English departments' meet'n'greets. According to the International Bible Encyclopedia, the word is "used richly in the Old Testament King James Version by 12 . . . Hebrew words," meaning "await," "lodge," "remain," "continue" and "endure," among others.

In Cohen's context, I lean toward "await" and "endure," which he will do until he is "spoken for," a phrase meaning "unavailable," often due to wedlock. Could he mean he will abide until God proposes to him? As in, "Do you, L.Cohen, promise to sing my praises?"

Or did Cohen take poetic license in replacing "spoken to" with "spoken for"?

Before we look at the next stanza, we should point out another deviation from conventional invocations: Cohen doesn't call his listener a muse or a god. He doesn't give it a name at all, doesn't even capitalize "your" or "you." Nor does he name the auditor in "You Want It Darker," but that'll have to wait for another post.

The next stanza has an implied "but" before its first line. To paraphrase, "Even though I'm willing to quietly endure until you choose me, if you want someone with a truthful voice singing from a broken hill (a fallen earth?), I'm your man." This sentiment is restated in the following stanza by way of the ballad convention we call incremental repetition.

Then suddenly, with no transition (another ballad convention) the poem seems to revise its request:

   If it be your will
   If there is a choice
   Let the rivers fill
   Let the hills rejoice

****

Here's where the teacher who favors discussions over lectures asks her students, "What's different about this stanza? Anyone? Tody? Lester? The rhyme scheme hasn't changed. Still good ol' predictable ABAB. But what is the narrator's request now? Anyone? Who is the potential doer now? Is it the speaker? Zasu? Anyone? It isn't, is it? 

"In fact, in line 3, no one or no thing is speaking, right? The rivers are simply filling, perhaps due to winter runoff, the melting snow roaring down the hills like a semi-truck whose brakes are burnt out. Is that what you think? Okay! Does the speaker speak in the stanza's last line? Aldus? Is he even asking to speak? Or or is he asking for someone else to speak? What do you think? Hank, what does 'rejoice' mean?"

After a few uncomfortably still seconds, a student might well reply, "First, Ms. Dilbickenstiff, the rivers aren't filling, they're just being asked to be allowed to. Also, you didn't even ask about 'If there is a choice,' and I think that's a critical, maybe even existential conditional. Have you considered the possibility that the speaker is asking his listener to let nature speak for itself if there is a choice between him and nature?"

"Hmm. That's intriguing, Xavier. Why don't you look that up for homework and get back to us tomorrow. But I have another question: How is my name similar to Mr. Cohen's poem?"

Entire class responds in choral fashion: "Both of them use assonance, in this case repetition of the short 'i' sound, for example, 'will,' "hills,' 'rivers,' 'Still,' 'ring,' 'spill,' 'sing,' and 'kill,' Ms. Dilbickenstiff!"

"Good job, kids! Hahahaha! Tomorrow we'll go over Jimmy Webb's 'MacArthur's Park.' Class dismissed!

Smart kid texts the guy next to him: "She didn't even ask us why Cohen would do that."

****

The next stanza shifts again, this time from nature's rivers and hills to miserable humans. Literalists may be reminded of the nonliteral tale of Lazarus and Dives (the rich man) in which the former dies and is carried by angels to Abraham, after which Dives dies and is hauled off to Hades where he pleads with Abraham to "send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water to cool my tongue, for I am in agony in this fire" (Luke 16:19-32).

Literalists are my arch enemy, but I will concede that Cohen might have been alluding to this passage.

The literati, on the other hand, will see through the metaphorical "burning hearts in hell" to all of us who are in any way ill, broken, cast out, repressed, depressed, stifled, in a dark place, hoping to "gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing.":

     
      Let your mercy spill
     On all these burning hearts in hell
     If it be your will
     To make us well

We're a long way from, "I'll speak if it's your will." What happened? Was Cohen sidetracked? Or did he have his narrator's perception change? 

What if, while awaiting a response to his invocation, pondering what praises he would sing, he saw a more urgent need, one that would preempt a Wordsworthian paean to nature? 

These questions remind me of my reductivist take on the Psalms: Their two topics are, one, "God, you and your creation are great" and two, "God, don't kill us." 

In Cohen's poem, while God (or whoever "you" is or are) is vetting the supplicant's resume, a still small voice moves him from Psalm topic one to Psalm topic two.

No longer an epic composer, the narrator becomes "An infant crying in the night / An infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry"**:

   And draw us near
   And bind us tight
   All your children here
   In their rags of light

   In our rags of light
   All dressed to kill
   And end this night
   If it be your will

Just an aside: "And end this night" -- how many times have I asked for this since Trump was elected?

****

Three minutes before the bell, a teacher would pose these questions:

"Does 'bind us tight' make you feel safe in your mommy's arms or like a frustrated baby Jesus, his freedom abolished and his potential confined in swaddling clothes?

"Is 'rags of light' a paradox or oxymoron? Does it create an image or suggest an abstract condition?

"How does 'dressed to kill' change your reading of 'rags of light'? The former suggests you're going clubbing or to the prom. Does the context make the phrase more sinister?

Or is this guy dressed to kill?

"And speaking of sinister, are the poem's first two lines a foreshadowing of the last two? Do you interpret 'night' as referring to our benighted, ignorant, aimless, untethered, feckless condition or to ending the whole damn thing, our universe and all the others, total closing time, shut the door? If it's the latter, the narrator will certainly 'speak no more.' Am I right?

"Anyone? Zasu?"

*Editor's note: The author of this piece is clearly flummoxed over whether he is analyzing Cohen's art or Cohen's narrator's ambitious musings. Forgive him, if it be your will.

**From Tennyson's In Memoriam, describing how the Victorians felt when Science reared its ugly factual head.

And  here's the poem we've been discussing:

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before

I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will

If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you

From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice

Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light

In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night

If it be your will..

Other Mothers

"Other Mothers"

One of the books I enjoyed reading to my beloved offspring when they were young was called Are You My Mother? This baby bird somehow gets separated from her mom, so everything she encounters is a possible mother, so she asks just in case. Every page featured a new possibility -- I think one of them was a bulldozer, for God's sake!

Since that book is still around today, there must be some truth in it, some wisdom that sneaks in with the delight it offers children. Most kids, I guess, spend some time in daycare or with teachers, babysitters, or someone like that while their parents go off to work with a broken heart.

I had a few substitute moms before my first-grade teacher took over that role, and I learned a lot from them even though they weren't actual teachers. I was dumber than dirt, barely a post-toddler goober, and they were old and wore dresses, so whatever they told me, I accepted as truth. And however they acted was the right way to act.

I'd heard many fairy tales and seen Disney's Snow White, so I knew mothers could be pretty easily divided into Fairy Godmothers and Wicked Witches.

For a while, though, I was privileged to keep the company of my actual mom, but it wasn't so easy for either of us. 

She tells me my dad was trying to farm in those days, so, through no choice of her own, she took me out in the fields where she and my dad worked in tobacco and whatever else they were growing. She tells me now that it was way too hot for me to be out there, and the mosquitoes were all over me and it made her very sad to see me like that.

But what else could she do? As every farmer knows, the fields have to be worked. You turn your back on crops for a second, and they'll die on you every time. If you can't afford to pay somebody to look after your children, you bring'em with you. It ain't gonna kill'em. Didn't kill me.

Some years passed, the crops rebelled against my dad and died in their various ways, and forced him and my mom to get jobs in town. She worked in shifts at what was called the Metal Plant. Sometimes she went to work at around 4 p.m. and came back around midnight. Other times, she'd go to work in the morning and work to 4.

At the Metal Plant she worked on an assembly line sitting in front of a very loud and very dangerous machine, and she wore gloves that attached to another machine whose job it was to pull her hands back so they wouldn't get chopped off.

While she was at the Metal Plant, someone had to watch me and my sister Martha. Often that turned out to be my dad's mother. Some people claim she was a twisted, crazy, wicked old witch, but I was with her many a day and so I know better: People were just being nice when they called her that.

Whatever her shortcomings, she did give me some religious education. She taught me about hell, for example, mainly by way of her own shrunken heart.

Must remember to bring this lady an apple

About the time Martha got old enough to go to school, my mom's mother took over the childcare chores. What a nice change that was! A Southern Baptist Sunday-School teacher, she was basically a Fairy Godmother with a bit of sternness worked in just to keep it real. 

She sort of worked me into any chore she was doing, whether it was picking blackberries, cooking dinner, or sitting around a gigantic quilt suspended from her ceiling in what was called a quilting bee, listening to a whole bunch of her women friends gossip away.

There was no TV and, of course, no video games, not even a phone, and the only tablets in the house were aspirins, so I was "always under foot," as they say, probably bugging the crap out of Grandmother with my endless questions, many of them focusing on her sewing machine with its impressive wrought iron pedal and some mysterious process called "changing the bobbin." 

She made me promise never to touch the sewing machine when she wasn't around, so I only completely screwed up the thing a few times by touching it.

But the female who taught me most of all during my preschool years was my sister Martha. She was, of course, no sort of godmother or witch, but rather a fairy or a wizard. 

Consequently, many of her lectures came from her endless imagination. She must have been about five when she realized there were countless wonderful things to know that had little to do with what our five senses could tell us. She was part Dr. Seuss, part Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes," part eternal storyteller who didn't bother with separating facts from fiction. Whatever her imagination seized as beauty was true.

For example, she topped me on a walk through the pastures one day to point out the rays of light issuing from behind a silver-lined cloud. She put her hand on my arm and stopped me in my tracks. "Look up there at that cloud," she said."That's where God lives." 

Once we were fighting off boredom in the car while Mama Joyce was grocery shopping, and I saw our doctor walking down the sidewalk. For some reason, I began to wonder what happened to doctors when they got sick. 

Who the heck did they go to? So I asked Martha about this, and she responded immediately. "You ever see pictures of those guys wearing Smoky the Bear hats and red coats and they ride around on horses? They're from Canada and they're called 'mounties.' Well, their job is to doctor doctors. That's who doctors go to when they're sick!"

That made such good sense! Why did I never think of that? What else would guys dressed like that do?

Martha was most helpful to me, though, by being a human "flash-forward-two-years" machine. When I was 3, in other words, her actions and teachings taught me moment by moment what it was like to be 5. 

I didn't have to guess about what to look forward to or to dread in the days ahead  -- she showed me. I learned, for example, to dread vaccinations and to look forward to the school Christmas play.

So I was always seeing what life would be like around the next bend while she taught me everything I needed to know, from tying shoes to buttoning shirts to making up the bed to washing dishes to catching fireflies.

And when she made my days much emptier by going off to school, she brought all the exciting things she learned back home to me. She showed me what letters looked like and how they sounded. She showed how 1 + 1 equaled 2.

But most exciting of all was the afternoon she raced off the bus and up the stairs to our old house, pulled out some paper and showed my how just three letters, when put in the right order, made the sound of my own name: r - o - y. Martha glowed like that cloud she'd shown me in the pasture, while I was rapt, stunned by this magic.

This was more than I deserved! Those letters at school -- she brought them home to me and made my name. The Universe was a generous place indeed. And how Martha and I basked in its generosity.

Martha: My sister, my teacher

Mrs. Poindexter

My first day of second grade, I discovered there was a new teacher in town: Mrs. Poindexter. In the time it took me to get from the classroom door to my desk, I fell deeply in love with her, which really means she cast a spell on me. 

Which probably means she caused me to open Dorothy's door: One second I'm in black and white (more on that later!) Pinetta, Florida; the next I'm in the Technicolored Land of Enchantment. Which means, more accurately, her extraordinary beauty made me happy, whether I was in Kansas or Pinetta.

My sister Martha never told me teachers could be beautiful, so I didn't know what to do with that image.

Here are some things that came to mind, probably shortly after I reached my desk on the first day: Don't ever disappoint this woman. Don't ever do anything that would cause her to scold you. Try to win her praise. Try to make her like you. Try to be her favorite.

I'm pretty sure those very thoughts were racing through the minds of most of my classmates. 

In addition to being glamorous, she was also left handed and made her check marks backwards. This seemed to intrigue my left-handed dad, and he became eager to have a conference with her.

About her teaching: She seemed genuinely happy to be there, every day, happy to see us, all good cheer and encouragement and twinkling blue eyes -- none of this "don't smile till Thanksgiving" baloney so many teachers use to show that they're the boss and you can't kid around with them because that would show a lack of respect, and hey, I'm in charge here! 

Either I really did turn out to be her favorite student or she made everyone feel that way. I would guess the latter. Still, she ruffled my hair, she patted my back, she said, "You can do this! Good job, Roy. Hey, boys and girls! Look how cool Roy's map of Antarctica is! Let's give him a big hand!"

Back then, our grades were E (Excellent), S (Satisfactory), N (Needs Improvement) and U (Unsatisfactory). I think there was also an I (Improving). Well, I wanted only E's, and that's about all I got. Plus, for behavioral issues, we got check pluses, checks, and check minuses. All left-handed backwards check pluses for me!

The climax of the Poindexter era came when she cast me as a bunny in a school play. I don't remember what the play was about, only that it included a bunny. 

All I remember is that, against my protests due to a practically terminal case of shyness, Mrs. Poindexter picked me to be the bunny and, I think, she even made the bunny costume, including a terrific cotton tail. She encouraged and praised me throughout rehearsals, so that I actually started looking forward to Opening Night (i.e., the afternoon we performed it).

On the big day, she gave me a much cherished back pat that signaled "enter stage left," and I hopped to center stage with all the confidence and bravado of Bugs Bunny scamming Elmer Fudd. 

Bashful as I was, I did not notice the crowd. I noticed Mrs. Poindexter cheering me from the wings, and I was not afraid. Once my performance was complete (I don't think I had any lines), she met me with a hug. I was convinced that I was the star of the show and, more importantly, Mrs. Poindexter's favorite student.

Because I was a 7-year-old boy, planning to grow up to be a man, I still saw no trace of teaching in my future. After my extraordinary turn as a bunny, however, I was entertaining the possibility of becoming an actor. But after a series of unforeseen twists of fate turned me into a teacher, maybe I carried with me, without being aware of it, some Poindexterisms:

Show up every day as if you're attending a party. Be happy to see the young people who make your job possible. When you push a student to grow and to take risks, be her safety net. Reward every kid who does her best. Make every student feel like she's your favorite. 

Encourage all of them as they try to get better. Be sure they know you're applauding from the wings. Be stunningly beautiful. (Apparently, some success is possible without that last one.)

Could Mrs. Poindexter possibly have had anything to do with my efforts to do all the wonderful things she did? Maybe, maybe not. As far as I can tell, I did them because I didn't know any other way to conduct myself in front of a captive audience.

Most of the time, I didn't choose to be funny and cheerful (I'm not even a cheerful person -- I'm anxious. gloomy and cynical, a provider of free room and board to a mostly mean-spirited pandemonius interior monologue), that's just who I became when I taught. I was being honest.  

Maybe Mrs. Poindexter, too, was a closet crab, cursing some of us little knuckleheads under her breath as she trudged out to her red-and-white 6-cylinder Chevy Bel-Air after school. 

Some twenty years would pass before Professor Eugene Crook at FSU would model that same joyful teaching style, differing only in that he he took it to the borders of insanity -- not only was he friendly, he loved the books he taught so much he always seemed to be opening his favorite Christmas present.

About 10 years after second grade, I saw Mrs. Poindexter again. You'd think I would've greeted her in a mature manner and told her how much her kindness meant to me, and how rare it was. You'd be wrong. 

I was in a 7-11 in Monticello, Florida, and I saw her get out of her car and walk inside. For a brief moment, whatever remained of the shy 7-year-old inside me shot an arrow from a Valentine's-Day-card Cupid right at her lovely heart.

Unable to sort through the confusing combination of  present and past emotions and the memories her beauty evoked, I did the only sensible thing I could think of: I ducked into the beer cooler and stared at her through six-packs of beer bottles.

Having made her purchase -- two packs of Wrigley's Spearmint gum -- she abruptly left. I swallowed hard at my missed opportunity, and walked out of the cooler, my glasses immediately fogging up.

By now, of course, my bunny suit has no doubt turned to ashes, and my teen-aged awkwardness is almost gone. Mrs. Poindexter must be a very old woman, maybe even growing lonesome and waiting for someone to say "hello in there." But I don't think so.

Her eyes surely still twinkle with love and hope, and she greets each new aching uncertain day with good cheer.

But just in case: Hello in there, Mrs. Poindexter. I love you. 

Mrs. Poindexter two years ago. Still smiling!

Election 2018: Grownups Say "No" Again

When I was a kid, every once in a while one of us would give birth to an idea, you know, "Hey, I got an idea! I got a great idea!"

And we'd all start fleshing it out, turning the thread into a colorful coat, "I'll sell lemonade to raise money," "I can make tee-shirts," "I'll make some signs, and Bessie can put'em on light poles on her way to Brownies," and our heart would quicken with euphoria.

We didn't know yet that we were experiencing hope. That's what hope feels like. 

Then we would rush to tell the grownups and one of them would inevitably chuckle with his first breath, "Noohoho, you can't do that. We couldn't afford it, and you're too young even if we could."

We would argue our case for a while, then be rebutted, dismissed, denied. And then we'd get more good ideas later, but they were just pipe dreams too, "That's not gonna happen!"

And after a while we quit coming up with new ideas that we thought would make everything better and make more sense and make us happier, because our good ideas were just dreams, illusions, fantasies, fairy tales. Grow up. This is how it is, the way it's always been and it's not about having fun trying out wild-eyed schemes! Do what we've been doing regardless of how destructive and cruel and selfish and greedy it is!

So we started to forget what hope felt like. We started forgetting to hope.

When Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg were kids, for example, someone came into their school and killed some of their classmates. They heard it all, saw lots of it, their friends gone forever, fucking teenagers, and then Emma and David and many of their classmates and friends got a good idea.

"Let's organize. Let's march for our lives. This must never happen again. I can help raise the money. I can make a speech, you give interviews, and you, over there, can organize marches, and this will never happen again, never" and they spent many, many hours on their beautiful, courageous plan, and grownups ridiculed them and doubted their sincerity and claimed they were actors, then election day came, and too many people shook their heads and said, "Noohoho, that's not gonna happen. The Second Amendment says we can have our AR-15s and we need them because an invasion is only 700 miles away. All kinds of bad people coming our way."

So maybe Emma and David and their friends are starting to lose hope.

I hurt for them and for all the young who just lost a little more hope. And I hurt for me, settling in for years more of tax breaks that we can't afford, continued trashing of the environment, vilifying of "aliens" and people of color and of non-Republican sexual mores  and tolerating two of our major "leaders" panting happily in the lap of the most offensive human being ever to soil the White House.

I am now quite old, and grownups keep telling me "Noohoho." 

But I gotta hope. When the grownups start draining your hope, it leads to disillusionment, then to despair, and then inaction, which then gives them the control they so desperately crave.

Honestly, though, I don't know what to do next. I hope somebody gets a good idea and quick. 

XTC's "Dear God": Full Commentary

"What the hell are you getting so upset about," Yossarian asked Lt. Scheisskopf's wife bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”

Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. “Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,” he proposed obligingly. “You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?”

                                                              -- From Catch-22

I first heard "Dear God" roughly 30 years ago when a student (who I will call "Julie Brannon" to protect her anonymity) made a mix tape for me so I'd know "what cool people listen to." Of the 20-25 songs on the tape, "Dear God" was my favorite. I liked everything about the song, the child's opening and closing it, Andy Partridge's voice (it sounded exactly like the Eighties) ,the increased intensity and tempo of the last stanzas (possibly called accelerando or maybe crescendo -- you make the call), and most of all the subject matter.

The song presents a seemingly facile argument, and maybe that's why it's cathartic for many of us. We expect little more from a "rock" or "pop" song. Partridge is venting for his fans, not inviting the meditation evoked by, for example, Leonard Cohen's  "Anthem."   

What I try and fail to do in the following is to slow down "Dear God" enough that I can ponder Partridge's topic and his presentation of it with both the seriousness and playfulness it deserves. A song about our "ultimate concern," whatever it is we place atop all our priorities, should be looked at with both a cold eye and a wink, don't you think?

So here is part one. The song's lyrics are here in their entirety, and the peculiar Vimeo video is here. 

Dear God, hope you got the letter  The opening line offers much unpackable material. Given the content of the song, "Dear" must be seen as ironic, bordering on oxymoronic. The God addressed in the following lines is not in any way "dear" to the narrator. 

Furthermore, "Dear God" mimics the conventional salutation of a letter and thus identifies the poem as epistolary. The remainder of the line -- "hope you got the letter" -- seemingly refers to a previous letter, now lost to history, to which this one is a follow up.

Some scholars claim the poem is an apostrophe as well as an epistolary piece, such as Dylan Thomas's "Death, Be Not Proud," Cohen's "If It Be Your Will," and "O courage, could you not as well / Select a second place to dwell?" from Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana.

This poses a thorny question: Does the narrator believe he is addressing a dead or absent God or does he see God as an inanimate object capable of reading a letter sent by someone who doesn't believe He exists? Perhaps Partridge will settle this debate later in his poem.

The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

Finally, these introductory lines come from a child, evoking a host of biblical passages: Isaiah 11:6 ("And a little child shall lead them"), Psalm 8:2 ("Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and avenger"), Matthew 19:14 ("Let the little children come to me and do not try to stop them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these"), and others. 

While this adds to the poem's pathos, the irony is as rich as it is obvious. The child who leads us and from whose mouth comes strength and to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs (I'm picturing Emma Gonzales here!), this very child now confronts her maker with a tone that rapidly evolves from deferential to righteously indignant.

And I pray you can make it better / Down here. The narrator uses both human (a letter) and divine (a prayer) means to express his request. Also, in "Down here," note the time-honored spatial distancing between creator and creature, i.e., the creator being a sky god (called Nobodaddy by William Blake), the creature being earth bound.

I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer   Many Partridgeans argue that the poet would gladly accept a small reduction in the price of beer, regardless of his belief or lack of same. Evidence suggests Partridge was aware of the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy," but unaware of Brett Kavanaugh's lip-smacking beer fetish

Beer

But all the people that you made in your image / See them starving on their feet / 'Cause they don't get enough to eat / From God  As the first stanza comes to a close, the narrator acknowledges that the God he doesn't believe in attempted to duplicate in humans his own image and, we assume, his beauty, wisdom and sense of humor.

This God is also the sole provider of their sustenance, possibly echoing Blake's "The Lamb": "Gave thee [the Lamb] life and bid thee feed / By the stream and o'er the mead." When his people are "starving on their feet," it's because they didn't "get enough to eat / From God" -- the same God the narrator can't believe in!

Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel /That I should be heard loud and clear  This is a much more civil and reverent supplication than the one we heard from the pissed off Job insisting that the God he does believe in account for his (God's) unspeakable cruelty. But maybe Partridge's narrator should have been more cantankerous, should have shaken his fist harder because, unlike Job, he gets no Divine response. 

Granted, Job was essentially told to shut the freak up, but at least it was something.

If you're fond of labeling and classifying, both works could be considered "literature of divine rebellion." The Book of Job could be called a theodicy, a defense of God's goodness and omnipotence coexisting with evil, suffering and the like. No such defense in "Dear God."

Did you make disease and the diamond blue?  What a rhetorical rat's nest we have here! These must be rhetorical questions since the narrator doesn't believe in God and thus cannot expect Him to answer them. 

But to what effect? Asking God if He is equally responsible for abundant pain and starvation, inevitable deteriorating health followed by death as well as the bountiful wealth acquired by the few (1%?) imaged in the "diamond blue" -- does this challenge God's existence or His goodness or his power?

Is this Zoroastrianism, i.e., an eternal struggle between a good spirit and an evil one? 

Is the narrator suggesting a yin and yang deity in which the dark and light are complementary? No. In "Dear God," the dark is unacceptable, esp. if there's an omnipotent God in the house.

Is it an either-or fallacy, a bifurcation, an oversimplification, to wit, "Make up your mind, God. You can't be real if you create both beautiful fall days and lethal Category 5 hurricanes; or, if you are real, you are weak on this earth and therefore can't be counted on to intervene when we need you, e.g., when we're starving or our house is floating down the Mississippi or we contract terminal cancer."

Here the narrator is essentially plagiarizing both Psalms 22:1 and Matthew 27:46: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Also rendered in Aramaic dialect: "Eloi, Eloi,  [or Eli, Eli] lama sabachthani?"

Forsaken, his belief melts quicker than the wet wicked Witch of the West, and who can blame him?

But unheard pleas for help do not necessarily suggest a nonentity. The whole mixed blessing dilemma has been acknowledged for centuries. We've all heard the old maxims that give no comfort, "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away," and "The sun shines and the rain falls on the just and unjust alike."

Here's one more bit of poetry that provides an answer to the narrator's question, "Did you make disease and the diamond blue?" Dylan's "Father of Night" (1970) praises a God responsible for what we need and/or desire, as well as what we dread. He is "Father of night, Father of Day, / . . . / Father of loneliness and pain, / Father of love and Father of rain." And the rest of it is here. (This was eight years before Dylan's conversion and swimming pool baptism which produced such tripe as "You Gotta Serve Somebody.")

Did you make mankind after we made you? / And the devil too! Dear God indeed! Here the narrator blindsides his careful listeners with a postmodern, nonlinear, achronological time machine that, upon reflection, gives them severe headaches. "Did you make mankind?" is a simple enough yes-or-no question, but the implied "did we make you first?" is a slice of non digestible logic.

The narrator is probably saying that humans needed an origin story, so they told stories about a creator god and then came to believe their story to be both true and factual, leading them to regard themselves as the literal products of their own metaphor. (That gives me a headache, too.)

But there are other views on the "who created (or is creating) whom" question, for example, in Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Henry Nelson Weiman's The Source of Human Good, Alfred North Whitehead and his gang of "process" theologians, and even in Tennyson's Victorian masterpiece In Memoriam. 

In a passage I cannot find from Rilke's Letters, he theorizes that God is the cumulative effect of human goodness, i.e., the sum of human kindness. Every sacrifice for the greater good, every act of charity, compassion and love is just another brick in the Temple of God, of Its eternal being. Rilke, then, would say to God, "Yes, we made you and are still making you."

In Human Good, Weiman says, "The only creative God we recognize is the creative event itself"; Partridge's composing "Dear God" is a creative event and this act is therefore the creative God who can create us now that our creative events have made him. 

And I am making him now, this very eternal moment, because this piece did not exist until my aging, anemic imagination brought it forth. I said, "Let there be 'XTC's Daydream (Non)Believer,' and there was 'XTC's Daydream (Non)Believer'." And I saw that it was not bad.

Whitehead says, "It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God." His answer to "Did you make mankind after we made you?" then is "Yes, and vice versa."

Tennyson's claim is a little different. As consolation for the death of his best friend Arthur Hallam, he argues that over time, humans will shed their animal nature, their greed and cruelty, and will eventually become Christlike ("The Christ that is to be") -- a state Hallam had already achieved when he died at 22. Here again, we are creating God.

Am I guilty here of the intentional fallacy? Was Partridge even aware of process theology? It doesn't matter. The poem is ours now, not his. In all fairness to me, I've reached out to Partridge numerous times during my research, but he has yet to respond. As far as I know, he could be dead -- or pretending to be, for tax purposes.

The exclamatory "And the devil too" is in a syntactically ambiguous position. Does it complete the question beginning "Did you make"? Did you make mankind and the devil too?

Or does it go with "after we made you"? After we made you and the devil too? I lean toward the latter. 

The Christian myth too obviously answers "yes" to the first half of the question if by "devil" the narrator means "Lucifer." Later the husband of Lucretia MacEvil, Lucifer was originally the light-bearer and morning star, the "fallen angel" who pays dearly for his reluctance to be God's second banana: According to John Milton, it took the Evil One nine days to fall from heaven to hell, and he was hauling ass! This give us some idea of just how far apart these two eschatological properties are. 

Dore's version of Lucifer's long fall

He also goes by Satan, but in the infernal roll call, there are some distinctions between Satan and the devil. In the Book of Job, for example, the former is the Accuser who slaughters Job's livestock, servants and family only after he gets the Divine Green Light from God. 

Yes, we made "the devil too" so we had someone to blame for our countless shortcomings. But, hey, we're only human.

Dear God, don't know if you noticed / But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book / Us crazy humans wrote it. The narrator's shocker, I suspect, is supposed to be that last line with its refusal to credit God for being the best-selling author of the bible. 

Not much of a shocker anymore. I would guess that 98 percent of Christians who grew up to be bible scholars, linguists, textual critics, archaeologists, philosophers, etc., or to have a mere modicum of skepticism can see far too many intrusive fingerprints and layers of text separated by decades in a single story to believe the Almighty literally wrote that sprawling, cobbled tome.

Did he inspire its composition? If so, he sure inspired a lot of editing, redacting, revision, and tacked-on endings.

To save myself from giving you huge chunks of supporting evidence, I refer you -- just as starters -- to Marvin H. Pope's Anchor Bible retranslations of and commentaries on the Book of Job and Song of Songs. If that doesn't support Partridge's biblical divine authorship skepticism, try Father Louis F. Hartman and Father Alexander A. Di Lella's translation, introduction to and commentary on the Anchor Bible Book of Daniel.

Want something easier with a focused thesis? Try Beyond Belief written by Elaine Pagels, who may know the Gospels as well as anyone.

Maybe "us crazy humans wrote it" in the sense that as writers we are hopelessly subjective and sick with motives secret even to ourselves, even if our topic is "People's Alleged Encounters with God." We describe encounters not with accuracy as our goal, but to persuade others to see what we see and to derive similar themes, morals or lessons.

Before we boldly advance to the poem's next line, let's sum up our premature conclusion based on the poem so far: The narrator's disbelief rests on his insistence that a real God would intervene on our behalf every minute and hour for all the days of our lives, so perhaps his song would be more accurately titled, "Dear God, I'm a Believer that You're an Underachiever," then this postscript from the process theology point of view, "We're not through with you yet. The best is yet to come!"

****

As we noted earlier, XTC's "Dear God" begins with a child meekly beseeching divine intervention for the people God made in His image.

For example, stanza 1 begins, "Dear God, hope you got the letter / And I pray . . .," stanza 2, no longer spoken by a child, with "Dear God, sorry to disturb you," but then comes a shift. 

The third stanza is a tercet, with violins (as clearly seen in the video) evoking a more mellow tone which suggests an almost bucolic, peaceful, pastoral setting, not an environment in which a theological grilling is taking place. Here, in the Garden, Mr. Apostate himself is introduced: "And the devil too."

Nothing can be the same now, can it? 

Following the string-soothed tercet, stanza 5 begins with the narrator either gently or sarcastically suggesting that the world's sorrows have escaped God's alleged omniscience: "Dear God, don't know if you've noticed." We have discussed the content of this above, but not its closing couplet where one might say all hell begins to break loose, even though the speaker doesn't believe in it. 

When the narrator/vocalist/poet (I give up on what to call this guy) gets to what sounds (and looks) like the stanza's final line, he makes two significant changes: One, he doesn't complete the line, i.e., "I can't believe in," not "I can't believe in you." 

Two, he adds a line: "I don't believe in," and continues the epistrophe at the beginning of the next stanza: "I won't believe in."

For your visual satisfaction, it looks like this: 

   I can't believe in
   I don't believe in

   I won't believe in heaven and hell (emphasis mine, obviously)

Before stanza 5, the poem's literary music has been generated by a fairly consistent rhyme scheme of AABBCDDEF, with the C lines (5, 13 and 25) ending with "in your image," while the poem's music music (sic) comes from a blend of acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums and, beginning with the tercet, violins.

In stanza 5, this changes drastically to a strident, militant drumbeat intensified by an unchanging rhyme, with each line halved by a caesura, which I will now illustrate: 

   No saints, no sinners, // no devil as well
   No pearly gates, // no thorny crown
   You're always letting // us humans down
   The wars you bring, // the babes you drown
   Those lost at sea // and never found
   And it's the same // the whole world 'round
   The hurt I see // helps to compound

The caesura -- a device that goes as least as far back as Anglo-Saxon poetry -- is a mini-pause, a half breath, a truncated intake, creating a dramatic effect similar to a drumbeat.

In short, both the poem's sound and sense have taken us to that place -- whether it be mountaintop, whaling ship, a classroom, the moors, wilderness, a pit -- where wounded and rebellious humans shake their fist at God, sometimes demanding an answer, sometimes "returning their ticket" (to find this reference, read The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety), and sometimes venting their Blakean righteous indignation.

If you're normal, you've probably had one of these tantrums and know that once you've let it all out or you've had your hard, loud cry, a calm descends upon you, that wonderful feeling of finally getting over a lingering illness. You've found and acknowledged your limits; your reach is even farther from your grasp much than you thought, and you murmur quietly to yourself in deep meditation, "I can't do shit about most of this stuff." 

You have, in short, achieved a healthy disillusionment.

The same is true for "Dear God's" composer Andy Partridge and/or narrator. After a few lines with all the metrical smoothness of a washboard dirt road ("The hurt I see helps compound / That Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody's unholy hoax") a calm returns and he turns the song back over to the child out of whose mouth the coda, the outro, comes as he completes the sentence "If there's one thing I don't believe in," with "It's you, Dear God."

Coming from the child, this line sounds more like a finger pointing than a fist shaking. "Dear God" has indeed ended not with a bang but a whisper with a razor-like precision, a truth told the way only a child can tell it  -- you know, like when you introduce your 4-year old to Aunt Matilda and the brat says, "You're really fat, Aunt Matilda."

I'm not one to label "God" or to speak for "It," but it's easy for me to imagine a Creator who loves Partridge's spirit, who loves that he has paid enough attention to be indignant, who loves that Partridge is right to cry out against the complacent, either/or, smug, absolute, unyielding, inflexible "God" stories Partridge has been fed in his youth.

"God" might also give a divine nod to XTC's creativity and their ability to add beauty and emphasis to their message through shifts in tone, rhythm, rhyme, and instrumentation, to stir more strongly their audience's emotions by opening and closing "Dear God" with a child, bringing the piece full circle, forming an Ouroboros. 

Once the circle is closed -- or the serpent has begun to swallow its tail --I can hear Partridge singing in a course with Captain Ahab, Job, Vonnegut, Heller, Shelley, Samuel Butler, Arthur Hugh Clough and Thomas Hardy. They're all saying the same thing. 

"Something is wrong here, isn't it? It shouldn't be like this."