Tom Waits: Silent Night

Here’s some nice music for Advent: a rare recording of Tom Waits singing “Silent Night.” Click here to listen online.

Bruno Forte: on music and apocalyptic aesthetics

In my posts on popular culture here at F&T (on films, music, or whatever), I’m often looking for ways to talk about aesthetics in terms of disruption and dissonance – “form” as a kind of apocalyptic grotesqueness; “beauty” hidden sub specie crucis. There are some helpful ideas along these lines in a new book by the Italian theologian and archbishop, Bruno Forte: The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics (Eerdmans, 2008). I went along tonight to a public lecture by Forte, and it was quite stunning – the Catholic archbishop presented a kind of “aesthetics of the cross,” with numerous colourful digressions into Luther and Karl Barth. So now I’ve now been devouring his book – here’s what he has to say in the chapter on music:

“Transposing this understanding of the Spirit to the musical event … one can hypothesize a form of music in which interruption, transgression, and silence are no less eloquent than harmony and sound. It is a matter, that is, of arriving at a kind of music that – without excluding tonality a priori, but also without any rigid adherence to it – would be able to find excessive forms which could transmit the message of that openness, newness and freedom proper to the action of the Spirit in God and history…. Such music would certainly not transmit the classical idea of beauty – the presence of the Whole in the fragment – by way of harmony or ordered numerical relationships. Yet it could render the no less pregnant idea of beauty as the Whole irrupting into the fragment and the fragment opening itself to be embraced in the depths of the unsayable Whole; and this by way of interruption, negation, surprise, silence, no less than of harmony, measure, and relationship” (pp. 99-100).

Ah, just thinking about it gives me a hankering for a good dose of Tom Waits:

       “Well you play that tarantella, all the hounds will start to roar
       The boys all go to hell and then the Cubans hit the floor
       They drive along the pipeline, they tango till they’re sore
       They take apart their nightmares and they leave them by the door”

A rain of frogs (and other horrors)

Thanks again for all the kind help with my lecture on Magnolia – I’ve just gotten back from presenting it. As it turned out, the lecture was actually a two-and-a-half hour session. So I called it “Monstrous Grace: Pauline Apocalyptic and Popular Culture,” and I talked about Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, Tom Waits’ music, and finally Magnolia as guides to the interpretation of Paul. Your suggestions for reading on Magnolia were all extremely helpful!

Anyway, I thought people would need to be eased gently into Tom Waits’ music, so I started with this film clip – “God’s Away on Business”:



                Digging up the dead with a shovel and a pick
                It’s a job, it’s a job
                Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood
                Join the mob, join the mob...

Tom Waits: theologian of the dysangelion

To my delight (and my wife’s dismay), my collection of Tom Waits CDs has grown nicely this Christmas. I’ve been absolutely addicted to Tom Waits all year – I can hardly bear to hear anything else.

I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to describe Tom Waits as a “theologian” – as long as we add that he’s a theologian of the dys-angelion, the “bad news.” His songs conjure up a swirling chaos of monsters and madness, devils and despair – and on the horizon of this dark world we glimpse the first faint glow of dawn, the surprising appearance of grace “de profundis” (Psalm 130:1).

God himself suddenly breaks into these songs as a strange and threatening – even monstrous – presence, as an unaccountable interruption of the world’s (dis-)order. One of Waits’ most astonishing theological pronouncements, for example, is the gleeful hiss: “Don’t you know there ain’t no devil / That’s just God when he’s drunk.” Or on another occasion he wonders: “Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?”

In such songs, God bursts onto the stage not as a benevolent projection of our own wishes and desires, but as the one who overturns our expectations and shatters our projections of deity. God appears not as a supreme being who calmly “completes” and “perfects” nature, but as the one who interrupts nature in the apocalyptic newness of grace. Divine grace, for Waits, is thus a kind of unnatural incursion, a perversity, a disruption of the way things are. Grace interrupts, it shatters and strips things bare to the bone. And so Waits portrays grace in a way that is uncompromisingly – often shockingly – menacing and grotesque.

Even in Waits’ more “orthodox” gospel songs – and there are many of them, such as “Way Down in the Hole”, “All Stripped Down”, “Down There by the Train”, “Never Let Go”, “Make It Rain”, “Take Care of All of My Children”, “Come on Up to the House” – even here, grace appears as a perverse interruption of a world of murder and brutality and Satanic seduction. Grace breaks open this world like a nightmare or an earthquake – wholly unexpected, unconditional, presuppositionless; impossible to be tamed or assimilated. As Rowan Williams remarks in his study of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, “the actuality of grace is uncovered in the moment of excess – which may be in a deliberately intensified gracelessness” (Grace and Necessity, p. 105). A “deliberately intensified gracelessness” – that is the world of Tom Waits’ lyrical theology. And it’s in this way that Waits articulates the euangelion through a startlingly brutal and disturbing declaration of the dysangelion.

Grace shines from the abyss. It appears in the mode of the grotesque. And if grace is itself dysangelion, it is “bad news” precisely for those of us who are already complacent in our own religion and our own righteousness (our own ready-made “Chocolate Jesus”). It is “bad news” because tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of us (Matt. 21:31), because (as Waits puts it) those who “never asked forgiveness, never said a prayer” are nevertheless grasped and held by grace. It is “bad news” because God – if he is really the God of grace! – is not the God we want, not the God we think we need. He is the God who does not “fit”, but interrupts. He is the God whose Yes is hidden in a shattering No.

But this “bad news” is indeed “good news” – the best and happiest news! – for the undeserving, the criminals, those riddled and rotten with shame and doubt. As Waits puts it in one of his more conventional gospel songs: “Does life seem nasty, brutish and short? / Come on up to the house!” At the world’s dark end, all that remains is grace – grace for the ungodly, which is therefore the grace of God.

Anyway, I’ve gotten carried away with this prelude – but the real point of this post is to list some of my favourite theological lines from Tom Waits’ songs. Here are a few (you can read all his lyrics here):

“I’m close to heaven
Crushed at the gate.”

“Hell is boiling over and heaven is full
We’re chained to the world and we all gotta pull.”

“God used me as a hammer, boys
To beat his weary drum today.”

“The devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand.”

“God builds a church
The devil builds a chapel
Like the thistles that are growing round the trunk of a tree.”

“I left my Bible by the side of the road
Carved my initials in an old dead tree.”

“You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again.”

“Did the devil make the world
While God was sleeping?”

“I swang out wide with her
On hell’s iron gate.”

“Well, you say that it’s gospel, but I know
It’s only a church.”

“Well, I got to keep myself, keep myself faithful
And you know I’ve been so good
Except for drinking
But He knew that I would...”

“Goddamn there’s always such a big temptation
To be good, to be good
There’s always free Cheddar in a mousetrap, baby…”

“Well they’ve stopped trying to hold him
With mortar, stone and chain
He broke out of every prison
The boots mount the staircase
The door is flung back open
He’s not there for he has risen…”

“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil
That’s just God when he’s drunk.”

“Well, you leave me hanging by the skin of my teeth
I’ve only got one leg to stand
You can send me to hell
But I’ll never let go of your hand.”

A few things I never could believe

In his delightfully pessimistic song, “Everything Goes To Hell” (2002), Tom Waits sings:

    There’s a few things that I never could believe:
    A woman when she weeps
    A merchant when he swears
    A thief who says he’ll pay
    A lawyer when he cares
    A snake when he is sleeping
    A drunkard when he prays…

So that got me thinking. And here are a few things that I never can believe:

• A telemarketer who wants “just a few moments.”
• A politician who talks about “our way of life.”
• A church which describes itself as “Bible-based.”
• A record company which produces “Christian music.”
• A theologian who uses the word “tolerance.”
• A TV preacher who says “glory to God!”

Chocolate Jesus

One of my favourite songs at the moment is Tom Waits’ “Chocolate Jesus,” from the album Mule Variations (1999). He gave a stunning performance of the song a few years back on the David Letterman show – you can watch it below (or you can read the lyrics here).

It’s a wonderfully entertaining song, and it’s packed with genuine theological insights. “It’s kind of an immaculate confection....”

Theology with Tom Waits

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Tom Waits’ extraordinary three-disc album, Orphans (2006). It’s a magnificent album, and there are some startling theological insights as well. Here are the lyrics to Waits’ gentle but gritty gospel song, “Down There by the Train” (the song was also covered by Johnny Cash in 2002):

There’s a place I know where the train goes slow
Where sinners can be washed in the blood of the lamb
There’s a river by the trestle down by Sinner’s Grove
Down where the willow and the dogwood grow
Down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

You can hear the whistle, you can hear the bell
From the halls of heaven to the gates of hell
And there’s room for the forsaken if you’re there on time
You’ll be washed of all your sins and all of your crimes
If you’re down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

There’s a golden moon that shines up through the mist
And I know that your name will be on that list
There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth
I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth
Down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

So if you live in darkness and if you live in shame
All of the passengers will be treated the same
And old Humpty Jackson and Gyp the Blood will sing
And Charlie Whitman is holding on to Dillinger’s wings
They’re both down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

If you’ve lost all your hope, if you’ve lost all your faith
I know you will be cared for and I know you will be safe
And all the shameful, and all of the whores
Even the soldier who pierced the heart of the Lord
Is down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

Well, I’ve never asked forgiveness, I’ve never said a prayer
I’ve never given of myself and I’ve never truly cared
I’ve hurt the ones who loved me, and I’m still raising Cain
I’ve taken the low road and if you’ve done the same
Meet me down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

The song offers a startlingly uncompromising depiction of the universality of grace. The train’s whistle is heard equally by those in heaven and in hell. Salvation is for the most notorious criminals of history, from the school shooter Charles Whitman down to Judas Iscariot. It’s for the “shameful” ones and the “whores,” for the criminals forsaken by the world, for those who take the “low road” – and, finally, it’s for the blatantly irreligious who have never even “said a prayer.” On this train, all the lonely outcasts are finally gathered into community; all sins and crimes are finally pardoned. On this train, God’s judgment is pronounced as the judgment of “the lamb,” and thus the judgment of grace. For this reason, there is here “no eye for an eye, no tooth for a tooth.” And so the train is filled with the most unlikely characters – they are “all treated the same,” not because they are the same, but because on this train you never get what you deserve.

Should we be committed then to a thoroughgoing universalism – the apokatastasis? I don’t think so. But I think any proper account of the death and resurrection of Jesus will have to take the unconditional character of grace with full seriousness – as seriously as this song does, with its unsettling catalogue of criminals; or rather, as seriously as Jesus himself does when he feasts with outcasts and hookers, and welcomes condemned criminals to join him in his kingdom.

If we can’t finally turn the universality of grace into a system, that is not because of any deficiency in grace itself, but only because grace is always more than we can anticipate or conceptualise: Deus semper maior! And so grace is always a riddle, a disruption, an excess that defies all systematic explanation. It is utterly free and boundless, so that we can never legitimately prescribe its boundaries in any way – not even with a system of universalism.

Still, in encounters with specific individuals, no matter what their crimes or faults, we should always be able to say (not self-righteously, but as one criminal to another): “And I know that your name will be on that list / There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth….”