Garage Punk Cave Liturgies
Nurturers of the Real #5
This is the fifth part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Berry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, is Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?” The first essay in the series was All Over the World the Faces of Living Ones Are Alike, which is free for anyone to read.
But the Emperor ordered that the nightingale be given her own golden cage to live in and a golden silk cushion to sit on, and to be taken outside with a golden chain around her leg by one of the court ladies. And every night she was led into the great hall to sing to the Emperor, but she pined for the wind on her feathers, and the rough branches of the trees under her feet. She longed for the simple life she had enjoyed before. Deep inside her heart was aching.
—The Emperor and the Nightingale, retold by Fiona Waters
I have a friend who, though she was excommunicated by a zealot priest fresh from seminary, still faithfully sings vespers in a ramshackle barn chapel at home, where hand-painted noncanonical icons and canonical icons taken from children’s coloring books and open walls of cotton candy insulation and fresh flowers come together as the body of her prayers, broken in its own way, but also beautiful, childlike, “incorrect,” and, above all, blossoming from a living human heart.
This essay is for her.
And anyone else who feels lost in the spiritual wastelands of the Machine, a desert world where you know in your heart of hearts you have to find the ancient root and drink, but what other people idealize as ‘Tradition’ itself feels like another face of the Machine—a gilded vastness, a ziggurat of human perfection replacing history with ideology, each century neatly stacked on top of the last in perfect geometric continuity with the ancient dream of Rome: All the beauty and truth you could ever desire is already there for you to surrender to it, but at the cost of you yourself being subsumed.
If you ever feel like that, or care about people who do, then this essay is for you, too.
Here comes the paywall, placing my hat on the sidewalk of the world as a writer. Past the wall, you'll find the rest of the essay, an easily printable PDF version of it, a recording of me reading the essay in soundscape that fits the mood—a seashore maybe, or bustling city, or a sunlit forest—and the comment section, where you're safe to say what you really think.
-graham