Review

Culture

Music

23 September 2023

6 min read

Imagining our heart’s fragile condition

The songs and sketches of Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy invites us to seek out sacred answers. Belle Tindall reviews their Sevens Psalms collaboration.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A illustration of a boy sitting in a field with his back to us, above him is a heart shaped cloud.

Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms – Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy.

No.9 Cork Street Gallery

Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy are the duo we didn’t know we were missing. Well, their collaboration means that we need miss them no longer. In their joint exhibition in Mayfair, Charlie’s artwork is a visual tool with which to ponder Paul Simon’s latest body of work.

Simon and Mackesy

I once read that if you’re looking for the answer to the meaning of life in a pop song, look to Paul Simon. I think whoever wrote that is right. His best-known songs are now decades old, but it doesn’t seem to matter - they’re timeless. And maybe that’s why; he has always written of permanent and universal things.

For example - You may think that he’s crafted an ambiguous tale about two mischievous childhood friends who used to wreak havoc 'down by the schoolyard’, but what he’s actually offered us is a song that gives language to the unexpected and unknown aspects of life. The times that feel like a pathless expanse, the moments that knock us off course, the occasions where we are forced to admit that ‘we don’t know where we’re goin’, but we’re on our way… ’.

And what may, at first glance, appear to be a direct message to an iconic character in The Graduate (Mrs Robinson) or a New York Yankees player (Joe DiMaggio), is actually a song that mourns a loss on behalf of us all. It laments the disappearing of ‘grace, dignity, privacy and fidelity’ in public life – the attributes that ‘our nation turns its lonely eyes to…’

You get the sense that Paul Simon tells the truth, even when he’s spinning a tale.

And then, every now and again, he strips away the fictitious and releases the hymn-like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or the haunting ‘Sound of Silence’, reminding us that he is concerned with the deepest and truest aspects of existence. His latest body of work, Seven Psalms, is one such offering. But before delving into it, there’s Charlie Mackesy to consider.

Mackesy is an artist who diagnoses our wounds and heals them all at once. As discussed at length in a previous article about his immense impact, his work offers an antidote to our loud and crowded lives. His modern fable - The Boy, the Mole, The Fox, and the Horse - allows us to escape into a fictitious world that feels so much kinder than our own, while also acting as a tool for deep introspection. Charlie puts language and image to our heart’s beautiful yet fragile condition.

And this is undoubtedly why his work has garnered such incredible success. His film is Oscar-winning, his book is best-selling, and his paintings are a fixture of this cultural moment. Charlie’s thoughts adorn therapy waiting rooms, his words are taught in school classrooms, and his images are simply everywhere. It’s hard to think of someone to whom the world is more openly and obviously grateful.

And there we have it: the duo that dreams are made of (it feels appropriate to give Art Garfunkel an honourable mention at this point - what is it with Paul Simon and iconic twosomes?). Now, without further ado, onto their recent collaboration.

Seven Psalms

Seven Psalms is a thirty-three-minute-long body of work. I reference the length, as opposed to the number of tracks, because Simon has released it as one continuous suite of songs; un-skippable and un-shuffle-able. The album makes the most sense as a whole, as a continuation, as a journey. The listener is not in control of how it is listened to, rather, they are tasked with letting it wash over them. They must surrender to Simon’s stream of thought and follow his ponderings to their end. It’s interesting how much un-learning that takes.

I’m no music critic, so I will leave the delineation of the technical details and musical mastery to Rolling Stone, and instead focus my attention on the profoundly spiritual dimensions of this body of work.

And with such, it is hard to know where to begin. There is not one song, in fact, there is not one line, that is not dripping with theological thought. I’m not sure how to sum it up, except to re-iterate Paul’s own understanding of what he has crafted – he has written seven Psalms.

The first song in the interlinked line-up is ‘The Lord’. The chorus of which goes like this:

The Lord is my engineer

The Lord is the earth I ride on

The Lord is the face in the atmosphere

The path that I slip and slide on

These four lines, a re-working of which re-appear as interludes throughout the album, are not pondering the existence of God (which, as Francis Spufford often says, ‘is surely his most boring characteristic’), but the nature of God. This album assumes God’s existence, in fact, it completely hinges upon it. Therefore, it is questions such as - How does he work? How is he present? How do we experience him? How can we perceive him? – that are held within these lyrics.

It seems to me that those are also the questions that Charlie is pondering in the drawings that adorn the walls of Frieze Gallery. Each one is unmistakably a ‘Mackesy’ piece, he is easily identifiable, it is as if he leaves a piece of himself in every frame. What I found particularly interesting about this collection of work, all of which were created in response to him listening to Seven Psalms, is his use of clouds. They are not an uncommon feature in Charlie’s work, but in this context, they caught my attention afresh.

Both the songs and the accompanying sketches create an atmosphere that invites us to seek out sacred answers, to take the time (thirty-three minutes to be precise) to ponder truth and ask the most vulnerable of questions. We see strikingly simple silhouettes of people doing just that in Mackesy’s work, and they’re almost always doing so underneath an imposing canopy of clouds. Clouds that look dark and heavy, clouds that look so light they’re touchable, clouds that are formed in the shape of a heart, even. They vary, but they’re almost always there. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Charlie thinks that we ponder such things alone – his drawings make it seem as though whoever is ‘above’ stoops down to engage in our pondering. If there is a God, he listens in. If Heaven exists, it comes close.

And that, just from his use of clouds. I could write a whole other piece on his use of ‘posture’, and then another on colour. But perhaps you should just go and see for yourself.

Seven Psalms asks the permanent questions, the ones that transcend time, space, and matter. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is time-stamped for this moment. One of the most striking lines declares that ‘the Covid virus is the Lord’, as is ‘a meal for the poorest of the poor’, ‘an open door to the stranger’ and ‘the ocean rising’. The questions that Paul Simon asks of God directly relate to the questions he then asks about us and this earth we call our home – social justice, ecology, community – his perspectives on such things all seem flow from who the ‘Lord is’. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the genius is that we’ll never know.

Again, Charlie’s sketches of bustling refugees all walking in the same direction or a mother hitchhiking with her child on what looks to be a bitterly wintry night, lead us to sit with the very same thoughts.

Truthfully, I am all too aware of how inadequate this, or any, review of this collaboration is doomed to be. Paul Simon knew this album transcended words, that’s why he called upon the genius of Charlie Mackesy. So, do yourselves the most profound of favours and spend thirty-three minutes in their company. I say thirty-three minutes, be warned, the impact of their work will reside with you for far longer.

‘Seven Psalms: Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy and Inspired by the Words and Music of Paul Simon’ is a free public exhibition that is running Tuesday-Saturday until the 27th of September 2023, at Frieze Gallery, No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.