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.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.