Bill Callahan, “Day”

Some people are a sickness on this land
They’re killing, they’re taking, they’re stealing whatever they can
Anything that is not bolted down
Your life, your money, your heart, your faith, your bike
Anything that is not bolted down

TOPICS ADDRESSED: stolen bikes, sources of hope, Kierkegaard, Joanna Newsom as heartbreaker and philosophical objection, eating Cheetos while you watch “Maury,” God.

1.
The first two-thirds of this song talk about how the world is in the shithouse. Government, finance, religion are all kaput. You’ve got to fight just to keep going. Once we are properly discouraged, Bill tells us that he’s found some hope though: he met someone. He says, “To family is all you can do, even if it’s just us two.” The music sounds jubilant and insistent over against “a world that spins and dies where it stands.” It’s a beautiful sentiment—forging interdependence, us two against the world, the upshot of your Bonnie & Clyde fantasies.

Recently I realized that Kierkegaard’s Works of Love pulls the same trick. It, too, spends a long time convincing us that the world is irretrievably fucked. Once the book totally discourages us and makes us think there’s no point in carrying on, it yanks us back from the brink and, too, says that love can transcend the problem.

2.
Here is the flaw in “Day.” I was brought up in the Eliot/Pound tradition, which teaches that you are to approach art as if it was dropped from heaven and bears no human influence (such as feelings or histories or passive-aggressive messages to ex-lovers), so I pause before broaching this point: the song was recorded during Bill’s well-documented affair d’amour with Joanna Newsom, an affair that has since ended. The thing in which the song invested its hope fell apart; publicly, he’s seemed pretty miserable since then. So it’s fair enough to say that this even if it’s just us two business didn’t pan out. Bill’s experience disproves his song’s conclusion.

Does it matter if some song’s conclusion doesn’t pan out? I say yes in this case, because many of us relate to the conclusion; Bill’s story is our story. I’ve never intentionally set out to build my hope on some girl, but I’ve slipped into that mode, conflating my identity with my role in a love relationship, and it didn’t work for me any better than it worked for Bill, and I doubt it’s worked for you, either.

It doesn’t work to place your hope in other people because they are fallible. I believe, for instance, that all people at certain times recognize the healthy option but choose what is unhealthy and fun. At times we recognize the loving option but choose what is alienating or hurtful. At times we recognize what is generous but choose what is selfish. Of course there are many times, too, when we opt to be healthy and loving and generous, but in other instances we forget. This point is worth making because finding our hope in a relationship is seductive, something that instinct and plenty of cultural production leads us to do, but it’s destined to fail.

Mind the distinction, however: I am not saying that relationships are destined to fail. I am saying that hoping for a relationship to supply purpose or redemption is destined to fail. Maybe it’s why you can’t date someone and fix them.

If you do not agree that it matters whether or not we invest our hope in something solid, consider the emotional state that comes with hopelessness. It looks like: you, in your pajamas at 2 p.m., accidentally eating the whole bag of Cheetos.

I agree that the source of your hope is a pretty heavy concept and trust you won’t get uncomfortable if I should go into some deeper stuff here.

3.
Works of Love offers a different proposal. For Kierkegaard, humans are so deeply fallible that he’s unsure whether you should even waste time trying to love them in the romantic way. Karl Barth says—like a real drama queen—that in the book human love is “tracked down to its last hiding-place, examined, shown to be worthless and haled before the judge!” Kierkegaard’s alternative is placing your full hope in God instead of people. It is Easter weekend, so I will quote Amy Laura Hall’s summary of Kierkegaard’s radical idea: “We cannot define ourselves, find our way out of confusion, or begin to love unless wed to the one who occasions our judgment and salvation.”

If you do not believe in God, entertain Kierkegaard’s logic for a moment. Merely human love is bound to let you down, so if you focus on love for God, then (1) you won’t be let down, because God don’t play that, and (2) it will lead you to treat people lovingly and unselfishly as a secondary consequence.

As a philosophical maneuver this makes sense, but it is a lot to bite off for day-to-day living. Lydia Davis locates the problem in her story “What I Feel”: “It is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.” Humans fail each other, so they would fail God, too, forgetting to act loving and unselfish. It is hard to keep something invisible in front of you and act as though it is always and already apparent.

Further, the mitigating factor in Bill’s philosophy was that he and Joanna broke up. Soren has a mitigating factor, too—he became engaged at a young age, called it off, then regretted it for the rest of his life. He has some incentive to opt out of “human love” and into the God plan.

4.
We have two rough options presented here. We know from experience that the hope in “Day” does not work and that the hope in Works of Love is, at best, incomplete. What we can be certain of, however, is that we proceed under some source of hope, even if it’s vague or undefined. Provisionally, the best I can do is: “The truth is between.”