Wartime Prayers

This is one of Simon's best, strongest songs. It ranks-- in terms of its sheer poetic quality, its moving melody, and its profound insights-- with his finest work overall.

Does Simon believe in God? Well, that depends on what you mean by "believe in." In the sense of "Do you believe in angels?" it seems so. In the sense that a coach means when he says, "I believe in you," to a nervous little-leaguer, perhaps not. Even in his first song with Garfunkel, "Bleecker Street," he believed that there was a "fog" that "hides the Shepherd from His sheep."

Yet, here, it seems Simon does believe in, does put stock in, prayer! It may seem disingenuous to say that prayer works if God is unresponsive. But again, it depends on what you mean by "works." Does God answer all prayers the way we wish? Well, no. Does praying help us feel better? It can.

The speaker, probably Simon himself, starts here by delineating the difference between peacetime and wartime prayers. Peacetime prayers, he says, focus on "appeals for love"-- maybe romantic, or familial, or even Divine-- or "love's release," a less clear idea. Is this a release from love? Does it mean that we pray to stop loving someone, or that they stop loving us? Or is this "release" in the sense of salvation-- yes, we have love, but we wanted it to save us, and it has not! (And perhaps it is a release of a more, ahem, physical nature.) In any case, peacetime prayers are "silent" and "private" and seem to take safety for granted, now upping the request for fulfillment.

Simon, unlike Springsteen, did not write an immediate response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still raging when he wrote and published this song, with what seems a clear reference to those attacks-- "the fires"--  which targeted his beloved New York.

In an post-9/11 world, "people hungry for the voice of God"-- one of commanding reassurance-- "hear lunatics and liars." These unspecified miscreants must include politicians, pundits, and clergy of all faiths, all in full-throated condemnation of each other, accepting no blame unto themselves.

So these days, we have "wartime prayers," given "in every language"-- including ours and those of our enemies! And not for love, anymore, but "For every family scattered and broken." All sides in a war send soldiers away... and either do not receive them back at all... or the same. Such families no longer take basic safety for granted. No longer is the prayer "please let him/her love me," but "please let him/her not get blown up."

Having defined his terms, Simon dismisses the notion that he has any answers to the situation, even cynical, public relations-style ones: "I don't pretend that I'm a mastermind with a genius marketing plan."

He does, however, lay out his personal plan of action. He acknowledges that prayers are not accepted from a less than pure heart: "You cannot walk with the holy if you're just a halfway decent man."

First, let us pause to find the source of this expression, "walk with the holy." In the early part of The Book of Genesis, we meet Noah, who it says is "a man of righteousness, perfect in his generation." The next line? "With God walked Noah." Noah was a man who also lived at a time of great destruction, yet was able to rise above it, both figuratively and literally.

Back to our speaker. What is the plan for achieving a higher state of decency, and thereby, holiness? To seek a source of "wisdom," to "rid [his] heart of envy," and "cleanse [his] soul of rage." So it is a matter of adding some more knowledge and insight, making room for these by ridding himself of some distasteful traits (that happen to be two of the Seven Deadly Sins, "rage" and "wrath" being synonyms).

"Wisdom" is more than just "intelligence," the ability to think. And it is more than "knowledge," the accumulation of facts. Wisdom is the result of the application of intelligence to knowledge-- what you think about what you know. This is such a laborious process that the speaker is willing to settle for "a little drop" of wisdom! (John Gorka's song "Wisdom" is very good discussion on this matter.)

"Envy" is the wanting of what someone else has. Not just ambition, wanting what you don't have, but wanting you to have it... and them not to. And "rage" is such a high level of indignation that one becomes undignified altogether. So both are self-consuming passions, devouring much while producing nothing.

Returning to current events, yes, there are wars, repression, and recession, "But everyone knows/ all about hard times." So what's your plan to cope? "Well, you cry and you try to muscle through/ And try to rearrange your stuff." Realizing your powerlessness over global events, you focus on yourself and your immediate world. (This passage echos the Serenity Prayer, which speaks of the "serenity to accept what I cannot change" and the "courage to change what I can.")

But then comes the breaking point. When that is reached: "We wrap ourselves in prayer." And so Simon comes back to his theme.

The image of "wrapping" oneself "in prayer" may come from the religion Simon was born into-- Judaism. The Jewish prayer shawl is called a "talit" (tah-LEET) in Hebrew, from a word meaning "to cover." To don the shawl, one wraps oneself in it, pulling it across one's shoulders all the way around one's bowed head. Once so cocooned, one utters the blessing regarding the commandment "to wrap" ourselves in this garment.

Nevertheless, the metaphor of being wrapped in prayer is so easily understood that the Jessy Dixon Singers are able to sing the line in soaring gospel harmony without, one assumes, guessing that it may have a specific ritual origin, let alone a Jewish one.

The song closes with none of the global geopolitics or moral philosophizing of the above verses. Rather, we see a "mother" allowing her babies to share her bed; she is falling asleep and "draws [them] closer." She nuzzles and "kisses" them. Then, "To drive away despair/ She says a wartime prayer."

Where is her husband? If this is the prayer she whispers, hers must be one of those "families scattered and broken." So he is at war.

Perhaps the babies are in the bed for their sake; they might be having nightmares with him gone. Or maybe they are there for her. Maybe she needs them close because of her own loneliness and fear; she is also at the point of "all that she can bear."

Does prayer work? It must, on some level. Otherwise, we would not keep doing it after thousands of years. As long as there are love and war, it seems, there will be prayer. Whether Anyone is listening or not.

MUSICAL NOTES
Jessy Dixon, along with his backup singers, performed with Simon in many contexts, including on his television special, on Saturday Night Live, and his Still Crazy and Live Rhymin' albums. Dixon died in 2011 of cancer, but not before writing for female superstars like Diana Ross, Cher, and Natalie Cole.

On piano is Herbie Hancock, a jazz legend. While he played with the challenging Miles Davis, he was remarkably accessible in his own work, integrating electronics and funk into jazz. He had a hit video with his instrumental "Rockit," and in 2008 won the Album of the Year Grammy for a Joni Mitchell tribute album.

Next song: Beautiful

Love

"You've got the cool water/ When the fever runs high," Simon wrote in the song "Something So Right." He returns to that imagery many years later, in this languid song, which begins "Cool me/ Cool my fever high."

Here, the speaker continues "Hold me when I cry," indicating that love can be passionate, but also compassionate. 

"I need it so much/ Makes you want to get down and crawl like a beggar/ For its touch," Again, the desire is so intense, that, like an illness, it makes one lose one's inhibitions and dignity.

The irony, of course, is that this wonderful, fever-reducing, anxiety-erasing "drug" is "free as air!" It costs nothing-- nothing material, anyway-- to love someone. "Like plants, the medicine is everywhere," refers to the idea that many of our most common healing agents, from aloe to aspirin, come from plants (aspirin comes from willow bark). In this sense, love as as available as something that grows naturally from the earth.

Well, that's what happens when you don't have love. What about when you do? "Makes you want to laugh out loud when you receive it/ And gobble it like candy." It's so easy to find, and hard to get, that if we do, we tend to overindulge and make ourselves sick on it!

"We think it’s easy/ Sometimes it’s easy/ But it’s not easy." This three-stage realization is key. When we are not in relationships, it seems like everyone else is. What we forget is that, when we are in relationships, life is not necessarily any less complex. And when you have love, the question is how to keep it. "You’re going to break down and cry," it seems, either way.

Those who give love, knowing how much the other '"craves" it, can use it to control the other, telling them that they are "not important" and that they "should be grateful." This puts the beloved in a seat of power. When I have what you want, you will do what I want to get what I have.

In the In the Blue Light version of the lyrics, Simon softens the idea of unimportance a bit. Instead of being unimportant in the eyes of others, subjectively, we are all objectively unimportant-- transient and mortal: "We're only here for a season of sunlight." 

So far, Simon does not paint a very happy picture of love. It is almost a drug, creating self-destructive, but coercive, desires. Unlike most love songs, it does not celebrate the emotion as much as lament it. 

But until this point, his focus is on interpersonal relationships. Then he shifts to geopolitics and history. Oh. he sighs, how high is "The price that we pay/ When evil walks the planet/ And love is crushed like clay."

The last lines use the imagery of the Nazis, who called themselves the "master race" and the Jews, the "chosen people," they committed virulent genocide against. But by speaking of these elements in plural, Simon broadens the concept of genocide to all throughout history who have declared themselves master races and lashed out against others in their imagined superiority. 

"The burning temples," are those of the Jews destroyed during Kristallnacht, the city-wide pogrom that initiated the Holocaust. But they are also all those from the Holy Temples in Jerusalem sacked by the Babylonians and Romans to the synagogues, churches, mosques, and ashrams that have been set fire to over all of human history. Very early in his folk career, Simon even wrote a song called "A Church is Burning," about a spate of arson attacks of black churches in the American south in the 1960s. Even today, houses of worship are regularly targeted by hateful violence.

The last words, "the weeping cathedrals," might refer to the response, over the years, by those who were not targeted (this time), but who said only that "this is a terrible tragedy" and that "something must be done."

However, in the In the Blue Light version, Simon eschews this whole historical retrospective, and replaces it with a self-help-ish affirmation: "When daybreak's hopes have come and gone/ Just love yourself, and pass it on." Pain comes from expecting love from others and being disappointed when it does not materialize, he seems to day. Instead, rely on yourself and be a giver instead of waiting to receive. 

This song, despite its title, seems not to be about "love" but about its absence. On a personal level, a lack of love can drive a person to despair and desperation. On the global level, a lack of love leads to an inhumane, and inhuman, attack on one's fellow humans. Such killers see the other as less than human, while they themselves are the ones who have abandoned their claims to humanity.

Next song: Pigs, Sheep and Wolves

Silent Eyes

Paul Simon, most people know, is Jewish. In the song "Hearts and Bones," he states this outright calling himself and is recent ex-wife Carrie Fisher "one and one-half wandering Jews."

While he discusses religion in general at various points through his songs, his earliest religious recordings are Christian in nature (he and Garfunkel were singing on a Christian radio show in England around the time of their first official album), and there are references to Christianity, and other faiths, throughout his repertoire, from "Old" to his recent "Getting Ready for Christmas Day."

And while these other faiths do include Judaism, this is one of his most openly and outwardly Jewish songs. It is about Jerusalem, Judaism's most sacred city and the capital-- ancient, modern, eternal-- of Israel.

The last line in the song, "what was done," does not seem to refer to any particular event, or news item, regarding Jerusalem, at the time of the song's release (1975). In fact, the most recent major news about Jerusalem was (from a Jewish and Israeli perspective) the best news the city had received in centuries-- that its most sacred section, The Old City, with The Western Wall-- was once again in Jewish hands (as of the 1967 Six Day War). The reunification itself was such a historic milestone that it is celebrated annually in Israel with its own holiday.

So the profoundly mournful tone of the piece must refer to Jerusalem's millennia of suffering. According to the Jewish periodical Moment Magazine, "During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times."

The line "bed of stone" refers to a particular material called Jerusalem stone, a local grade of limestone used to build everything from The Western Wall to modern office buildings and homes. It has a reflective quality, and in many lighting conditions, the city does seem to glow yellow, as referenced in an Israeli songwriter's beloved song "Jerusalem of Gold."

It is an ongoing source of worry, in the Jewish community, that Israelis themselves see Jerusalem as a proud, thriving, and even glowing city while American Jews see it much as Simon does-- a city shrouded in mourning. American Jews are raised with stories of Jerusalem's fall at the hands of the Babylonians and Romans, and we see media coverage of various wars and terror attacks today, and assume that the city is a battle zone and always has been. Slightly fewer than half of American Jews have been to Israel-- the last number I saw was 41%-- so the kind of personal familiarity with the city that would belie this image is lacking as well.

Turning back to the song itself, the speaker of the song seems helpless and helplessly detached. He "watches" in "silence." In other words, not only can he not help Jerusalem, but he can't put himself in a position to do so. In fact-- no one can: "No one will comfort her/ Jerusalem weeps alone."

Nevertheless, he feels that he should feel an attachment: "She calls my name." The city "burns like a flame"; it is not actually afire (as it has been during various battles); it burns "like" a flame, not "with" one. Instead, it is undergoing an intense emotion, as in the Sting song "I Burn for You." This "burning" is linked to the "calling," they are connected by the word "and."

So here is the city, yearning and begging for his attachment. The choir surges, then subsides. Has the connection been made? Maybe not... he still watches with "silent eyes."

Only now, his eyes are "burning" like the city. He has caught the fire. He feels the desire for connection welling within him, and he even starts to move toward the city.

But as he pushes on through the "desert," he only gets "halfway to Jerusalem." He can see the city, but he can't get all the way there, which would mean to speak for her. The "desert"--the empty space between himself and the city, is too intense (the word "burning" might also apply here), and he cannot complete his journey. He can see the city's "sorrow," he can even share that sorrow... but he still cannot speak words of comfort or defense to mitigate that sorrow.

We have instead, for most of the song, silence: "Silent eyes," "watching," "no one will comfort." Then the city "weeps" and "calls." And only gets silence in response. Movement, yes-- but not a completed one, only a "halfway" one.

This state cannot last, he concludes. God will judge him for not completing the journey. In the end, God will force him to speak-- to defend himself as if in court ("called as witnesses") --and explain why he did not speak to console or uphold Jerusalem.

The song phrases that idea differently. He-- and in fact "we... all"-- will have to "speak what was done." This is more profound, in that "we" what will have to say... is nothing. Because nothing was done. Nothing was even said. We stood there and watched Jerusalem "weep."

You know that thing parents say when children cry over, say, not getting ice cream: "I'll give you something to cry about"? Well, this is a similar situation. God's point? "You want to say nothing? I'll give you the chance to say nothing. I'm going to ask you what you did when Jerusalem wept. Then-- then!-- you will really be saying nothing."

On a larger scale, the speaker implies, we must all answer for what we did not do to stop suffering in general, in Jerusalem or during the Holocaust or at any time or place. We see the devastation wreaked by war and nature, we hear the "weeping," but we only watch with "silent eyes."

And if we say nothing, then when we are asked to speak for ourselves, we will have nothing to say.

The theme of "silence" has been part of Simon's lyrics since "Sound of Silence." The inability to connect on an interpersonal level runs through songs like "Dangling Conversation," "Most Peculiar Man," "Sparrow," "Bleeker Street," and many others. Here, Simon explores what happens when that detachment is writ large, on the stage of world events and history. Or rather, what doesn't happen.


IMPACT: The song appears in the soundtrack of the Warren Beatty movie Shampoo. "Have a Good Time" was also supposed to appear in that movie, but did not. "Feelin' Groovy" also makes a very brief, but recognizable, appearance.

The song was sampled by Access Immortal for a track titled "Authentic Made."

Next Song: Late in the Evening