Neil Young :: Tell Me Why
“Everything will be asked of us, and everything will be given”
This line popped into my brain this week while I was riding the train home. Tears pounced on my eyes, a swelling inspiration moved into my chest. I couldn’t remember which book it was from, I had to look it up (The Satanic Verses), but minus the context, the sentence has hung around in the back of my brain for years. I wasn’t raised religious, I have no slot built into my brain for god or heaven or penance or prayer, but fervent devotion has always touched me. I CAN understand activity, movement, or work that express something felt internally.
When I was in India I witnessed a pilgrimage. Devotees of a local deity spend 30 days each year walking from their home villages to His main shrine. They carry their local shrines with them, and some hold a pair of sandals. The sandals symbolize a poet-saint from their area, now five hundred years dead, who had also worshiped the same deity. On foot, they enact a spiritual journey the poet-saints made in words. These poets are so well loved because they wrote in the vernacular. The oldest wrote his impressions of lofty Sanskrit texts in his native language, making religious thinking accessible to more people. Later, the devotional, action-oriented, religious movement, went further and took religious activity out of the hands of an elite caste who cultivated purity, and gave it folks who cultivated the earth. In pilgrimage, they get a direct line to god where every step is a sacrifice to Him, without the need of a Brahmin go-between. And the joy these people express as they approach the end of the pilgrimage is stunning, like you could reach into the air and squeeze it.
I’m not of sure of the exact credentials, but if we’re looking for more current poet-saints, I’ll nominate Neil Young. He’s not writing about the perfect glory of god, but lyrically and musically, his fervor can’t be denied. Amid the deluge of messages promoting material happiness, idealizing non-feeling and sameness, he harnesses the sadness and ambiguity that underlie most of our lives, and makes beautiful songs that I can understand. Now that I’ve got the heart-swelling inspiration, I’m trying to hear what’s being asked of me.
Tell Me Why (4.1MB MP3)
Neil Young (homepage)
one of my favorite neil young lines — ever — is in this song. it’s the chorus: “is it hard to make arrangements with yourself? when you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?” SO GOOD.