The Patron Saint of Hiraeth

The Welsh have a word. It has no simple English translation but roughly means a longing for a place or time to which you cannot return. A yearning for that which no longer exists or, perhaps, never really was. Hiraeth the grief for lost and unreachable places. For home. Home is the first thing you know. It crawls into you young and then slowly begins to dissolve. It dissolves into far off cities and ambition. It boils away under a flame of desire and confidence that the future will be sweeter than the past. Until one day you find yourself surrounded by strangers and compromise, and home, is suddenly unreachable. What is left is only the smoke from a fire that once warmed you. As inescapable and as it is unreachable. . Before long you carry an old photo in your wallet, a relic of who you used to be. A passport for a country that no longer exists. You stare at it like a map that will someday offer a way back from all you have given away. And all that Time has taken. The first time I felt hiraeth was listening to Paul Simon through the small stereo my older brother kept between our beds. I was just a boy and Simon was not much more than a boy himself. The record, a 33, chased itself in circles as I listened to the singer. Homeward Bound… I wish I was. He seemed trapped in a kind of loneliness to me. Manacled to the groove and wedded to the scratches. A plea searching for some way home. As a boy I wanted only the world beyond my bedroom. To be older and free. I wanted anywhere else and longed for leaving. Much later I did. And alone in the world occasionally I would hear that song again. Scraping for rent or had not eaten in a couple days. Sleeping in church pews and on floors or friend’s couches. I found my way to New York City and an Irish neighborhood in the shadow of the 59th St. Bridge. I was young and poor and living alone. Unsure that I belonged to anything but some kind of unbelonging. Something else had crept into the song. The lyric carried a new weight. I didn’t know the word then but understood the feeling. Hiraeth. I heard it in Paul Simon’s voice. He explained it with his sound. Homeward Bound, I wish I was. By then Paul Simon had found his way back to America. He sang My Little Town, about returning to his home, that though still intact, had gone missing in some other essential way. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.” As though home or the very idea of it, had evaporated. Lost to the hiraeth. “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” Simon called out again and again from the radio. “Where have you gone…” Joe never answered. So, each of us, Simon and I, began searching for another kind of home run. Searching for a country that, while all around us still, had in some other way disappeared. Disappeared into Vietnam and Watergate. Into supply side theory, 911, two wars, a global financial collapse, the rise of fascism both here and abroad. Jolting Joe has left and gone away. Disappeared into the hiraeth. I wasn’t much more than a boy, searching 7th Avenue with my pockets full of promises. And like The Boxer I too was cleansed of my innocence, and began to grapple with the first and permanent stain of loneliness. The kind that reaches in, introduces itself and, even after you’ve tried to throw it out, never altogether leaves. And I began to dream of returning home. Of made beds and soft glances. Like Simon, I went home to the place home used to occupy. We all try. And I too discovered, as each of us must, that I had become a stranger to my own past. Trying in vain to recover some place that, as Simon had warned, no longer existed. When I hear The Boxer now I still listen with the ears of that boy. An artless artist, a wordless writer. Eyes drinking in all I felt pulsing beneath the hours and in the eyes of strangers. I still recall the feel of 3 am cold, my hands cracked from nightshift winter, shivering trying to unlock the door of a tiny apartment. Songwriters guard word space like coyotes guard roadkill. I could never understand the waste of word space in The Boxer chorus. Li la li …li la li…you know it. But in countries that do not understand English, there is no mistaking its power as a choir of thousands echo a wordless anthem about an everyday unfairness and the common kind of courage that can rise to meet it. About taking the small day to day beatings yet remaining intact in some other unspeakable but essential way. The fighter forever leaving, remains. Endlessly battered, but forever unbroken. “I am leaving, I am leaving," he vows again and again. Like all of us, over the years I have listened to the calls of the leavers. The lost lovers and friends, the suicides, the refugees from their own dreams crying out that they could no longer bear to stay. And I too whispered late at night into a mirror…I am leaving, I am leaving. Still, I remained. Li - La - Li. Paul Simon remained as well. He remained faithful to the hiraeth, searching across the years not only for a lost hometown but then also something greater. A country. “Kathy I’m lost,” he sang to a country of pilgrims slowly spinning their tires, like 33s on a turntable. “All come to look for America.” All drenched in the hiraeth. I too drove in circles for more years than I care to remember. But there comes a time when you can no longer believe in distant places. When you finally lay down all the useless maps. When you have finally satisfied yourself there is no GPS yet invented for that place you hear beating like blood in your ears. Simon had begun to sing of another kind of highway. Not the kind found on any map. The kind you clear and pave yourself. A toll road that leads in just one direction, to a land of hard earned grace. With a toll that requires you pay only with all you have endured. To Graceland. Years ago a photographer an old friend showed me his darkroom. He had lost his wife to cancer that year and thrown himself into his work to save himself from the bite of loneliness. He told me once that he felt like an amputee. Just one leg, hobbling along through the years. He had been shooting some ancient maps for a museum exhibit he wanted to show me. That night in his studio there was a radio playing low in the background. Graceland came on. In the shadows he held up a negative then exposed it to light, transferring the image to blank paper. “Watch,” he said as he soaked the paper in a bath of acetic acids. And slowly the hidden image, an ancient map, rose into view. He took another roll, followed the same method. Light and acid. An image of his smiling wife swam up from the blank sheet. He hung the two images side by side. The map and his wife. I turned to see him staring at them, and listened as Simon sang softly in the dark. “I’m going to Graceland…poor boys and pilgrims…we’re all going to Graceland.” That road, the road to Graceland, is paved with lost loves and abandoned friends. With suicides and the excuses we make, with badly built vows and betrayals of ourselves and others. And grace, if it comes at all, rises as a kind of residue. From enduring those things each of us would have given anything to avoid. From the struggle and the suffering. From being human. Until by some design all the wrong turns and dead ends, all the heartbreak and sorrow… all the Acid and all the Light become the only way to ever make that road, finally appear. And it appears arm in arm with hiraeth. Like my friend’s lost wife and an ancient map side by side. “For reasons I cannot explain some part of me wants to see Graceland” By then I had begun, in fits and starts, to lay down the endless string of bars and perfect strangers, their telephone numbers and beds. Their faithless confessions and my own. That first careless self serving kind of love. The kind without the essential weight of sacrifice. But listening once more to Simon, Bridge Over Troubled Water described another kind of love. Something far greater than just hit and miss hunger. Love slowly became instead the refusal to turn away when another’s dreams are sanded down by disappointment or unfairness or heartache. Bridge Over Troubled Water became for me a hymn. Not to the loud clamor of love but rather the quiet dogged insistence of it. The decision, no matter the cost, to be a place of refuge. And a promise of how the heat of love can finally, simply, surrender to its light. Simon took on other big ideas too, like mortality in Slip Sliding Away. The song offers a series of vignettes, of souls struggling as Time slides past each. It ends with a small story of a father devoted to his distant son. He travels a great distance hoping to explain himself only to be overcome by the sound of his own silence. In the end all he is able to do is kiss his sleeping son before departing. A silent benediction of unspeakable love to which both father and son are born. Each touched by a longing for something unreachable. For the hiraeth. To my ear it is one of the most affecting lyrics of our time. In his latest, 7 Psalms, Simon finally reveals what careful listeners have understood for years. Somewhere across the decades his songs became hymns and now, at long last, undisguised prayers. This time, however, he turns directly to the Engineer, God behind the glass, turning dials trying to perfect the song. He argues…praises…beseeches the silence. And then, as every pilgrim must, accepts the mystery embedded in the pilgrimage. “ We're all walking down the same road We're refugees of sorts… from my home” A couple months ago I heard Simon, now 81, once again singing Homeward Bound. It was that same voice I heard as a boy, still singing above the vinyl scratches. Still trying to reach the unreachable place. A voice calling out still, as he did as a young man, for a way home. But listening now, the song seems to have deepened. It is shadowed by time and seasoned by a different kind of longing. At 81 Paul Simon, possessed still by the hiraeth, sings now for another kind of home. This home, is no longer behind, but ahead. But I hear something else too. The recordings no longer spin slowly on a turntable. Instead they now circle the globe at the speed of light. And, though they are now pristine, I can hear the scratches left. By time and effort. By hard earned grace. By the hireath. And it reminds me of my own scratches and grooves. It sings for them. And for my own hiraeth. In some mysterious way our greatest writers become receivers, copying down something unspeakable offered to us through them. By what? It has many names. The Unconscious. The Muse. The Holy Ghost. It is some fractured mosaic, a broken whisper, painstakingly pieced together. Waiting to be dragged up whole from the shadows into sound and light. Paul Simon is one of these. Migrant. Pilgrim. The patron saint of hiraeth tuned to the wavelength of a soundless song. Singing his own map. Charting the hiraeth highway. Sometimes now I have an odd feeling. That I am not who I think I am. That this face I wear is not my own. And listening I hear a quiet clamor, I can barely hear. I feel myself moving toward an unreachable place. Driven that soundless sound and by the hiraeth I have carried with me for so long. I look around me now and sometimes I see others driving that same toll road toward some unspoken promise, toward a place that I cannot remember but yearn for none the less. In interviews for this latest record Simon discussed his gradual and now near total loss of hearing in one ear. I hope he recovers. But age and time are pitiless companions. They strip us of our talents and vanities until only the unadorned core, the soul undressed, remains. When I listen to him now, that is what I hear. Theologians tell us the language of God is silence. If that is so I’d like to think the Engineer… the Record producer is trying to teach Paul Simon a new song. I’d like to think He is whispering a secret chorus. An answer to the hiraeth. The negative turned by acid and light into a map. The directions home. WLM The Patron Saint of Hiraeth