Superman, Krishna, and Sermon on the Rocks

Life is good.

World Fantasy was World Fantasy: some few hundred of my closest friends in the SFF community all walked out of the mist and smoke into Saratoga Springs for five days.  Longer cons like this feel more like the creation of a village.  I remember being fifteen on the campus greens of Sewanee, TN, in a golden fall, running into whoever I ran into, forming partiers by simple logic of accretion and the shouting of names across fields of blown dry leaves.  Then, when the planets move out of alignment, the village parts like clouds.  It’s a fantastic experience.  (Which informs my conviction, by the way, that the structure of the con should allow all attendees the same level of safety and comfort I feel—free and easy wandering requires personal assurance.)

Attending conventions made a certain sort of hidden-world fantasy make a lot more sense to me.  Neverwhere describes a con culture of a sort; so does The Last Hot Time (possibly the entire Bordertown universe?), and A Night in the Lonesome October, and of course Diana Wynne Jones’ Deep Secret.  Folks step out of daily life into something different.  And then they get back to the Work.

I’m listening to Josh Ritter’s new album, The Sermon on the Rocks, a lot, and a weird theory’s percolated in my brain.  Basically, I think this is the album Superman would make if he decided it was time to head back to Smallville (or maybe if he never left Smallville in the first place).  Hear me out.

Ritter calls the album “messianic oracular honky-tonk,” which places it on a genre continuum with high-period A3’s “sweet pretty country acid house music;” the perspective roots not in country (the genre) but in the country, in small towns and fields and water and the intimate personal geography that comes with growing around stuff that grows.  City dwellers orient on streets, buildings, landmarks; grow up in the country, in the USA at least, and you orient on things without proper names: oaks, maples, rivers, rocks.  (I’m told that in Wales all these have their own names, too.)

Top 40 radio country uses ubiquitous cultural signifiers (pickup trucks, the barbecue stain on my white t-shirt, etc.) to evoke nostalgia for country culture, but for me at least this tends to feel a bit fake, like the false evocation of community (“we’re all guys here, right?”) that precedes and attempts to excuse gross generalizations.  The speaker’s hiding his or her own opinions and experiences by evoking things that of course everybody knows.  “Yah, you grew up in the country, right?  How about pickup trucks?  Those are a thing you have, eh?  Youv’e seen them?  Huh? Buy my record!”  As opposed to: this is my place.  Let me show it to you.  (That said, not all top 40 country feels this way. I think “I Want to Check You for Ticks” is particularly well-observed, for example.)

By contrast, in “A Big Enough Sky,” off Sermon:

What happened to the riverbed?
What happened to the prairie fire?
Can you tell me where the lightning went
Every time you met my eye?

The riverbed, the prairie fire, are metaphors, but they’re not common; Ritter has a specific riverbed in mind, I think, and a specific fire.  And that calls to mind river beds and fires I have known—not some vague imprecise “oh yeah, we all know” style riverbed, but the riverbed my scout troop built a bridge over on the trail behind the high school baseball diamond, that connects down through Shakerag Hollow.

But Ritter knits these images to something bigger:

Nights are getting colder now
And the air is getting crisp
I first tasted the universe
On a night like this
A box of wine, an alibi
And the hunger in her eyes
In the place where the tree of good and evil
Still resides

The intimate personal geography (long roads, old cars, backroads and the boneyards in “Where the Night Goes”) naturally blooms to cosmic language (I first tasted the universe / on a night like this or in the place where the tree of good and evil / still resides).  The album’s second song, “Young Moses,” completes with this amazing over-the-top semimystical boast in which country landscape and figures bloom oracular and transcendant.  “I’m the king of the milkmaids, honey,” to me reads not just as an evocation of “milk and honey,” but as a specific reference to Krishna, who incarnated as a cowherd and, in one of my favorite stories, split himself into 100 Krishnas to carouse simultaneously and in equal full spirit with 100 milkmaids.

That’s what I meant by my evocation of Superman, above.  Some of the songs on this album are oracular and personal, some (like “Henrietta, Indiana”) are stories, but they’re all sung by a person with dirt under the nails—someone whose personal geography is built from trees and rocks no one knows unless they’ve been introduced—and at the same time has this ecstatic cosmic vision of the potential and grandeur and wonderful horror of the universe.  Cowpoke Krishna—whose closest avatar in the US pop media canon, really, is Superman returned to the farm.

Anyway, I think it’s a great album.  Give it a listen.

New Bookburners this week!  Shore Leave features bellinis, belligerence, and problematic clockwork.

Leave a Reply