Illusions of the Sunlight

So many people think art is supposed to mean something.  In visual art and written art such as prose and poetry, it is a typical thing to try to figure out what it means. I have come to accept that the art stands on its own as beauty and truth and that it doesn't have to mean anything. It certainly doesn't have to mean anything in particular.

Nearly two years ago I found a song on Spotify. I do not remember how I found the song.  The song is "Shattered" by a group called Trading Yesterday.  Spotify not only introduced me to this song, but to the entire album that includes this song.  When I'm listening to music, I enjoy Googling the song and the band to learn more about both.  In this case I only learned that the band had broken up years ago.

But I also learned that the writer and the singer was a man named David Hodges. I typed David Hodges into the Spotify search and it opened an entire universe of music. Although I have enjoyed hours of his music, I return to where I started with "Shattered" time and time again. Even after listening to this song perhaps hundreds of times, I still don't know what it means.  All I know is that the words and the music speak to something deep within me.  There is a mental and emotional healing aspect to the song for me. I start and end many days listening to this music.

Shattered begins with "Yesterday I died. Tomorrow's bleeding. Fall into your sunlight." The song had me at "fall into your sunlight."  Whatever the "sunlight" is, it's a place I want to find. And to think all I have to do is "fall". When I fall I just step where there's nothing below me and gravity does the rest. Falling requires absolutely no effort on my part.

"and finding answers is forgetting all the questions we call home."  Rainer Maria Rilke tells us to "Live the questions."  Hodges tells us to "forget the questions."  This is very difficult for me to do, but the song challenges me over and over again to do exactly that.

"And this day's ending. Is the proof of time killing, all the faith that I know. Knowing that faith is all I hold."  If all I have to do  is fall into the sunlight, then I also accept that the faith is not what I hold, but the faith holds me.

"There's the light.  There's a sun. Taking all shattered ones. To the place I belong, and his love will conquer all."

This light I fall into and this faith that holds me takes me to the place I belong.  Where is this place?  And how do I know when I get there?  For me the song is a reminder that I'm already there. The place of departure is actually a place of arrival, a still point in time that moves forward by itself. All I have to do is constantly fall forward. Inertia is just as powerful as gravity. After the initial push, inertia acts on its own.

"and his love will conquer all."  Whose love will conquer all?  God we might assume, but the song doesn't say.  Maybe it's the love of this shattered one for himself.   Another of my magnificent obsessions is Tori Amos. She sings in "Winter"  "When you gonna love you as much as I do?" I have learned that if I don't love myself, then God Himself can't scale that wall of arrogant self-deception. Or at least He chooses not to scale that wall.

"As reason clouds my eyes, with splendor fading. Illusions of the sunlight."  The birth of every day ends in darkness. Was the sunlight ever really  there?

Years ago I was alone in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  With no group to answer to, I strolled the halls at my leisure.  There was a Renoir in particular that I stood before for quite some time. It was a painting I had seen photos of in high school art. But there I was trying to comprehend the very masterpiece that Renoir had painted. Its beauty was consuming.   What did the painting mean? It meant that my entire life had arrived at a resting point, a point of total completion. In that moment I forgot all the questions. And I found home.