PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION II

A piece of work by John Thompson (1938-1976) characterizes the condition that the contemporary poet is in. That work is something called, Two Ghazals. Patrick Lane’s commentary on these twin poems reveals the miserable condition even more. Patrick Lane, it is useful to note, is an award-winning poet of the governor general’s rank. I hope to serve a moral purpose by volunteering some general remarks on the poems and their commentary; my purpose, to be precise, is to communicate something worthwhile and helpful about the condition of a postmodern poet. 

The only literary criticism that is worth something is the kind that passes judgment in order to distinguish quality from rubbish. I have listened to our state broadcaster, the CBC, on a regular basis for over twenty years. The CBC, through a variety of programs, invariably greets authors on its platform in a manner meant to signal that these authors and the books they write are beyond reproach. Our national newspaper—The Globe and Mail—exhibits the same flattering behavior in its reviews. A book, poem, or song that is placed above criticism by the medium that it is featured or reviewed on, however, is usually unworthy of respect.

           Two Ghazals

xiv

All night the moon is a lamp on a post;

things move from hooks to beautiful bodies. Drunk.

I think I hear the sound of my own grief:

I’m wrong: just someone playing the piano; just.

Bread of heaven.

In close.

In dark rooms I lose the sun:

what do I find?

Poetry: desire that remains desire. Love?

The poet: a cinder never quite burned out.

xvi

The barn roof bangs a tin wing in the wind;

 I’m quite mad: never see the sun; 

you like sad, sad songs that tell a story;

how far down on whiskey row am I?

 I believe in unspoken words, unseen gods:

where will I prove those? 

If I wash my hands will I disappear?

I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.

 If one more damn fool talks to me about

sweetness and light...

I’m looking for the darkest place;

then, only then, I’ll raise my arm;

someone really must have socked it to you:

were the lips made to hold a pen or kiss?

If there were enough women I wouldn’t write poetry; 

if there were enough poetry

                        

(The Globe and Mail, June 10th, 2000.)

 

What is even that? On a speculative level, though on no other, a person with no time to redeem might spend a minute or so trying to make sense of a line or two of this while sitting in the corner of a coffee house reading a discarded section of a newspaper. I do know what the ‘sound of my own grief’ means, at least. It is the sound that a gullet makes when a gag is triggered by fake poetry. This fragmented mess of words, I contend, cannot bring pleasure to anyone who reads it. Some fancy people would say that they are regularly blessed by clutter like this. We shouldn’t believe them. For the sake of appearing wise in the eyes of pontifical trendsetters, many persons among us will twist their opinions into conformity with what is ugly. No amount of peer pressure should suffice to make the saner sort of humanity join that self-pretzeling community, however. What ingratiating critics really think about the dopey work they eulogize is usually ‘hiding in plain sight,’ as they say. For example, it is an oblique tribute to call the work of Henri Matisse ‘stripped and pared down,’ which is the kind of compliment that Matisse commonly receives from critics who profess to adore his paintings. His work is so arid and uninspiring that no more than ‘stripped and pared down’ can be said about it without lying. What does ‘stripped and pared down’ mean but emptied of meaning and beauty? Postmodern poetry is even emptier than the latter paintings of Matisse.        

Postmodern poetry structure is nothing else than lack of structure. It is borderless and it is not regulated by metrical beat. And it is utterly absurd. It is the worst of the worst of free verse.  Not all postmodern poets write as nonsensically as Mr. Thompson does, even while conforming to the visual anti-structure of postmodern poetry, which is frequently distinguished by lowercase letters and sentences that do not end in periods. A postmodern poet, even without structural components, can still say something that makes a bit of sense. Aural and visual patterns, however, do say something about the late model poet. He is sterile, spiritless, out of harmony, and borderless. Not only is he lost to truth and beauty, he does not search for either one, which aimlessness approximates what postmodernism means. This kind of poet is of the same family as liberal theorists; he is a direct descendent of that school. Liberal literary theory, morally considered, is literary theory according to anti-traditional libertines. The worst libertines, these days, are socialist ideologues, though sometimes the ‘socialist’ moniker is too embarrassing for them to openly profess. Libertine literary theory—that which practically all universities teach nowadays—is iconoclastic vis-à-vis truth, goodness, and beauty. I even read that today’s ‘literary theory aims at…a Newspeak,’ an assertion that shocked me as I read it. This opinion was by a man named Holcombe, whose work I have misplaced. The statement is obviously and certainly correct, for what is Newspeak? Newspeak is the official language of socialist Ingsoc (English Socialism) in George Orwell’s 1984. It is the use of politically acceptable speech—valueless speech that has been approved by the ruling party: muddling talking-point speech. Politicians perform it best. When asked prickly questions about policy or practices, they, as if by the press of a button, utter their memorized bullet points in android fashion. The perfection of Newspeak, though, is Duckspeak. “It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck” (George Orwell, 1984, pp. 138, 373, 382.) Duckspeak includes, but is not limited to, speaking or writing in a style that can best be described as educated blah blah blah—speech that, had she become a gender studies university professor, Charlie Brown’s teacher would have uttered. Leftist literary theory has spun offshoots that, like tentacles in a horror movie, reach out to strangle right thinking wherever it can be found. As these tentacles go about choking cogent thought, they continue down their dozens of intersecting corridors leading to nowhere and to no more purpose than mindless, endless quacking. From a book that I haven’t read and never will, this is what leftist literary theory sounds like: “To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44.) Quack, quack, quack. But these theorists really believe that their words, on some level, though I do not know on what level, are both relevant and revealing. This is why, I suppose, whoever read this book highlighted the part that I just quoted. These faddish theorists and their fellow poets have gone deeper into black holes than Jules Verne’s twenty thousand leagues, and yet they profess to be able to see something. No matter what the latest literary theories are, and even if someone can be found who understands them, their poems will remain impenetrable everlastingly. What they think is deep, we know is dumb; what they say is lit, we see as dung. What they write is no more intelligible than the ‘Post-Modern Gibberish Essay Generator’ randomly spits out. Indeed, this generator (look it up on the internet) was created, I think, to show exactly that. Is this sentence from the gibberish generator not as educational as the sentence quoted above from Butler’s book? “If one examines dialectic libertarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept deconstructivist desituationism or conclude that the establishment is fundamentally unobtainable.” This (Judith Butler might as well have written it) is philosophical quackery. Crackpot poetry is its handicapped child. You have to understand the ‘background discourse’ in order to understand postmodern poetry, says a radio host on the CBC’s Radio Canada. The background discourse is high fashion gobbledygook, the kind of stuff that Judith Butler’s book contains.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION I

Except for the proverb, the poem is the writer’s most concise medium by which to convey a memorable message. When words are carefully chosen and perfectly framed, the hallmarks of elegance and poignancy appear, and the result is a poem, not of a passing moment, but even for posterity to praise. A poem reveals much more than the message that it is drafted to communicate. A poem reflects the spiritual condition of its author. This becomes increasingly evident as poetry decreases in purpose and becomes less and less meaningful than poetry was once wont to be.  The poet’s condition will be more obvious in one poem than in another, and most obvious in his work as a whole. While reading some postmodern poems, my understanding of all of this coalesced; and out of this confluence, the following article developed.   

When a fashionable author describes the process involved in composing his work, we are virtually guaranteed to hear the same spiel that we have heard dozens of other authors give. How does he produce his novel, his story, or his poem? He makes a lot of it up as he goes; his characters take on lives of their own; the end of his effort is unlike the finale that he had in mind when he started; and he likes it that way because writing is a learning experience. Then, when asked about the suddenness of his popularity, he responds by saying how ‘crazy’ it all has been. This process is partly the reason why what is written these days is so wretched and weak. No plan is prepared; or if there is a plan, it has not received enough attention through meditation; and therefore the work is destined to be injured in the womb before the project comes to term. Edgar Allan Poe did not produce his classics, apparently, except by composing them based on a blueprint. His theory on the composition of tales includes the following rule: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (Edgar Allan Poe, Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.) Novels and short stories have become, since the dawn of the 20th century, as poor as paupers; every reader of 19th century classics knows it; and one reason for the downgrade is because the idea of composing according to plan has been discarded. But if novels and stories are paupers, poems must be to paupers what maids are to millionaires. Poetry is now the skid row of literature when it should be sipping Chateau Margaux from the balcony of a chalet in the Alps. In his own words, here is how Poe wrote his famous poem, The Raven: “It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.) If this approach is too inflexible, it is still far better than today’s unpremeditated doodling. 

Songs, too, are weak and wretched today. Often they have no more than ten lines of text, with two or three of them repeating for most of the song’s length. But they still bond together and they still have borders. Songs, more than poems, are still holding together because songs must have rhyme or rhythm in order to be sung and sold to an audience. To be successful, a song must convey a message that is not wholly vague. Current poetry is not hedged in by these requirements. No one buys poetry; so the poets don’t care. Today’s lauded poet (lauded by snobs, not the rest of us) is the one who writes poems without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. The songwriter reveals his spiritual condition in the message of his song; the poet reveals his by the scramble of words that his poems are made of—poems lacking sense and the essential elements of poetry. The successful poet, to a much greater degree than the successful songwriter, is successful because he is celebrated by connected persons in upper crust coteries and clubs. If he has a cult following, it is not because of his craft. It can’t be, because there is no craft. Without mainstream media props, there can be no success for the postmodern poet because people give even less time to postmodern poetry than they give to the sensible kind from the Victorian era.   

Writing thoughts down as they come is not entirely a bad idea as long as these thoughts are passed through a moral sieve, and as long as the words are made to associate with one another to convey a message that can be gotten to the bottom of. But the poet of our day does not sift his thoughts in a meaningful, much less moral, way; this is why his poem fails to transmit a certain meaning. He writes this way on purpose, though, and with a healthy brain, which is a scarier fact than if he wrote chaotically because of a pathological disease. He is a step down, even, from writing thoughts down as they come. He imagines weird word combinations, then takes these wild compounds and places them on paper in such a way as will block meaning from coming through to the reader. How do I know that our poets write in this way? How do I know what’s in the head of a poet? One has only to read their poems in order to know it. No Muse, except Satan on LSD, maybe, would seduce these poets to write as they do. It is on purpose that they write meaninglessly. It is not necessarily easy to do what they do. It involves some degree of mental effort. It takes more work to stitch a line or two of discrepant thoughts together than to write a line or two that comes naturally through one’s mind. It is easier to write, for example, ‘cow on green grass/west side of fence’ than something like ‘Himalayan anxiety/yellow cow, drink.’ Because this last example is made up of words that are knit together to bewilder, it takes more time and effort to write it than it takes to write a couple of natural lines of sense. But because it doesn’t need to associate with the rest of the poem like the lines of sense do, the rest of the poem is easier to write than it is to complete the sensible poem. If I were a second cousin to Margaret Atwood, and if I were audacious enough to solicit her and other cocktail-sipping snobs to consider some poems containing bewildering verse (supposing I had written some), and if I were at the same time dishonest enough to pretend to be an admirer of Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, and Susan Sontag, there is a chance, however slim, that I would be chosen to join the literary overlords in an ivory tower for a cocktail and a book deal; but if, during the meeting, I wasn’t careful enough to conceal my true self, and my conservative cows came home, I’d be tumbled out of the tower and my connections would be terminated. As long as a person claiming to be a poet is not a conservative, he could be praised as a lion of poetry for composing crazy verses. Whether he is accepted or not depends on his connections.  As long as a person isn’t writing normal, fathomable poetry; and as long as the meaning of his riddles cannot be unraveled, he has a chance. His determination to write the opaque word could be noted as the mark of a prodigy come of age: if he is accepted. Today’s poet is in a desperate condition, no matter how popular he is made out to be. The deadness of his word is the proof of it.

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION IX

Most persons would not be ruffled in the slightest after reading a disquieting essay on the shabby state of songwriting among English-speaking citizens of the world. Distress signals of this kind, if they are read at all, are drowned out by clamor and rage or unmindfully disregarded by a habit to remain unfazed. Our poor quality of communication, however, and our glorying in it, is a symptom of the moral cancer that threatens us with a denouement which is equal to—even greater than—the last bleak pages of Orwell’s dystopia. On a regular basis I read the most perspicacious books that I can find from the long past days of hoary yore. After several drafts of this essay were completed, I happened upon the following frightening passage from some time in advance of 1829. In a book called On the English Language, Past and Present, R. C. Trench, quoting a German scholar by the name of Friedrich Schlegel, bids us to notice a baleful signpost. Therefore, mark: “The care of the national language I consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern to preserve his language pure and entire; to speak it…in all its beauty and perfection…A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to exist” (p. 13.) We have, in fact, become barbarous ‘in regard to everything else.’ That is how far we are en route to utter wreck. Our barbarities are numerous. In this article we have witnessed the wretched condition of songwriting by a close look at one pop band, taken for example. But witness our loss of manners and respect, or the declining elegance in cars, architecture, and even telephones. Witness this person walking down your street, holding what looks like a brick to his ear in order to talk with somebody. And then listen to him speak in the lame, stammering English of an outlander. This person, pitifully, is not a foreigner, but a citizen from birth, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, as white as Winston Churchill, and has a master’s degree in social work. He is the average citizen of today: the decadent descendent of courtly kinsmen. Even some 19th century milkmaids and plowboys had a better grasp of the English language than 21st century educators do. If the reader thinks that ‘decadent’ denotes a positive hallmark, by the way, he suffers from the deterioration of which I speak. Not one of us is exempt. To some extent, we are all affected by illiteracy, even if we read above the level of our culture; this is the case because we must, with regularity, come into contact with simple-minded men in order to keep up with what’s going on. I would say ‘simple-minded women’ as well; but that would be sexist when my object is to be generic. We are born in sin, which is enough to damn us; and we are brought up to be less than civil, which at least coincides with the heathen’s way to perdition. I have sometimes observed that a fairly recent immigrant, fresh from the tutor, is more seamless and fluent in conversation than is a Clarke or a Grant. What must this person’s reckoning of us be? Our manner of speech and our written word have become so impaired that even what Thackeray calls ‘fashionable slipshod’ might be desired instead, so long as the slipshod could be discerned. Whatever we do, we must strive to make sense—to toil at tying our thoughts and verses together in order to bring them to a plain termination. And what if I say that in addition to this, we must convey knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, and that to do this we must not only know our times but also know how these times are judged by the word of God? We are a long way, folks, from doing any good through what we say, sing, or write. “Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all” (Proverbs 28.5.)                   

Now, to finish I will zero in on what matters the most. In his song called Wheat Kings, Gord Downie sings about a ‘weathervane Jesus’ being pushed by ‘rusty breezes.’ That’s one of the catchiest lines in his whole repertoire, though I don’t believe in the writing or singing of it. The sound of the song is warm and tender; but to depict Jesus as being turned this way or that by a breeze is blasphemous, unless the statement is qualified by an overruling, interpretative remark, which it is not. To the author, ‘weathervane Jesus’ is nothing but the right sound and feel for a part of a song; and this is the kind of thing the word of God condemns in its command to not take his name in vain. The way we react to how Jesus is treated is a mark by which to assess the validity of our profession of faith. What we believe concerning Jesus, and how we live because of our trust in his person, life, and sacrifice, is the weathervane pointing us, either to a miserable hell, or else to felicity in heaven. The rusty breezes of this world point us in the wrong direction. Gord Downie’s music is one such rusty breeze.

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION VIII

Some persons will, or would, more than bellyache at my treatment of Downie’s august lyrics in this article. They will, or would, fulminate, vituperate, and execrate, but with saltier speech than these noble verbs intimate. In their minds, I will have done nothing but roast their troubadour, and not in the boyish charm of a Dean Martin roast. The mind of man is supposed to be a repository for knowledge, not a dumping ground for clusters of words leading to confusion. There is a Great Roast coming—what the Bible calls ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and ‘the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God’ (Malachi 4.5; Revelation 19.15.) If you, whoever you are, insist on continuing your addiction to twanging folly—if you persist in this habit of walking nowhere without ear buds in your ears—ear buds that spill into your heart jangling jingles like ‘big soup stones’ and ‘prideless loans’ and ‘grill sick crows’—you will wish, on that Determinative Day, that you had been wrenched away from imbecilic ditties like Twist my Arm. Imagine writing strings of words like what’s in Twist my Arm, calling these strings lyrics, and then saying to your band mates, “Okay, boys, now we’re going to add some music so I can sing this thing”?! This is madness. And it is madness to enjoy listening to what madmen sing. The sight of a man ending his career in shrieks appeared hip to Downie’s committed fans. If ending his career like that was hip, then it was tragically hip, and the band has been well-named. Tragic, hip, obtuse, mad, The Tragically Hip is all of that. But ‘obtuse’ is the key word, the best word to describe the band, its lead singer, and their lyrics. From first to last, Gord Downie’s Tragically Hip has been tragically obtuse. It may be that most of these tragic lyrics were fashioned only after what musicians call a ‘riff’ was conjured. If so, it is madness to reach for words, irrespective of meaning, that will suit a predetermined sound. This is not songwriting. It is merely sound-causing, something even less than what the Bible calls a ‘tinkling cymbal.’ 

In light of this man’s lyrics being no more sensible than an accidental clashing of cymbals together, what does celebrating the man and his ‘work’ mean for Canada where the judging of literature is concerned? This lost man—this wayward soul—was awarded the Order of Canada in 2017, which grant can do nothing but greatly reduce the distinction of the prize; something called CBC Music made him personality of the year for 2016; and now a proposition has been put forward to create a poet laureate position in his name. So there are people who are not embarrassed to assert that the man who wrote verses like this (from The Darkest One) should have ‘artists’ follow in his footsteps, and, I suppose, be paid by the taxpayer to shuffle stupidly along in his wake—: “Where you don’t complain, but you still do/And you don’t explain if you want to explain/What you believe you say without shame, ‘I just do’/To say what you mean you don’t mean what you say/Or you do.” Do we need more ‘poetry’ like this? One more time, to force the point home—from Long Time Running: “Well, well it’s all the same mistake/Dead to rights and wide awake/I’ll drop a caribou, I’ll tell on you/I’ll tell on you, I’ll tell on you.” The sound that both these songs make is not the problem. I like the sound of each one. The first one trips merrily along; the second one is pensive and dreamy. The trouble is their lack of sense. The first song might have been written by a child with autism or some other similar handicap. If the song had been given to represent that—to represent the effort of a disabled child trying to be understood—then the song would have made some sense. In the second song, the word ‘caribou’ has no context to support its being there. The song might have been written by a troubled child of nine or ten upon learning the phrase ‘dead to rights’ and after having seen his first caribou during a car trip. After acknowledging the child’s attempt, a parent or teacher could correct him or redirect him, and that would be the end of it. But no one but a madman should call writing like this ‘poetry.’ And it is madness to establish a poet laureate position on the basis of it.

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION VII

As I was showing someone something about Gord Downie on the computer, she tapped on a video that made all that I had learned about the man and his music, merely a prelude to what I saw on the screen—merely a lead-up to his career’s all-time low. The sight and the sound stupefied both of us. After watching the clip a few more times, I began to understand. Because of my entrenchment in the world before my conversion—because once I too was a member of the hedonistic herd—I can interpret, at least marginally, things through the prism of the way I used to be, live, and think. But because now I am a Bible-informed Christian, I can take this interpretation, and then juxtapose it with an interpretation from the new life that supersedes my old ways. Then, by eying the secular and the sacred at the same time, I can more satisfactorily explain what lies before me. Here is a description of the display that jarred us as we stared at the computer. It was a video clip of the last few minutes of Downie’s last concert. So at the end of this final concert, Gord Downie started to shriek into his microphone for some minutes, before flailing his arms in the air like a mortally wounded magpie. It seems obvious that each one of his shrieks was a shout at the enemy that was taking him away from his fans and his music, and his fans away from him. The shrieks were protests against the alleged injustice of cancer—against cancer being so arrogant as to embed itself into a brain to destroy a beloved artist. The shrieks were a witness to his fans that he was being unjustly cut down and taken away. I suppose that most fans construed the shrieks in this manner. The flailing is harder to interpret, but I think it included a desperate spontaneous show of having no answer for the coming fate, and no certain hope to overleap this fate. He could not see how death could be swallowed up in victory, as it says in 1 Corinthians 15.54 for the good of Christians who have faith in Jesus Christ. He was feeling the sting of death. “The sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15.56.) The flailing was an astonied thrashing about—the action of a discomfited man who knows not what to do in the face of imminent, inevitable demise. It is a pitiful sight; I am not making fun of it, only teaching a little Bible through its use. Most of us are familiar with the saying: ‘he saw the writing on the wall,’ which idiom means that a person sees an end coming, like the end of his career or life. In Babylon, the lords of the king were ‘astonied’ (astonished) at the writing on the wall, for they did not know the writing’s interpretation (Daniel 5.9.) Downie did not know the interpretation of his fate any more than these lords knew the interpretation of the words they stared at. He knew that his end was near; but he knew not what this end could mean. The words that prophesied an end to their kingdom were foreign to the Babylonian lords; the meaning of death was foreign to Gord Downie. These, in part, are the words that were written on that wall: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it” (Daniel 5.26.) That is the word of God. All kingdoms of this world, whether large or small, must end. The little kingdoms that we build on earth must come to their close. We must prepare ourselves for what is coming. We should not be shocked if we see our end approaching. The meaning of death is that God has something to do with it. Cancer is God’s creature; it does God’s work. This is true even if cancer takes me down. But wasn’t it brave that Gord Downie rallied against terminal cancer to do a final tour for his fans? Did this not remind us of when NDP’s Jack Layton campaigned for his party to the brink of death? There is something romantic in last ditch efforts that are done to please others. It would be unfair to say that such efforts are nothing but conceited. But it is both foolish and tragic to do something so vain and unnecessary at the door of death when the meaning of death is not yet discovered and dealt with.                  

Some of the comments below the video of him crying out during his concert did, as I did, take the shrieks as plaintive cries against cancer, which conclusion easily follows from the fact that it was cancer that he was dying of. Said one commenter, “One of the rawest moments you’ll ever see…It’s a man with terminal brain cancer performing one of his fans’ favorite songs the way he always has, only with the unbearable anguish of knowing he won’t be getting to do it anymore, saying goodbye to the fans he loves, to the life he loves and knowing he’s going to die soon.” So far I agree. Said another, “He’s screaming at god and the universe, just for once, and he’s right. It just ain’t fair.” I agree in part. And said a third, “Death this way is cruel.” I entirely dissent. The truth is, cancer is a factor used by God to take life. It is neither cruel nor unfair. Getting cancer is entirely fair and completely just, because death is a curse for sin, and Gord Downie was a sinner just like everyone else.  Downie’s death was not cruel and unfair, because God, who is perfectly holy and good, has justly cursed mankind for sin. It was no sin for God to take this man’s life by cancer. It is neither cruel nor unfair when God takes life by any agency whatsoever. Even the everlasting remedy that God provides for sinners does not spare a sinner from dying. That everlasting remedy is the person, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and intercession of Jesus Christ. Salvation by faith in Jesus Christ is the only means to lasting consolation for all the ways that we, on account of sin, die. It is Jesus’ death for sin that saves sinners from what inexorably follows death: the inexhaustible wrath of God, which to impenitent sinners amounts to an eternity of anguish. Cancer kills; but unbelief leads to something far worse. Therefore our bouts of cancer should be used as opportune times to get from sin and unbelief to holiness and faith, for without holiness and faith, heaven is inaccessible.               

On some level—to merely sober-minded folks: persons who can neither see ‘art’ as enthusiasts do, nor psychoanalyze in deep troughs of Scripture—these antics on the stage have the appearance of madness. It is a sane way to interpret the scene. Considering his career and his last concert together, the Bible has this to say: “The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness” (Ecclesiastes 10.13.) Is that not an accurate summary as far as it goes? This madness might not be clinical madness; but it is a kind of madness—a new kind of madness—a sophisticated, cultural, avant-garde kind of madness. Indeed, this madness is in vogue, fashionable, trendy: tragically hip. See that verse one more time: “The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness” (Ecclesiastes 10.13.) This is not a good trend to get in the groove of. Gord Downie sang foolish songs for a living; and in the end he turned to wailing like a madman. This deduction is based on plain, visual, aural, decisive, definitive evidence. The lyrics and the shrieks, they speak for themselves. After I placed my own comment under the video clip among the others, one man called me a Neanderthal because my comment did not follow in the stream of praise. After correcting the man on the spelling of ‘Neanderthal,’ I informed him that Neanderthals never existed, except maybe in the grunting of Gord Downie. That is a hot come-back; but fighting is fierce on YouTube; and I would rather fell than fail, especially on social media where no one gets hurt. I recognize that for persons who attended the concert or who watched it while teetering on the edge of their seats from afar, the shrieks meant something else than madness. But is it not a kind of madness to be facing something worse on the other side of cancer than cancer itself, and to nonetheless spend your last days singing senseless songs instead of preparing your soul to meet the Judge of all the Earth who, in one of those songs, you have casually addressed as ‘hey, man’? Is it not a kind of madness to end your career shrieking, because you don’t realize, even after twenty centuries of theology since the advent of Christ, that man is a sinner who deserves cancer, death, and everlasting distress; and who, therefore, needs be reconciled to God, and on God’s own terms? Under that video clip of him shrieking, one person promised Gord that they would be together again, by which he meant, evidently, in a good place together. Another one thanked the singer for cleansing his soul! A man who has used God’s name in vain has cleansed the soul of no one, though. He needs cleansing himself. Reunions in the good place happen only between persons who have been cleansed by the blood of Christ—orthodoxy and the clean, practical life of faith being the indications or evidences of their mutual happy destiny. The death of someone we admire causes grief. This grief is made even worse when a person criticizes that someone. But the noblest goal of criticism is to wake sinners up to their need. The desire to have no feelings hurt comes second to a need to be told about the greater hurt of hellfire. One reason the evangelism of our day has no authority, no power, no authenticity, is because too many pastors and writers who call themselves Christians are not willing to apply certain verses of Scripture. A verse like Proverbs 18.7, for example, is obsolete to most persons who profess to be Christians: “A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul.” Gord Downie’s trade, plied for decades by the use of his mouth and lips, was a snare to his soul from beginning to end. We should not assume that the end that he came to was an agreeable one. His portion in eternity has been settled and sealed, and we must assume the worst. There is no use pretending otherwise except to self-deceive. Purgatory does not exist; hell does; read your Bibles and see. God’s Proverbs were written for a reason. Those Proverbs have teeth. They will have their chew. Once acquaint yourself with Scripture, and it is easy to imagine Canada’s darling, wretched performer wailing ‘let me out, let me out’ from the abode of the damned, though with an eternity’s worth more intensity than we hear at the close of Locked in the Trunk of a Car. 

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION VI

The majority of people in North America do not know who The Tragically Hip even is, or were. This is because The Tragically Hip never made it big in the USA, it being the dream of Gord Downie to be a household name there. He said somewhere (probably in Egos and Icons) that until they made it big in the States, the band was illegitimate. I picked up an anecdote from the CBC’s Cross-Country Check-Up (the show they did about him on the Sunday after his death) about how unpopular the band was in the country that counts. While the band was doing a sound check in LA, a woman was able to walk right in and listen to them practice. Nobody else was there; no paparazzi had bothered to show up; no security was necessary; no fans had the band staked out. On some other CBC show, I heard that an American magazine of the artistic sort was remembering, not Gord Downie, but someone called ‘Dan Gordon.’ 

The band is more popular up north than down south. But even though the band has been well-liked by some Canadians, it was never as popular in Canada as it has been made out to be since the news surfaced in May of 2016 regarding Gord Downie’s terminal case. This, from the CBC’s Cross-Country Check-Up: A choir member on stage with him in Toronto in 2002, which was long after the band had become ‘popular,’ didn’t know who he was or even who the Hip was. Again, from the same show, same episode: Gord walks into a bar in BC and asks a barmaid to play some ‘Hip’ for him; the bar didn’t have any of his music; the barmaid did not recognize him; and she didn’t know who he was even after he told her that he was Gord who had brain cancer. As moderately popular as he was, he had somehow got it into his head that everyone should know that he was Gord who had brain cancer. When your entourage becomes your world, you think that you are as big as your entourage says you are. To some credit to his popularity, this barmaid had listened to some Hip songs in the 90s, she said, and had been to a Hip concert once. She had never become an ardent fan, though, as her story shows. Quelle surprise that these two stories got past the call-screener! The CBC seldom allows opinions that cross the leftist narrative—the narrative being, on that day, that the great Gord Downie, the ‘Indigenous Rights’ champion, must be unequivocally praised. These two embarrassing anecdotes got past the call-screener by accident, no doubt. Even these, however, were surpassed by a third—the one about the man who had bought some flowers for his sister, only to be asked by lord Gord if the flowers were for him. Once we begin to be large in our own eyes, all pretty things approaching seem to be for us. Is this not the instinctual reaction of a sinfully proud nature? After this flower faux pas got broadcast all over the radio and into the easily offended ears of Downie’s fawning fans, the host began to distrust the call-screener, and proceeded to overreact. One caller, obviously intending to end with a coup de grace in favor of Downie, began to warm up by telling the radio listeners why his wife was not as enthusiastic as he was about Downie’s band. Suspecting the worst, an intervention was adverted to at the station, and, CNN-like, the line went dead, and the paean (and for me, the pain of hearing it) was prevented. That paean was ‘looking for a place to happen.’ Probably it still is. It is a wonder that the CBC did not have the prime minister on as a guest in at least one of the several hours that they devoted to Mr. Downie. After all, in spite of how little Trudeau and Downie knew one another, the PM did eulogize the semi-celebrity as if they had been bosom buddies, even with tears running down his face. Usually his tears are theatrical. But who are we to judge? The most telling anecdote about how well he was known concerns the CBC newswoman who referred to him as ‘Troy’ or ‘Trey’ Downie, obviously confusing him with the better-known Trey Gowdy, the American politician. If a CBC mainstreamer knows Trey Gowdie more than she knows you, you are probably not that well-known in Canada.

I submit proof that Downie’s band has not been widely known and celebrated, not to put him or his band down, but to show that our nation’s broadcaster, the debauched, more than billion dollar a year CBC, is somewhat to blame for propagating ‘artistic works’ that cannot bear critical scrutiny. The CBC does this for novelists and musicians, or for anyone who can perform a trick or two and at the same time be an ally with the CBC in the interest of socialism and degeneracy. Though musicians are all for making as much capital as they can, you will never hear a musician on the CBC speak favorably of capitalism during an interview. Pop musicians are, generally, godless leftists; conversely, famous composers of classical music have been committed and outspoken theists, if not outright Christians. The CBC is an atheistic corporation whose aim it is to magnify postmodern meaninglessness. Their door is shut to anyone who performs above the dregs unless that person has, or pretends to have, a meaningless worldview.

The fact that four million Canadians tuned in to view Gord Downie’s final concert does not prove popularity on a large scale. Who will not tune in to see a terminally ill man do his final show? I wouldn’t, but who else would join me in that sin of omission? About thirty-two million Canadians, apparently. Maybe more had tuned in if maestro Downie had not wearied his fellow Canucks with his protracted political goodbye. Knowing that his end was near, this Bruins (not a Canadian team) fan soon blew it wide open that he had been radically—perhaps I should say rabidly—brainwashed by the myth that the Indians are under attack by white Canadian cowboys. Anyway, I think we can assume, based on how many Canadians bothered to tune in to his grand finale, and based on my less than immaculate, but nevertheless adequate, research, that, in Canada, the band has been unknown to most; moderately popular with some; and extremely popular with a segment. 

Callers from this last clump—the longsuffering, steadfast fans—were the ones who were permitted to populate the phone lines on the CBC’s Cross-Country show on that memorable memorial day. These are those who, along with their prime minister, fancied Mr. Downie was their ‘buddy.’ These are those who, if Downie’s songs be considered (for that is what they principally know about him), set folly in great dignity, as it says in Ecclesiastes. Somehow the Universe—or the Creator—put something together at the end of his life, said one Indian woman about his ‘Indigenous’ endeavors. Because of his death, it was said that a daughter saw her dad shed tears for the first time. One caller stated his disbelief at the privilege of having lived on the same planet with him. Another one labeled him a historian. Yet another called for a state funeral. Many of the callers choked up. One caller didn’t know what to do except stack up compliments. “Gord Downie is the single most generous, passionately supportive, committed, loving person that I’ve ever encountered in my career,” he said. To become this attached to a person based on songs that make little, and sometimes, no sense, is fanaticism, which is always irrational, or at least, never rational enough. Once your praise is this jacked up, you have carved an image in your mind that little resembles the messed up, mortal man who walked the earth. Consider the following interchange that took place on the show just mentioned. Near the start of the program, the host got a man on the phone who knew Gord from the early days when the band members used to patronize his record store. The starry-eyed host asked the man what struck him when he met Gord Downie that first time. After a lot of stammering and a comment about Gord’s long hair, the man had to finally admit, “Nothing struck me.” This is the reality. Gord Downie was not a saint. He was not a god. He was not a demigod. He was not superhuman. He was not a hero. He was not royalty. He was not a dignitary. He was not a social justice warrior in any good sense. He was not a historian. He was not a poet. He was a prater with some vocal ability. The collaboration to create the lyrics that make up his repertoire of songs was, in the main, an exercise in folly. This verdict suits many, maybe most, musical artists of our day. This verdict is vindicated each time one of Downie’s efforts is subjected to scrutiny. His very last musical works are coming out now over the radio. I think that even his kindest critics must find fault with some of that. But the lyrics of these last works cannot be worse than most of what he produced in his prime. Here is what legitimate poetry looks and sounds like: “If only I might love my God and die/But now He bids me love Him and live on,/Now when the bloom of all my life is gone,/The pleasant half of life has quite gone by” (From If Only, Christina Rossetti.) These lines have rhythm and musicality. They have truth and depth. They can be understood. They remind one, and are on the level, of Aznavour’s Yesterday When I Was Young. The lines are better than anything Downie ever wrote. They are better, for example, than any lines from At the Hundredth Meridian, one of Downie’s most popular songs. From that song, what could these two lines mean?—: “Garbage bag trees, whispers of disease/And acts of enormity.” To compare Rossetti’s verse with Downie’s lyrics is fair because this man’s lyrics are being called poetry. If we were to get back to a 19th century standard of the written word, Downie, as a lyricist, would soon after be evaluated as: almost never known, now thankfully forgotten, except by very few. Would this ten word appraisal, by the way, not make a better lyric than most of the verses that Downie authored? “Almost never known/Now thankfully forgotten/Except by very few.” That’s not bad; I can hear that being sung.

PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION V

I used to enjoy some songs by The Tragically Hip. That was decades ago. Naturally, I did not understand what I was hearing, which perfectly suited my drunken state. Sometimes, for an instant, a message emerges, as in the following lines from Locked in the Trunk of a Car—: “They don’t know how old I am/They found armor in my belly/From the sixteenth century.” But what has this to do with what follows?—: “Passion out of machine revving tension/Lashing out at machine revving tension/Rushing by the machine revving tension.” Not only are the songs not lucid enough, some of them are defiled by foul words or irreverent references to persons of divinity. Others of them contain lines that overtly encourage dissolute conduct, like these lines from Blow at High Dough—: “But I can get behind anything/Yeah I can get behind anything.” At least this tiny part of the song is comprehensible. But there is little agreement on Song Meanings about what the song is about. I think the lines preceding the part about ‘getting behind anything’ are about a movie being shot at a racetrack. “They shot a movie once, in my hometown/Everybody was in it, from miles around/Out at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing/Well, I ain’t no movie star.” The rest of the song is, tragically, typically obtuse. ‘Getting behind anything’ is the philosophy that anything goes. That much is obvious. So it is not merely that we should not listen to songs that are unreasonable; we should not listen to songs that induce, through their mood and what little sense they contain, behavior that can ‘get behind anything.’ We should apply these two reasonable lines from his song called Poets, though—: “Don’t tell me what the poets are doing/On the street and the epitome of vague.” The ‘epitome of vague’ is Tragically Hip songwriting; the ‘street’ is the base lifestyle that one may be tempted to engage in by listening to a meaningless pop song; we shouldn’t want anything to do with any of that. Aliena optimum insania frui. (It is best to profit by the madness of others.) We profit by criticizing it and then alienating ourselves from what madmen do. Songs that are unreasonable or immoral are unfortunately popular. “Folly is set in great dignity” (Ecclesiastes 10.6.) Songs that are unreasonable or immoral may be joyful to both songwriter and listener. “Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom” (Proverbs 15.21.) We should ‘go from the presence of a foolish man’ when we perceive that he transmits no knowledge (Proverbs 14.7.) We should do so because ‘a companion of fools shall be destroyed’ (Proverbs 13.20.) It matters how we spend our time. Going to concerts may be fun. But ‘even in laughter the heart is sorrowful’ (Proverbs 14.13.) Why is it like that? Because even while a person is tearing it up, he knows that something is not right. What occasionally nags his conscience is the fact that a thoughtless lifestyle of getting behind anything is a way that leads to both death and hell. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14.12.) Should we not consider this verse in light of the slaughter that took place on October 1st, 2017 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, two weeks before Downie’s death? Going to this concert seemed right to many. It was ‘a way which seemeth right.’ But the end of that way was death for fifty-eight persons and injuries or terror for the rest. The songs being reveled in when the shots rained down were not much better, maybe no better, than what I am criticizing in this essay. You might not believe that concertgoers were shot because of the sin of going there; and it is true that there are more factors to consider in these deaths than the sin of going to a concert as a beguiled merrymaker among many. It is nevertheless a fact that the victims would not have been shot if they had stayed home to read their Bibles. “Well, they died doing what they loved to do!” That’s the kind of thing people say. “Well, it was their time to go!” This is the other thing that people say. But would their time not have been some other time if they had been somewhere else? Would a thirty-four year old woman who got shot and killed at a concert have died in some other way if she had decided to stay at home that night to read Augustine’s Confessions? That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? How many days we get to live is predestined; but the Bible does not command us to live conscientiously and cautiously for nothing. We can’t square the circle of predestination and responsibility any more than we can drive through a black hole with a Volkswagen Beetle. Some things in both General and Special Revelation lie beyond our abilities.