sable, and hope
bon iver, norman wirzba, and the possibility of hope.
Oh, but maybe things can change
What can wax can wane
Things can get replayed
And if it's all the same
Oh, just take my hand
And place it on your blame
And let it wash away
With you I will remain
— “Awards Season,” Bon Iver
Earlier this month, I finished reading Norman Wirzba’s latest book, Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. It is a beautiful series of meditations on how we might cultivate a hopeful way of being in a world that is worthy of our love.
Dr. Wirzba’s writing always finds me at the right time. His books have become companions in my own walk of faith—or lack thereof. Love’s Braided Dance is no different. In a time of profound hopelessness, Wirzba offers a vision of hope that is not seductive or placative—either alluring toward something false or telling us to sit back and wait for God to act.
Early on in the book, Wirzba argues that the common question, “What gives you hope?” is the wrong one to ask. This language treats hope like an object. In this way, hope is something that some people have or they don’t. Instead, Wirzba argues that hope is better understood as a way of being in the world that is molded and directed by what we love.
He encourages us to ask instead, “What do you love?” and even further, “How does that love shape what you hope for?”
The philosopher Charles Taylor calls love a “hypergood.” In a very Augustinian sense, Taylor identifies that love is often the thing we measure all others against and the framework within which we order our lives. What we love shapes what we do, who we are, how we act, and where we go. And, as Wirzba names, what and who we love shapes what we hope for.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Of course, we can identify the relationship between love and action on a meta-level. When we love God, we devote ourselves to God and pattern our lives after God’s teaching and will. When we love our families, we make the long trek home for the holidays, take time for calls, put up with annoyances and pet peeves, and express our gratitude and appreciation for one another. When we love a band, we buy their hats, attend concerts, and share their music with our friends. When we love a sports team, we follow their season record, shout at our TVs, purchase jerseys, and root for them year after year, even when a championship isn’t won.
After reading Love’s Braided Dance, though, I have sought to identify how my love and actions are connected to my daily routines—how does it shift my thoughts in the waking hours of the morning, the books I read, and how I speak to others?
Enter: Bon Iver’s (Justin Vernon) new EP, “SABLE,.”
Just 12 minutes in length, Vernon tells a story of trial, failure, and hope.” It is a deep meditation on anxiety and grief. In a powerful interview with the New Yorker, Vernon tells the album's story—which includes a complicated relationship to music, fame, touring, and love.
For those acquainted with Bon Iver, SABLE, is a return to the distant but familiar stripped-down sound of “For Emma, Forever Ago” (2007). Vernon, who began for many as an intimate voice tucked into our old Skullcandy headphones from Hot Topic, quickly grew to the booming stages of arenas and music festivals with “22, A Million” and “i,i.” But SABLE, does not hide Vernon’s lyrics behind a chaotic, technicolor musical aesthetic. From the opening lines, Vernon returns again to the quiet corner of our minds with his steel pedal guitar and piercing clarity.
The opening song, “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” introduces us to an uncomfortable protagonist who sings of his frustrations. “I would like the feeling gone, ‘Cause I don’t like the way it’s looking,” he sings piece by piece.
As with many of Vernon’s lyrics, this protagonist is both uncomfortable with his own feelings and also uncomfortably close to us as listeners. “I get caught looking in the mirror on the regular. What I see there resembles some competitor. I see things behind things behind things. And there are rings within rings within rings.”
Things behind things behind things. Rings within rings within rings. Like a mirror infinitely reflecting itself, the protagonist looks at himself with the uneasy recognition of his own infinitude. “Say I went out and told them how I am afraid of changing.”
The second song, “S P E Y S I D E,” is an acknowledgment and lamentation of failure. The opening line offers a confession, “I know now that I can’t make good. How I wish I could go back and put me where you stood.” Now in his early forties, having experienced the highest of fame and the loneliness of long isolation in the Wisconsin Northwoods, Vernon admits, “Nothing's really happened like I thought it would.”
In his New Yorker interview, Vernon expounds upon this line with his interviewer, Amanda Petrusich:
When we were young, if our childhood was good, we project ourselves into a happy adulthood. You start to put pieces together, you start moving the furniture around. And then when you actually get there you realize you’ve been trying to steer toward that so hard that you kind of missed some shit, and it’s never gonna be like how it was. . . .
Sometimes we end up chasing these ideas from our childhoods, and they guide us for the rest of our lives, for better or worse.
I feel like we are barely driving. I look at it like you’re yanking on the wheel. You’re down below, by the gas and brakes. But that’s all we’ve got.
I can’t tell if that makes me feel helpless, or if it makes me feel empowered. Helpless in the sense of, “I’m not in control of this.” But it’s also freeing in the sense of, “I’m not in control of this.” Right?
Exactly. That is a freedom.
The remainder of the song describes a self-reckoning—“What’s wrong with me? Man, I’m so sorry. I got the best of me. I really damn been on such a violent spree.”—before clueing the listener in on the final track: “But maybe you can still make a man from me here on Speyside quay. With what's left of me, as you live and breathe, really know now what had hold on me.”
The final song, “Awards Season,” is the assurance of hope. Taking a decisive turn away from the despair and uncertainty of the previous songs, “Awards Season” opens with a bold claim, “I can handle way more than I can handle.” Vernon describes these lines with one word: “Resilient.”
Whereas the first track articulates a fear of change, the final track embraces it:
Oh, how everything can change
In such a small time frame
You can be remade
You can live again
What was pain now's gain
A new path gets laid
And you know what is great
Nothing stays the same
The EP ends with a deep musical swell, suggesting that the comma in the EP’s title is present for more than a trendy visual. This, too, is a sign of hope. It is the sign of something more. Vernon does not end the EP in despair or finitude but the anticipation of another song.
While I certainly would have enjoyed Vernon’s latest musical escapade simply because it is new Bon Iver, listening to the EP after Wirzba’s admonishment to learn to dance—to join in the “braiding of lives in the joining of hands”—changed how I heard Vernon’s story in “SABLE,.”
“SABLE,” isn’t a rehearsed story. It is a reckoning with what Vernon loves—music, touring, himself, those close to him—and the complex emotions it brings. It is Vernon’s struggle with—as Wirzba writes by way of Robin Wall Kimmer—the braided dance.
Yet, as Wirzba concludes, “The hope that emerges and grows in "love's braided dance" is our most worthy hope.”
But it is a hope that is without perfection; a hope borne of excitement for life's goodness and beauty; a hope tied to the nurture, protection, and celebration of each other; a hope committed to mercy and forgiveness; a hope manifest in the construction of built environments and just economies that honor the lives that move within and through them; a hope witnessed in the creative gestures that resonate within the world's symphony of life.
Reading:
J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals
Josiah R. Daniels, “What I Hope To Witness in Israel/Palestine” (Sojourners)
Watching:
[Rewatch] The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)
Pearl [HBO]
The Penguin [HBO]