Into the Mystic

THE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES

Van Morrison and Astral Weeks

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone.

MARGARET ATWOOD

A VALID complaint against the counterculture of the 1960s is how easily it sometimes wandered smiling and empty-headed into whimsy. “I’m dappled and drowsy and ready for sleep,” yawns Paul Simon in his footie pajamas. It was this angle that the majority culture found easiest to like, and inevitably, easiest to exploit. It was not hard for the marketers to locate a primary-colored psychedelic superficiality that leant itself to advertising, sitcoms, commercial design, and so forth. One could decorate bedrooms for the kids in the style, or enjoy television shows where suburban families formed rock bands. The runaways of the Haight had left those homes some years before. Now the third- or fourth-hand reverberation from the Haight was washing back over those houses, bringing a style that when completely deracinated would become the hopeless look of the 1970s.

Happiness was being marketed as a simple state, not a delicate balancing act. It was time for the songs of experience, for the taste of ashes and tears.

To be fair, tears had never been out of the picture in the new world of sixties rock and roll. In fact, a lot of the distinctive freshness and sweetness of that world came from its having been washed in tears. Inside a lot of the music was a wistfulness or poignancy, even a sorrow, whose origins were unclear, an absence or longing that gave the music much of its resonance.

The revolution had begun with the message that it was possible to shuck off the armor one had been wearing. But after a while there grew a sense that there might be something that needed to be picked up and carried again. A song on the Band’s first album aptly named “The Weight” (“some combination of love, debt, fear and guilt” Greil Marcus said)¹ became a sort of anthem for this seriousness of the later counterculture. Even that supposed document of the joyous vision, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, careered to its finish leaning way out over the edge of an abyss. In that same year Dylan returned with John Wesley Harding, restrained and austere, as if making a penitential attempt to cast off the profusion of images that had perhaps grown choking to him. Even while rejecting the moral basis of a money economy, the hippies were finding that there might yet be some use for the metaphors of price, cost, debt, and obligation. Behind everything was the old lesson of gospel music, that the soil of ecstasy is sorrow.

It remained for a runty, touchy, expatriate Irish R & B shouter to make Grief his muse and distill all this half-expressed sorrow and dread into a suite of unearthly beautiful songs, songs that demonstrated that rock and roll could comprehend suffering as profoundly as any other form of music. George Ivan “Van” Morrison of Belfast had been the front man for an exceptionally hard-edged and belligerent early beat band from Belfast called Them, named after an American sci-fi film about giant ants from outer space. Astral Weeks was his second solo album, released in November 1968. Morrison had been working on most of these songs for a while, but one can’t imagine this album being released any earlier in the decade. Past the psychedelic zenith of the age, the colors were beginning to leach out of the days. Despite its far-out title, the colors of Astral Weeks are the drab grays and browns of northern European industrial cities, cities like Belfast where the story is set, far from the carnivals of London or San Francisco. The world of Astral Weeks stands in stark contrast to the mindscapes of psychedelia, and yet the music offered an alternate path to vision, the via negativa, the way where everything is taken away, a path few want to take but that will open for most people at one time or another.

There is a transformation of the mind and world that belongs to pain. Pain brings things to the surface that each suffering soul knows but doesn’t often talk about. But this was the 1960s, and it was time to consider pain psychedelically, that is, as a mode of vision. By the time Van Morrison went to record Astral Weeks, rock and roll had shown itself willing to tackle some large concerns—justice, consciousness, alienation, love, nature, mystical experience. What rock and roll had not encompassed so far, what it had been straining toward, was eternity, or, you might say, death.

Popular music had been getting quieter as the end of the decade loomed. Even rock and rollers wanted, for the moment, to turn down the noise and the craziness. There was a feeling that things were close to getting seriously out of hand. Solo “singer-songwriters,” singing relatable, confessional lyrics to unamplified backing, in the manner of the old folk-club troubadours, were starting to reappear. Superficially, Astral Weeks fit in with this moment. But burned-out hippies turning to it for acoustic solace were in for a surprise. Such peace as there is in Astral Weeks comes at a high price—it is the naked exhaustion that comes after grief has purged the emotions.

Astral Weeks began as Morrison started playing acoustic, jazz-inflected arrangements of some new songs in clubs around Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early 1968, accompanied by Tom Kielbania, a student at the Berklee College of Music, on stand-up bass, and jazz-trained flautist John Payne. Warner Brothers, who was interested in signing Morrison, sent veteran producer Lewis Merenstein up to Cambridge to check him out. Morrison obliged by playing the song “Astral Weeks” for him. A few lines in, Merenstein started to cry.

In one way, Astral Weeks is an expansion of the most basic rock-and-roll kick, the three basic chords, only stretched to contain a previously unimaginable depth of feeling. It’s why as strange and unexpected as a lot of it is, people tend to like it right away; they get it. My first thought on originally hearing it was “This is the kind of music I really like.” My next was “I’ve never heard anything like this before.”

The mood of Astral Weeks is austere. There is only one voice—alone, never multitracked, never supported by another voice—accompanied on acoustic guitar. But it’s also one of the most extraordinary collaborations in pop music. Half its power is in the way that Morrison’s ideas are supported and developed and realized by an inspired set of session musicians, a small jazz combo brought in by producer Merenstein. They were bassist Richard Davis, guitarist Jay Berliner, percussionist Warren Smith Jr. on vibes, and drummer Connie Kay. On this record they almost devise a new musical vocabulary, a haunted folk-jazz or some unexplored alleyway of the blues. The musicians hover over Morrison as close and sympathetic as air to his every move, both ethereal and intimate, timing hung on the rhythm of a singer’s agitated breath.

The experience of listening to Astral Weeks was unique in 1968 and has remained unique: The novel style, quiet but fraught, bringing impressionistic jazz and rock and roll so naturally together; the cyclical feeling—the way it kind of sounds like one song broken into pieces or episodes; the picaresque hallucinatory glimpses of Belfast life; a certain timelessness suggested by the way that at moments you can slip into thinking you’re listening to something archaic, an ancient children’s rhyme; the way the windows of a song will unexpectedly open from a small overheated room in Belfast with smoke-yellowed wallpaper onto a prospect of endless sea or sky; the way it feels true to the rhythms of grief—brief moments in “gardens all wet with rain” when you can imagine a future again, only to have the blackest clouds yet close over you—the experience of Astral Weeks is made of these things.

Most spiritual traditions have an outsized solicitude for those who are suffering because they believe that it is at that point that the soul is being made. That soul making is what Astral Weeks is about. That’s why the experience of listening to it ultimately feels like an enlargement of the spirit, as much as the most expansively blissful rave-up. When I say that Astral Weeks is the most profound meditation on suffering in pop music (which it is), you might think it’s a bummer, instead of gorgeous and thrilling (which it also is). One of the warmest, most joyful and hopeful love songs ever recorded (“Ballerina”) sits suggestively close to the end of the record.

Few pieces of rock-and-roll art are as rooted in what feels like such a specific set of circumstances. Most everyone who knows this record senses that the singer is telling a story, a cryptic story that develops from song to song (though not sequentially—it goes sideways, backward, and leapfrogs). A story in which you feel sure the man who is singing the songs played a real part. It’s a story whose theme is grief so irreconcilable with life that it pushes the narrator through the membrane of vision.

Like Dante, the narrator of Astral Weeks glimpses a teenaged girl on a public street, finds his world shattered, but cannot speak to her. As in Dante’s poetry, the girl (maybe) dies. Like Dante, the lover in Astral Weeks follows the spirit of this girl through a kind of purgatorial dreamworld. In Western occultism, the astral plane is where we are when we dream. Meaning shifts on Astral Weeks in the characteristic way of dreams. The exact nature of the tragedy in the story changes. “Slim Slow Slider,” the grim coda, seems to say quite plainly that it’s death: “I know you’re dying babe, and I know you know it too.” But is it so plain? Is it literal death, from disease, violence, accident? Is it addiction, or some other kind of spiritual or metaphorical death? Is it that she is entering into some hopeless tunnel of life that he can already see the end of?

Or maybe the bad thing that’s happened is something we wouldn’t recognize from the outside. Maybe even, if we were a friend of the protagonist, we wouldn’t know that this Irish doom was gathering inside him. Maybe the tragedy of Astral Weeks is as ordinary as romantic heartbreak. It’s a pop record, after all, and in the rather narrow emotional vocabulary of pop music, romantic heartbreak serves as a metaphor for almost every kind of calamity. Is that long black train that took the blues singer’s baby away an actual funeral coach, or does it just feel that way to the young man by the side of the tracks?

In “Cyprus Avenue” one of the places on Astral Weeks where a far-gone state of anguish is most vividly evoked, the situation seems to be that the lover is sitting in a car watching a girl walk home from school. Yes, this has dark connotations, and we’ll talk about those in a moment, but the point here is that what’s being described is not something that we would ordinarily think rises to the level of bereavement. But maybe Van Morrison in his obsession didn’t even know that these songs would make listeners imagine the worst kinds of loss, maybe he surprised himself by how deep his obsession, maybe even a transitory obsession, seemed to cut. Dreams often surprise us with the significance they seem to grant to small things.

If the story were set in the Middle Ages, all this would not be so mysterious. We might assume with some good reason that we’re talking about courtly love, like Dante’s for Beatrice. Dante Alighieri met his angel when she was eight years old, and then once more in the streets of Florence when she was seventeen, and that was it. “Dante frequented parts of Florence where he thought he might catch even a glimpse of her” we are told, just like the Astral Weeks Lover on Cyprus Avenue.

Like Dante, this Lover is not able to speak to the girl. “My tongue gets tied every time I try to speak.” Maybe we can remember awful moments when ordinary powers like speech suddenly felt like some complicated skill. But sensations like this are more familiar from dreams. The first words on the album announce that the Lover is entering the world of dreams, the astral world: “If I venture in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream.” This is the mode he remains in until the end of the record. The dreaming body rises out of the physical body and is caught like smoke in the slipstream. There is a gentle but irresistible sensation of forward movement through the air, as in a dream of flying.

The astral plane is also the location of ghosts. Some listeners think that the opening song, the title song, is about the beginning of a new love; the Lover’s questions—“Would you find me? Would you kiss my eyes?”—are questions asked of a new lover, about the extent of her love. But I’m sure he is talking to a ghost. His love made him whole, so now half of him is gone wherever his beloved has gone—the world of dreams, memory, the land of the dead. Now he’s a stranger in this world, he says, using the language of old gospel songs, marked and set apart by his loss.

There’s guilt too—the ghost points an accusing finger at him. Maybe there was betrayal: he remembers her “whispering in the hall.” A child appears, a boy, her child? Their child? The boy too is accusing him: “Pointin’ the finger at me . . .”

The Lover longs for the end, for rest. Will she come to him then, be there to give him rest?

Would you find me?

Would you kiss-a my eyes?

Lay me down

In silence easy

To be born again

Later in the night, the slipstream washes the Lover up on the doorstep of Madame George’s flat on Cyprus Avenue. (Again as always in talking about this record, this is just one option—my option—for how the story could work.) Madame George is an aging, maybe dying, drag queen who keeps a salon full of boys—Madame George provides the liquor, the drugs, the place, the music. It is a place where everything is slowed almost to a halt. Somewhere a harpsichord plays a halting, woozy dance. It is a place where everything is done according to an antique formula of manners. The air is blue with hash smoke, tobacco, Shalimar eau de parfum. There might be many tawdry things going on here, but there is something in addition—there is no time here.

The boys amuse themselves playing games. They might be taking advantage of Madame George; they might joke about her behind her back. The police hassle her. People get up to leave, and she begs them to stay. The Lover is perhaps there to consult her, the way you would a fortune-teller or a card reader. Maybe he was once one of the boys. Maybe she has been a sort of mentor to him. The stumbling harpsichord and George’s faux aristocratic title are pretensions to elegance, costume jewelry, and yet they hint at a secret hidden in this scene. The beauty here is not a tarnished gleam of decadence or the thrill of transgression. There is a huge tenderness, a huge sad tenderness, a love that is also regret, the weight of which presses on each moment in Madame George’s place and causes the time to slow.

When you fall into a trance

Sitting on the sofa playing games of chance

With your folded arms and history books you glance

Into the eyes of Madame George

“And you know you gotta go. . . .” The Lover has a train to catch. The slipstream, eddying outside Madame George’s door, is tugging at him again. Time is returning, the world where the beloved is dead, outside in the “rain, hail, sleet and snow.” Madame George is going away, or the singer’s going away, or both. The little timeless world she has created is passing. For the moment of this visit, she somehow stands in for the loss of love as he sits across from her and looks into her eyes, she and her dying world are his loss, and for this moment she is the tragedy. And then in this dying glamour he’s given a glimpse of “the love that loves to love,” love in its eternal circulation—love that wants nothing but to love, the secret hidden in Madame George’s world that is, in the end, what this record is about. Love that might exist outside of time, outside of time-bound, death-bound people like Madame George and her boys, and the girl.

There is a freedom in catastrophe. When everything that you thought most essential is snatched away and you are hanging out there unsupported, you are a kind of free agent. That’s when you can get caught in the slipstream. The Lover in Astral Weeks has been forcibly ejected from ordinary consciousness into the state that the Eastern Orthodox call apatheia, where feelings and emotions, though they take place, can be experienced from a still center that is independent of them. This is what enables the lover to drift freely and not become snagged. Though feelings and emotions are evoked, sometimes wrenchingly, there is also somewhere inside or behind the performance the sense of an unmoved observer, a chronicler of the trip. For all the anguish on this record, it is very still. This is what makes Astral Weeks more than simply confessional and makes the experience of it more than just emotional identification. In fact it is a kind of rite of passage, a version of the oldest story there is—there and back again, the journey to the land of the dead and the return to tell the tale. Like Leopold Bloom’s voyage through Dublin in Ulysses, there is the sense that this is somehow a predetermined procession through the astral Belfast with certain necessary stops to make—seeing these varied scenes in the knowledge that all has fallen, that all this is happening in the gap between the lightning flash and the thunder.

C. S. Lewis, who was also a child in Belfast, talked about how he learned “those great contrasts which have bitten deeply into my mind—Niflheim and Asgard, Britain and Logres . . . air and aether, the low world and the high”² from the topography of the city. For Van Morrison, the great contrast was between Hyndford Street on which his family lived and Cyprus Avenue, another street in Belfast: “It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.”³

For Morrison the great contrast doesn’t seem to have been felt as an economic or class difference. He didn’t resent or envy the people who lived on Cyprus Avenue. It was perhaps that there was some grace in the physical attributes of the place, the houses with space between them, gratuitously decorated. And trees—big, mature, leafy, shady trees stretching along the avenue. He calls it “the avenue of trees,” like some Celtic epithet—the Island of Apples, the Avenue of Trees. It was a glimpse of a world that was not entirely utilitarian, that was not just the bare elements of life, but that included qualities that were “no earthly good” like grace and pleasure. Anyway, it was a place he liked to go, as he says, where he could think.

In the song “Cyprus Avenue” the forward floating of his nighttime journey stops. The drifting spirit gets snagged, “caught,” as he says, on this street. Why? Because he’s obsessed. In some way he’s revisiting the scene of his original catastrophe. His astral body is stuck back in his physical body, confined in his car; he can no longer move along the slipstream, and he’s paralyzed, tongue-tied and shaking. It’s an autumn day, and he is watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school. Somehow this is the heart of the story.

Fig. 9.1. Cyprus Avenue, Belfast, Ireland (photo by Agadant)

When a person says, as the Lover does toward the very end of “Cyprus Avenue,” “Nobody stop me from loving you baby,” it means that something has in fact stopped him. Something irrevocable is between him and her—death, distance, the law, a social taboo? There are, of course, sinister implications to a man in a car watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school. The police might be called. He might face the same kind of social ignominy as Madame George. But whoever it is in the car, should we assume that he is supposed to be much older than the girl? That doesn’t seem to necessarily follow. This is dream or memory, or both. The Lover might be remembering himself as a boy. And do the man (boy?) in the car and the girl on the street even exist in the same time?

His physical body may be paralyzed but his astral body, his imagination, is lurching between worlds. Only part of Cyprus Avenue exists in this world. The astral, dream half of it is the Avenue of Trees. On Cyprus Avenue the girl is walking home from school, but on the Avenue of Trees she’s part of an old ballad, returning from the fair in a coach with six white horses. The six white horses are an image out of fairy tale, but they also lead down a darker path of suggestion—six white horses traditionally pull the funeral coach.

Wherever she is, she is beyond his reach. Whatever she is, she is the thing most full of promise, the fairest thing he’s ever known. “In the wind and the rain darling” she comes walking down and then sun shines through the trees and the autumn leaves fall one by one and she walks on. “The little girl rhymes something on her way home from school.” A tremendous secret in a schoolyard rhyme. How he wants to hear it.

In the song “Sweet Thing” he steps out of the dark for a moment, and this is crucial to the emotional rhythm of the record. It doesn’t last long, and it’s terribly poignant and suspenseful, because all the while you’re wondering how long he’ll be able to escape from his grief, and what will happen when the reverie shatters. It’s still part of a dream, still dreamlike, but it’s the reverse side of the doom that moves him through the night. It’s the hope of a person who’s past hope. It reminds you of the fact that Van Morrison is a great poet of happiness; he can project a happiness that is as deep as sorrow. The next couple of albums he makes after Astral Weeks are the sound of a man breathing a sigh of relief, a man who against hope walked out of the valley of the shadow. The poetry of happiness is hard: it’s easy to fall into superficiality. To portray happiness effectively, you have to suggest the depth of the desire for happiness when you didn’t have it. The reality of all the unhappy time has to be in it. Forever after Astral Weeks, Morrison’s music, even when it has veered near the trite, is that of a man who knows he almost didn’t make it. Check “And It Stoned Me,” the first song of Moondance, the album that followed Astral Weeks. He’s born again (as he wishes for on Astral Weeks) as a boy, washed in lustral waters—by the rain, by a fall into a creek, by an old man with a cistern of cold water.

Oh the water

Let it run all over me.

In later years he would put too much pressure on this happiness, he would try to make it a technique or a philosophy, and it would sometimes seem silly. But in that first music after Astral Weeks you could still feel the price of his happiness and that made his joy and gratitude vivid.

The sequencing of Astral Weeks lets us know that “Sweet Thing” isn’t the happy ending. The Lover is still in his night wandering. It’s a dream inside a dream, a grieving man dreaming of reunion with his beloved. But it brims with delight. The soft insistence of the brush on the snare is like a surge of feeling he can’t quite allow but can’t resist. His sexual power is restored: “I shall drive my chariot down your streets a’cryin’ / ‘Hey, it’s me I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.’” There are “gardens all misty wet with rain,” what Camille Paglia would call a “bower image” of feminine regenerative power and mercy.⁴ It is powered by the desperate hunger for strength and life that the severely depressed and the grieving know. There is a frantic pushing away of the habits of thought that brought him into his crisis: “I will never grow so old again . . . / I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines.” It’s a picture of the satisfaction of a lifetime’s wanting: as the Irish say, the heart’s desire.

Morrison has said that Astral Weeks was “channeled,” and his ecstatic, mediumistic performance style, eccentric even by the flamboyant standards of the era, were of a piece with that. Over and over he seemed to enact a deep struggle to retrieve the most profound layer of meaning in the songs; a Van Morrison performance was always a product of that struggle. In his rapture he would sometimes become incoherent, he would stutter, he would obsessively repeat words or phrases, or else fall into uncomfortably long silences. There was a suggestion of the kind of stakes that lie behind gospel performances, the heavy responsibility for bringing down the spirit. Over the years from time to time it has seemed to be too much for him. It’s addled him. It’s as if there’s some element Morrison lacked that helped balance the great masters of soul and gospel music. Maybe it was that, in the spiritual communities they were reared in, the gospel singers knew that at some point they could set down the weight and someone else would be there to pick it up. It didn’t depend on them alone.

There are some artistic accounts of suffering that you only go back to infrequently because they are so hard to experience. Astral Weeks isn’t like that; it’s joyful to go back to it, though in a solemn way. The Greeks said we love tragedy because it offers catharsis—we experience vicarious pain and to some degree it is carried away. The slipstream that flows through Astral Weeks also carries pain away. It isn’t just that Van Morrison communicates the details of his own shipwreck with special vividness, although he does. But it’s as if he’s gone beyond the strictly personal dimensions of the disaster. The songs vividly evoke the individual experience of pain, but at the same time they go deeper than the surface turbulence to a level that all suffering humans have in common. We are supported, nourished by the suffering we have in common with the Lover of Astral Weeks rather than torn by it. This, you think after you live with it for a long time, may be part of what holiness means. Listening to it, you want to lift up your hands so as not to disturb the thing taking shape in front of you.

Around 1968 the whole countercultural world was starting to feel a little like Madame George’s flat. Time was seeping in again through the cracks. Astral Weeks marks the furthest reach of the sixties explosion of vision before deceleration began to set in. It was starting to turn colder, and the little Irishman had left a window open.