{"id":5222,"date":"2016-11-26T12:38:22","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T17:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/?p=5222"},"modified":"2016-11-26T12:38:22","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T17:38:22","slug":"what-will-save-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2016\/11\/what-will-save-you.html","title":{"rendered":"What Will Save You"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"oldtimer\"<\/p>\n

The idea that our love can be\u00a0bad<\/em>\u00a0makes us uncomfortable.\u00a0Sure, we\u2019ll enjoy a\u00a0leering ode to \u201cbad romance\u201d or a woeful \u201caddiction to love,\u201d but these songs aren\u2019t bold confessions of love\u2019s ambiguity \u2014 they\u2019re justifications of our own inability to keep our pants on. Their basic theme is one of erotic determinism: \u201cI know you are bad for me\u201d\u00a0but I \u201cjust can\u2019t stop,\u201d I was \u201cborn this way,\u201d I \u201ccan\u2019t help myself,\u201d for this love has \u201ctaken control of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last thing we want to hear about love is that it is an insufficient emotion that, far from justifying our behaviors, requires a transformation<\/em>\u00a0to achieve all our hapless pop songs hope for \u2014 salvation, redemption, communion, purpose, and all the rest.<\/p>\n

Because we don\u2019t want to hear it, Kyle Morton\u2019s first solo album will probably have little commercial success.\u00a0His new album is called What Will Destroy You<\/em>. The penultimate song is titled \u201cWhat Will Save You.\u201d He tracks, quite unabashedly, a journey from a destructive love to a salvific love. The work, then, is a backwards take on a\u00a0pulp mystery \u2014 it starts with a destroyed man\u00a0and ends with a saved\u00a0one, and we, detectives all, look diligently, not for the poison, but the cure.<\/p>\n

The love that destroys is all too familiar. Kyle gives us it in several doses. It is the love that does not stay:<\/p>\n

Then the morning takes
\nThe love away
\nLeaving only ashtrays
\nand broken bottles<\/p>\n

It is a love that bears no fruit:<\/p>\n

The truth settled down like a euthanized pet
\nIt\u2019s over there\u2019s no need to repopulate<\/p>\n

It is a love that\u00a0can only ever actualize itself as a performance; a love that finds the beloved insufficient except insofar as she serves to make the lover appear as powerful and acceptable in the eyes of the world:<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m the last man standing
\nyou are woman\u2019s paragon
\nThe garden\u2019s ours now we\u2019re competitionless
\nBut suppose a third party\u2019s necessary
\nJust to get it on
\nThat the rituals of love demand an audience
\nI went I found some mannequins
\nSet \u2019em up lining the bedroom
\nThe safe words: eyes to God<\/p>\n

It is the love that accepts substitutes, repetitions, imitations and replacements:<\/p>\n

Now you are carving their names into your mattress
\nIn an imitation of some obscure actress
\nAnd I don\u2019t know why you keep me around
\nBut I\u2019m easy
\nTarget practice<\/p>\n

Right from the start, What Will Destroy You<\/em>\u00a0denies the basic premise of post-modernity \u2014 that love unequivocally justifies our lives.\u00a0Here,\u00a0love is not some secret garden kept unpolluted of humanity\u2019s evils: \u201cYou changed out of me \/\u00a0As one would change to a new pair of shoes \/\u00a0And I see the fashions changing with the seasons \/\u00a0And no, love is not immune.\u201d Small wonder, then, that Kyle sings:<\/p>\n

I never learned to trust a love song
\nIt was not because the words were trite
\nBut I felt the love itself was trite<\/p>\n

(What a\u00a0radical critique! Where, in what space, and to what audience are politically-sensitive, modern humans allowed to\u00a0call, not expression, but love itself<\/em> trite? Can you imagine saying it to a friend? \u201cThe problem, Jim, is not that your words are trite, or that you are failing to properly express the some pure love you have in your heart, but that your love itself is trite. It\u2019s grotesque. It\u2019s attracted to nothing lasting. It\u2019s beneath you and your beloved.\u201d It occurs to me now, as it occurs to me listening to Kyle\u2019s writing with Typhoon, that the indie-rock album may be the last place in which a genuine critique of self-experience is possible, in which we can genuinely question our own innermost heart and the purportedly innermost heart of our neighbors.)<\/p>\n

The turn to an erotic love that does not destroy, but saves, is hard to pinpoint. For Kyle,\u00a0good love appears as something like grace. It is not expected. It is not conceptualized. It does not come as an idea, but as a person<\/em> who loves Kyle well. <\/em>To understand this, the one who has the good fortune to be loved well need only ask: Could you have planned it? Did you know it would be her? The \u201cbreaking in\u201d of good love can be comic. The song \u201cWater Torture\u201d describes the advent of a love that bears fruit as the afterthought of an obliterated mind:<\/p>\n

Got that cataclysmic feeling
\nBabies crawling on the ceiling
\nAnd now I think
\nMaybe we should start a family<\/p>\n

Love is either freely given or it is not love, and if it is freely given then it cannot be expected \u2014 we\u00a0can only hope that it will break in upon our dim horizons. The person does not fit with what we know of love, but teaches us what we did not know, such that we can say: \u201cI thought I knew what love was until I met you.\u201d With this grace-like characteristic of good love in mind, it is no surprise that Kyle colors it as something divine. In \u201cMy Little Darlin\u2019 Knows My Nature,\u201d he sings:<\/p>\n

Who could blame you being cynical
\nYou\u2019re right the world it is a crypt
\nIt\u2019s pitiless and cold
\nAnd though I remain skeptical
\nThat you still love me
\nMay be the only miracle<\/p>\n

For those who have been following Kyle\u2019s poetry with Typhoon for a while now<\/a>, this album implies a further development of a basically Kierkegaardian adventure. Soren Kierkegaard paints life in a\u00a0triptych \u2014 there is the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious life. The aesthetic life is the life lived according to what pleases. In Typhoon\u2019s first album, Hunger and Thirst<\/em>, we get to hear Kyle bear-wrestling with the inadequacy of this life, which, however pleasant, is haunted by death: \u201cyou take every year as it comes \/\u00a0but when your life is over \/\u00a0all those years fold up like an accordion.\u201d The ethical life is characterized by the leap away from what one likes<\/em> to do towards what one ought<\/em> to do. It is characterized by the promise \u2014 the vow. White Lighter<\/em>, Typhoon\u2019s second is full of this radical commitment to the ethical, his answer to the problem of death is: \u201cI will be good though my body be broken,\u201d reminiscent of the last lines of Singrid Undset\u2019s epic trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter<\/em>:\u00a0<\/em>\u201cthe good you have done cannot be undone; though all the hills should crash in ruin, yet it would stand.\u201d White Lighter<\/em> ends in a longing for an ultimate vow in the face of death: \u201cI would never leave you broken-hearted \/ You\u2019ll never be alone nor made to feel discarded \/ As long as I\u2019m alive I\u2019ll finish what I started.\u201d The last lines of What Will Destroy You<\/em> take this desire and actualize it \u2014 \u201cI will be your witness if you\u2019ll be wife.\u201d Or rather, Kyle and his newly wedded actualized it \u2014 my warmest, most bubbling congratulations to them both.<\/p>\n

Is this a leap into the religious sphere? We are given a certain amount of leeway to assume that marriage, for Kyle, is more than a merely ethical commitment. \u201cMy Little Darlin'\u201d makes it clear: Marriage is a response to a warmth that challenges his skepticism. Love that is good pushes him to the edge of the ethical and has him consider the miraculous. In What Will Destroy You<\/em> it is love, and not merely \u201cbeing good,\u201d that provides a satisfactory answer to the problem of death. The album begins with Kyle \u201cinside a coffin.\u201d He pops out with the hope that \u201ceventually you\u2019ll be reborn.\u201d This hope is satisfied that hope in a life-affirming marriage\u00a0directly opposed to death: \u201cI used to want a fancy funeral \/ But now I\u2019m just a sucker for your love.\u201d As with most religiously-contorted indie-rock, the question the simpleton believer can\u2019t help but pose, swimming in the midst of hints and indications, is \u2014 \u201cbut do you really believe it? Can love bring you resurrection? If so, how?\u201d Kyle sang, in White Lighter<\/em>, a line that should be tattooed to the modern consciousness: \u201cYou are sleeping together but you will die alone.\u201d Does marriage overcome this tragedy? Or is it all destroyed in the end?<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I asked Kyle about the religious sphere. He said:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

I had a very secular upbringing (not atheist, but sort of this wishy-washy agnosticism \u2014 you know, \u201cspiritual not religious\u201d) where my only exposure to Christianity was what I saw on TV and an occasional born-again, evangelical-style church camping trip with schoolmates, which is to say, I was only exposed to a very reductionist, reactionary form of Christianity. \u00a0Years later\u2013while studying literature and philosophy in college and finding in my love-life the limits of modern romance\u2013I had this unsettling realization that the modern world, far from succeeding in the project of moving \u201cbeyond religion,\u201d had actually regressed to a twisted form of more primitive religions; idol worship, sacrifice, etc.<\/p>\n

About this time, I went with a friend to live for a month at an Benedictine monastery in Michigan, St. Gregory\u2019s Abbey. \u00a0It seemed at the time like a whim, but looking back I think my subconscious intellect was rightly conspiring against my old prejudices. There I met a community of some of the most intelligent and brave men I have ever met and was introduced to Soren K. This all had an enormous impact on my ideas about God, Eternity and my relation to both.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kyle\u2019s new album\u00a0mirrors in verse what he already described as formative part of his spiritual life: By transgressing the limits of modern love, he is forced into a strange contact with the religious sphere. What Will Destroy You<\/em>\u00a0pushes the limits of the ethical and describes\u00a0good, erotic love as a window into the divine. Whether there really is<\/em> a divine landscape outside of the window of human love\u00a0answer is not provided. But thank God, or simply thank Kyle, that someone is posing the question \u2014 critiquing a stale, stationary, and self-justified love\u00a0with a first-person experience of miraculous, or near-miraculous love that makes dead men and women \u201cwitnesses\u201d and \u201cwives.\u201d<\/div>\n