Review

Culture

Music

23 September 2023

6 min read

Imagining our heart’s fragile condition

The songs and sketches of Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy invites us to seek out sacred answers. Belle Tindall reviews their Sevens Psalms collaboration.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A illustration of a boy sitting in a field with his back to us, above him is a heart shaped cloud.

Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms – Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy.

No.9 Cork Street Gallery

Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy are the duo we didn’t know we were missing. Well, their collaboration means that we need miss them no longer. In their joint exhibition in Mayfair, Charlie’s artwork is a visual tool with which to ponder Paul Simon’s latest body of work.

Simon and Mackesy

I once read that if you’re looking for the answer to the meaning of life in a pop song, look to Paul Simon. I think whoever wrote that is right. His best-known songs are now decades old, but it doesn’t seem to matter - they’re timeless. And maybe that’s why; he has always written of permanent and universal things.

For example - You may think that he’s crafted an ambiguous tale about two mischievous childhood friends who used to wreak havoc 'down by the schoolyard’, but what he’s actually offered us is a song that gives language to the unexpected and unknown aspects of life. The times that feel like a pathless expanse, the moments that knock us off course, the occasions where we are forced to admit that ‘we don’t know where we’re goin’, but we’re on our way… ’.

And what may, at first glance, appear to be a direct message to an iconic character in The Graduate (Mrs Robinson) or a New York Yankees player (Joe DiMaggio), is actually a song that mourns a loss on behalf of us all. It laments the disappearing of ‘grace, dignity, privacy and fidelity’ in public life – the attributes that ‘our nation turns its lonely eyes to…’

You get the sense that Paul Simon tells the truth, even when he’s spinning a tale.

And then, every now and again, he strips away the fictitious and releases the hymn-like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or the haunting ‘Sound of Silence’, reminding us that he is concerned with the deepest and truest aspects of existence. His latest body of work, Seven Psalms, is one such offering. But before delving into it, there’s Charlie Mackesy to consider.

Mackesy is an artist who diagnoses our wounds and heals them all at once. As discussed at length in a previous article about his immense impact, his work offers an antidote to our loud and crowded lives. His modern fable - The Boy, the Mole, The Fox, and the Horse - allows us to escape into a fictitious world that feels so much kinder than our own, while also acting as a tool for deep introspection. Charlie puts language and image to our heart’s beautiful yet fragile condition.

And this is undoubtedly why his work has garnered such incredible success. His film is Oscar-winning, his book is best-selling, and his paintings are a fixture of this cultural moment. Charlie’s thoughts adorn therapy waiting rooms, his words are taught in school classrooms, and his images are simply everywhere. It’s hard to think of someone to whom the world is more openly and obviously grateful.

And there we have it: the duo that dreams are made of (it feels appropriate to give Art Garfunkel an honourable mention at this point - what is it with Paul Simon and iconic twosomes?). Now, without further ado, onto their recent collaboration.

Seven Psalms

Seven Psalms is a thirty-three-minute-long body of work. I reference the length, as opposed to the number of tracks, because Simon has released it as one continuous suite of songs; un-skippable and un-shuffle-able. The album makes the most sense as a whole, as a continuation, as a journey. The listener is not in control of how it is listened to, rather, they are tasked with letting it wash over them. They must surrender to Simon’s stream of thought and follow his ponderings to their end. It’s interesting how much un-learning that takes.

I’m no music critic, so I will leave the delineation of the technical details and musical mastery to Rolling Stone, and instead focus my attention on the profoundly spiritual dimensions of this body of work.

And with such, it is hard to know where to begin. There is not one song, in fact, there is not one line, that is not dripping with theological thought. I’m not sure how to sum it up, except to re-iterate Paul’s own understanding of what he has crafted – he has written seven Psalms.

The first song in the interlinked line-up is ‘The Lord’. The chorus of which goes like this:

The Lord is my engineer

The Lord is the earth I ride on

The Lord is the face in the atmosphere

The path that I slip and slide on

These four lines, a re-working of which re-appear as interludes throughout the album, are not pondering the existence of God (which, as Francis Spufford often says, ‘is surely his most boring characteristic’), but the nature of God. This album assumes God’s existence, in fact, it completely hinges upon it. Therefore, it is questions such as - How does he work? How is he present? How do we experience him? How can we perceive him? – that are held within these lyrics.

It seems to me that those are also the questions that Charlie is pondering in the drawings that adorn the walls of Frieze Gallery. Each one is unmistakably a ‘Mackesy’ piece, he is easily identifiable, it is as if he leaves a piece of himself in every frame. What I found particularly interesting about this collection of work, all of which were created in response to him listening to Seven Psalms, is his use of clouds. They are not an uncommon feature in Charlie’s work, but in this context, they caught my attention afresh.

Both the songs and the accompanying sketches create an atmosphere that invites us to seek out sacred answers, to take the time (thirty-three minutes to be precise) to ponder truth and ask the most vulnerable of questions. We see strikingly simple silhouettes of people doing just that in Mackesy’s work, and they’re almost always doing so underneath an imposing canopy of clouds. Clouds that look dark and heavy, clouds that look so light they’re touchable, clouds that are formed in the shape of a heart, even. They vary, but they’re almost always there. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Charlie thinks that we ponder such things alone – his drawings make it seem as though whoever is ‘above’ stoops down to engage in our pondering. If there is a God, he listens in. If Heaven exists, it comes close.

And that, just from his use of clouds. I could write a whole other piece on his use of ‘posture’, and then another on colour. But perhaps you should just go and see for yourself.

Seven Psalms asks the permanent questions, the ones that transcend time, space, and matter. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is time-stamped for this moment. One of the most striking lines declares that ‘the Covid virus is the Lord’, as is ‘a meal for the poorest of the poor’, ‘an open door to the stranger’ and ‘the ocean rising’. The questions that Paul Simon asks of God directly relate to the questions he then asks about us and this earth we call our home – social justice, ecology, community – his perspectives on such things all seem flow from who the ‘Lord is’. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the genius is that we’ll never know.

Again, Charlie’s sketches of bustling refugees all walking in the same direction or a mother hitchhiking with her child on what looks to be a bitterly wintry night, lead us to sit with the very same thoughts.

Truthfully, I am all too aware of how inadequate this, or any, review of this collaboration is doomed to be. Paul Simon knew this album transcended words, that’s why he called upon the genius of Charlie Mackesy. So, do yourselves the most profound of favours and spend thirty-three minutes in their company. I say thirty-three minutes, be warned, the impact of their work will reside with you for far longer.

‘Seven Psalms: Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy and Inspired by the Words and Music of Paul Simon’ is a free public exhibition that is running Tuesday-Saturday until the 27th of September 2023, at Frieze Gallery, No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London.

Review

America

Culture

Film & TV

19 April 2024

5 min read

Cutting America to the bone

Civil War warns against worshipping civic and political violence.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

An explosion occurs at the Lincoln Memorail

Civil War's finale in Washington DC.

A24.

The president of the United States is dead. The film Civil War culminates with soldiers of the Western Forces (a fictional secessionist group composed of California and Texas) posing for pictures with a presidential corpse just minutes after executing him. It’s a chilling climax, with optics reminiscent of American soldiers capturing deposed president of Iraq Saddam Hussein in 2003. The film ends with a warning. No democratic country, no matter the perceived strength of its institutions, is immune from tyranny, civil violence, and the bloody process of state failure. Collapse follows when states lose the capacity to provide solutions to the linchpin challenges negatively affecting their citizens.

A strength of Civil War is the way it articulates a universal political message without defiling itself with the toxic hyper-partisanship asphyxiating real-world American society.

It features a number of loyalist and secessionist geopolitical groups each motivated by a distinctive combination of social, economic, and political interests and goals. These groups include the Western Forces, Florida Alliance, New People’s Army, and Loyalist States.

The film’s storyline prioritises a violently unfolding near future civil war in a United States whose president bucked constitutional tradition by remaining in office for a third term. The president, whose character is modelled after Donald Trump, is the villain of the film, despite being supported by over half of the 50 American states. The Western Forces function as the film's hero group. Unlike the mercilessly murderous and viciously xenophobic soldiers affiliated with the Loyalist States, the soldiers of the Western Forces treat an eclectic team of journalists and war photographers (the film’s main protagonists) with kindness and respect, allowing them to accompany them during the final stages of their assault on the White House and entrance into the belly of the beast, the Oval Office.

The film includes shocking scenes that would make the most patriotic Americans shudder. Shortly after it begins, a suicide bomber associated with the Loyalist States, proudly carrying a large American flag, sprints into the centre of a group of vulnerable people, pleading with agents charged with guarding a water tanker, and detonates a bomb. Dozens of people including children are killed, many of whom were non-White Americans. This scene's power is that it bring home the threats Americans associate with foreign lands. Suddenly the menaces Americans instinctively link with states like Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela exist in cities like Charlottesville, New York, and Washington DC. America is no longer safe, and the threats have come from within instead of from abroad.

The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully.

As an American watching this film from a cozy cinema in Oxford, I thought about how the violence, polarisation, and civic rage depicted in the film already exists in many forms in the country I love from a distance. Shootings, many of them mass in nature, happen every day in an America whose citizens are comfortable with violence but afraid of each other. The United States suffers from an embarrassingly high association with mass shootings, far more than whichever county manages to claim an ignominious second place. Whilst it is unlikely tanks and attack helicopters will surround the White House anytime soon, the casual spirit of violence that has overtaken American society already fosters a level of violence far above the threshold any twenty first century democratic state should tolerate.

I watched this film as a proud American and as a committed Christian, a faith I share with many of my fellow American citizens. My Bible, and theirs, does say we are “citizens of heaven” destined to enjoy an eternal posterity in a New Creation marked by perfect peace and prosperity. However, until Christ returns, and God remakes the cosmos, Christians do have a vital role to play in their everyday civic communities. Whilst Civil War offers a grim view of America’s immediate political future, that message of Christ contains the content needed to cure the gravest challenges bedevilling the United States. I remain optimistic.

Not all Americans identify as Christians or even with organised religion; nevertheless, twentieth century history confirms that states that altogether ignore God will soon wither into an ecosystemic abyss of state-sponsored moral relativism that endorses the use of violence for an increasing, arbitrary range of unsuitable, injudicious, and illegitimate purposes. The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully. Humans need a moral system to provide them (as well as their societies at large) with at least a perceived sense of moral structure. Christ’s message articulates a concept of civic love that challenges the existing worship of civic and political violence. Christ argues that violence in moments of disagreement or dismay is never the appropriate option; the mark of genuine Christian devotion is revealed in the avoidance of violent action even when the use of violence would not categorically be condemned by observers.

Civil War explains how multiple, competing Americas exist. These Americas have different cultures, economic capacities, and sociopolitical ideologies. It teaches that America’s main problem is Americans only love other Americans like them. A number of enclaves exist across American society. Cut off from each other, the development of these enclaves has led to the emergence of micro-Americas so distinctive from each other that some of them no longer view formal geopolitical ties with other micro-Americas as in their best interest.

The same enclavisation portrayed in Civil War exists in the nonfictional, real-life America. However, unlike in the America depicted in the film, the real-life America still has time to solve its sociopolitical troubles and stop the American state from collapsing. I recommend Civil War to anyone interested in being entertained and warned by what a dystopian, worst-case-scenario of near-future American political activity might actually look like.