Echo Beyond.
“I do remember
When I was a kid and realized that life ends and is just over
That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do anything
And then what? I guess just forgotten
I said to my mom that I hoped to do something important with my life
Not be famous, but just remembered a little more
To echo beyond my actual end
My mom laughed at this kid trying to wriggle his way out of mortality
Of the inescapable final feral scream
But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means
Unsatisfied, ambitious and squirming” — Mount Eerie, Distortion
‘Distortion’ is the second song on the EP Now Only by Mount Eerie.
Written as a follow up to his harrowing album A Crow Looked at me (Seriously, listen to ‘Real Death’ and try not to cry.) The songs are written by Phil Elverum in response to the tragic death of his wife at the age of 35.
‘Distortion’ is a soft sleepy biography, with Elverum drifting in and out of stories, moments, and memories. Some are moments of deep significance, the first time he understood death or saw a dead body. Whilst others are grasps at the little moments that comprise our days, seemingly insignificant at the time, yet ones that linger on in memory.
Two moments in the song grabbed me.
1. A desire to be ‘Great’
2. The Falsehood of ‘Greatness’
As a kid facing his own mortality, he says to his mum “I hope to do something important with my life. Not be famous, but just remembered a little more. To echo beyond my actual end.”
That line struck me, ‘To echo beyond my actual end’. The impermanent trying to grasp at permanence. I’ve felt that that desire for something more, to be something more, part of something bigger. We’ve all felt that haven’t we? We’ve all had that moment on a street corner, on a bus, looking at the sky. Where we have wondered what does it all mean? Why are we here? How do we live? Does it even matter?
I remember asking my own mum about death after she explained that everyone dies. I was unable to fully grasp it and responded with “even me? even you?”. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even you, even me’.
I wrestled with this longing for much of my life since then, trying and failing to grasp hold of meaning and permanence in the ominous face of death.
When I was 17, I encountered Jesus, and in his teaching and story, I found weight and substance that wasn’t undone by the cold inevitability of death. In Jesus, I found an anchor for my soul, a way of echoing far beyond my mortal life. In Jesus, I saw a path to greatness, not my own greatness or my own self-mythology. I saw the greatness of God, and the opportunity to work with him in what he is doing in the world. His life-affirming, life-changing, life-giving, death-defying, transformative and restorative work!
Faith allows us to “echo beyond our actual end” for the work we do for God, never ends. Whilst death undoes all that is done for ourselves, what is done for God lasts eternally.
The Second part that grabbed me was Elverum’s little musing on the author Jack Kerouac. On the Road is a classic novel, one that I love. I was given it as a backpacker and devoured it. It sits tattered and torn before me on the shelf. It was a huge moment for me reading it, but more than that it was a huge moment for the world. The book is the cornerstone of much of the modern’s world view of self and freedom. Would we have our modern notion of the road trip without it? I am not sure.
Pursuing blindly the ephemeral ‘it’
“We gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.'
'Where we going, man?'
'I don't know but we gotta go.” – J. Kerouac, On the Road.
Kerouac is an immense figure in both culture and literature, you could even go as far as to call him great!
And then we have a documentary, and his daughter and the picture changes hue.
“They interviewed his daughter,
Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history
She told about this deadbeat drinking, watching Three Stooges on TV
Not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child
Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology”
Here Kerouac is not great, he is not a giant. He is hollow and empty hiding behind his outward ‘greatness’.
We are drawn to outward greatness, we hold up heroes based on their outward actions, their achievements, their looks, our perceptions of them. Yet - as has been proven time and time again - that is a weak and disenchanting means of understanding greatness. Greatness, as taught by Jesus, is a matter of the heart, the quiet internal court within each individual. What is truly great is the everyday actions - no matter how seemingly insignificant - of faithful people done in faith, in hope and in love. That is greatness. This world might not acknowledge it, it might pass by without the slightest appreciation or recognition, but when the kingdom comes in all its fullness. It’ll be the great men and women who continued - despite it all - to live a faithful life, full of love and hope that will be called ‘great.
“Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” — 1 Corinthians 13:13
“The world and its desires are fading away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. ” — 1 John 2:17
“The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” — George Elliot , Middlemarch
“Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain” — 1 Corinthians 15:58
