Hoping with Paul Simon that the Gate Won’t Be Closed

They crowded the gate, anxious for entry. It was a heavenly late afternoon, the sky blue, the sun radiant, you could see all the way to eternity. Most in the crowd were old, hungry for salvation, gnawing on their memories. It was Peter’s day off, but a man with a gun stood at the entrance. Paul was somewhere within, working on his lines, saying his prayers, hoping to sound the right note when the madding crowd rushed in with their wagons full of food and drink.

“Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast. “I asked my wife [Hadley] and she said, ‘I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.’“ Ernest lay awake trying to think it out but says he was too stupid. Nada came.

Outside the gate, hunger seemed to permeate the air, a hunger that could never be satisfied by what lay in the wagons. It was memory, of course, but memory filled with nostalgia for a future, some song of hope for homeless souls seeking forgiveness for sins that lay vague in their minds. To lay them open was their only hope. But many came looking for a savior whose refusal to pander to them wouldn’t please them.

*

“I Am Waiting” – The last stanza of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem:

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

*

When Paul Simon stepped from the shadows and began to sing the opening lines of “Graceland” – “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National Guitar” – the satiated massive crowd who had made it through Tanglewood’s gates for his June 27, 2026 concert, “A Quiet Celebration,” woke with a roar. It seemed to me that they had slept through the first part of his concert, the 33 minute short song cycle, “Seven Psalms,” as if its beautiful meditative depths on old age, forgiveness, death, belief, and unbelief were a little too much for their stomachs. Hearing him sing “Yesterday’s boy is gone / Driving through darkness / Searching for your forgiveness / Is sorrow a beautiful song?” seemed to have been too haunting for them with its Hawthornean echoes. A Tanglewood tale for ten thousand or more people who weren’t listening in their bored silence or incomprehension, as their concluding meagre applause showed.

I had low expectations for the concert, having heard that Paul’s voice was greatly diminished and it might be hard to hear him. I knew he had suffered nearly total hearing loss in one of his ears and I wondered what its effects might be on his performance. I am happy to say that he was easy to hear and performed wonderfully. Being nearly eighty-five years old, his voice has naturally changed, but he still possesses the vibrancy and passion of his youth. His voice was strong and clear throughout. Added to this is his literate and philosophical mind, deepened by a long life in the sun of public fame and the shadows of a private “homeless soul” pondering “the code of forgiveness.” In one of his Seven Psalms, he enigmatically sings, “The pity is / The damage that’s done / Leaves so little time / For amends.”

The seeds for these Seven Psalms – which were the first part of the show – were planted in Simon’s brain in a compelling dream he had seven years ago. A voice told him he was working on a piece called Seven Psalms, which he proceeded to do. An album by that name was released over three years ago. The music and lyrics are wedded beautifully, as was evident at Tanglewood, which makes the audience’s reaction even stranger. I had thought that the large crowd waiting at the gate to open was there to go deep into Paul’s spiritual revelations, but they wanted none of it, appearing to be perplexed by what they were hearing. It seems retrospectively prophetic that when the gates did open and people rushed in, they were stopped again by recently instituted security screening and metal detectors, as if such measures foretold the real hunger that brought so many there – a hunger for the security of nostalgia and the old songs only.

This was further borne out when in the second half of the show Simon played some songs that he wrote in the past but were unfamiliar to the audience. They were received with muted applause from a disgruntled audience that craved his big hits. I would agree that Paul probably played two too many of the somewhat obscure songs, but this may have been because his voice is not up to reprising some of his old hits. Perhaps doing so also bores him, although I do wish he had sung “America,” with its exquisitely ironic lyrics such as “Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. / I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

“America” was released on April 3, 1968, the day before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and two months before Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. The Tet Offensive has just occurred in Vietnam and President Johnson would soon massively escalate the war with approximately 550,000 U.S. troops. It wasn’t just Paul who felt lost that terrible year; the country was lost, never to be found, look as far and wide as you want. Hop on a bus, take the car, get out on the streets. We’re empty and aching, and if we don’t know why, we’re sleeping with Kathy.

When a creative artist offers something new, it is often greeted with rejection. For the true artist always writes toward death, his own and others’, and death, like life and all our tomorrows, is always the unknown. In a culture that once imagined itself within a church but where celebrities are now revered as surrogate gods inside their fans’ domestic mental chapels, a musical genius like Paul Simon, one of the greatest songwriters of our times, deserves accolades for offering fresh bread to try to satisfy a hunger that only craves old treats.

*

“There is but one freedom,” Albert Camus wrote in his notebook, “to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved – and not the reverse.”

*

Paul Simon’s oeuvre is political only in the most oblique ways. In one of the lesser known older songs he sang, “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” there is a reference to JFK’s and John Lennon’s deaths, and at the song’s conclusion a photo of the three Johnnies appears on the video screen. What, besides sadness, he thinks about the deaths of Kennedy and Lennon is anyone’s guess. Obviously they are two assassinations that have generated intense controversy and debate. But explicitness about such matters is not Simon’s style; there is a free-floating surrealistic tone to his music – say, “The Boy in the Bubble” – that leaves the listener wondering what he really thinks; images fly by with the beats and you tap your foot or dance, ignorant of who is playing the fiddle, God or the devil. But it is brilliant, nonetheless. With the help of his wife Edie Brickell’s beautiful voice and an extraordinary band, Paul’s lyrics took flight at Tanglewood.

*

Of course the audience came to hear Simon’s most iconic song, “The Sounds of Silence.” After the usual bit of teasing that the show had ended, he came back out to sing it to loud applause. First recorded on March 10, 1964, less than four months after President Kennedy’s assassination, one can’t help thinking there is a connection. But I doubt that the audience made such a connection, nor did they think it pertained to them, just as “The Seven Psalms” flew past them. When Paul sang the following stanza, their applause became a massive roar:

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
In tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of silence

As they gathered up their empty picnic baskets, the crowd’s physical hunger seemed satiated. And as they turned to go, the flashing of their cell phone screens were like fireflies in the gathering gloom. Their only warning being for a hard rain coming. America is hard to find.

*

“For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out from one cage into another.”

– Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press) edwarcurtin.com