When the Music’s Over
The affinity between poetry and painting, and the literary and visual arts is a long-standing and natural one. The line between the two can be hard to define. The Roman poet Horace famously remarked that “A picture is a poem without words”. What then is a picture put to words, or words rendered visually on a sheet of canvas? And then again, what if it is accompanied by sound. It then becomes a story. This is a short story – a story painted with words and sound.
Over 50 years ago Jim Morrison and the Doors released their second album, Strange Days. It contained an epic track “When the Music’s Over”. Like the album, it is strange and uncomfortable. Music is the fire of life. When it stops, so does life. Ever the poet, Jim Morrison asks the universe for help, crying out in desperation: “Persian Night! See the Light! Save Us! Jesus! Save Us!” This is not a religious incantation. It’s a sad lament. A cry of desperation.
Morrison entreats: “what have they done to the Earth?” What have we done to the planet? Both shaman and soothsayer, he exhorts those, bothering to listen, to reflect on the earth and its music – conveyed as a broad universal truth – the elemental sounds and music of nature, made by the earth and everything that lives on it. This is an infinite and universal music, which humans are systematically destroying. If we succeed, which looks increasing likely, then “the music’s over” and the lights will in fact go out.
I won’t be here when that happens, but our children and their children will be. Is it already too late? I hope not. In 1962, just four years before Jim Morrison conceived that the music may soon be over, John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spoke at the Swedish Academy on receiving his award. Like Morrison, his words are eerily prescient and even more poignant half a century later:
The door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice. We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken God-like power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
We have the ultimate power – the power of knowledge and choice. We can tame the beast that is destroying the planet. It lies within each one of us – you and I, individually and together. There will be no beauty and life if humanity walks morbidly to its doom; and the lights go out.
This is a call to action.
You and I – and that means each and every one of us – are not just our greatest hope – we are our only hope!
