When we say, for example, completely outside scientific deliberation and far from all philosophical contemplation, “the weather is fine,” and then by “weather” we mean something actual and existing, and we mean with “fine” the actual condition, and we mean with the inconspicuous “is” the manner in which this being, the weather, thus and so exists. Hence we mean the being of the being that is called “weather.” The “is” does not thereby name a being, unlike “the weather” and “fine.” Conversely, “the weather” and “fine” name a being, unlike the “is.”
—Martin Heidegger (From the lecture, Basic Concepts, 1941)

I had a dream in which Martin Heidegger fronted a cover band that played only weather-related tunes (e.g., “I’m Only Happy When it Rains”). The band never got around to actually playing the weather songs, though, because Marty’s garrulous pre-song banter consumed all of their stage time. Marty’s stab at providing a hermeneutical basis to interpret the meaning of being led not only to his turning aporia, but his support of the Nazi regime, which allows for a different reading of his, “… the call to participate in the actual always stands under a different law; it does not each time guarantee a straightforward experience of what is.” If we can take anything from Heidegger, it’s his statement, “perhaps the ordinary must first of all be shaken, so that we receive a first sense of the superfluous.” With that, and to allow ourselves to be shaken by the superfluousness of giving credence to a Nazi, let us look to a philosopher of our age, a man of humanity and grace:

I summer where I winter at / and no one is allowed there.
—Bob Mould

The stage that heretofore has been without song due to its ontological indigestion over the “is,” is now set for a phenomenological exploration of phenomenal songs about (read: not about) the weather, just as Ulrike Meinhof would want. Thus, ten awesome weather-related songs:

1. “Sea Above, Sky Below” — Dirty Three

The specialty of this song is its ability to refloat intellectuals marooned on the rocks of perdition, and as such, it should be used — either as a searchlight to identify, or a beacon to signal — fellow travelers and wayfaring strangers. The Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon, said Of Travel:

It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation.

This song (as a diary of the type of voyage mentioned by Bacon) tears language away from its repressive system, inasmuch as there is zero actual language used in the song, and makes language, instead, an instrument of desire. Words, and more generally their signs, are liberated from the codes of utility or entertainment (as alluded to by the topsy-turviness of the title) in order to restore them as bearers of revelation. This song is a revelation, a voyage of discovery. What is the purpose of a voyage, after all? It is to seek the unforeseen. When Heraclitus wrote, “Whoever does not seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse,” I suspect he was hearing the prescient early bowings of the sirens sitting on the distant shores of this song.

Go out on thin ice, experience is the best teacher.

2. “Sailor” — Thalia Zedek

Keeping with the nautical voyage theme, as well as the portamento style of gypsy violin used in “Sea Above, Sky Below,” Thalia Zedek adds some sinking touches that are sonically analogous to drinking in the view from the upper deck of the Titanic: a vista of free, open space in all directions… while water pools at your feet. The transitional changes between verse and chorus in the song have dynamics similar to that of the waves lapping against this ship, let’s call it the S.S. Downer. A plash and a crash and then a moment of reprieve, only to be pooled again in the water’s wishes; rhythmically the song affects a maritime waltz. Thalia Zedek doesn’t get enough recognition for her unique lyrics (her open-ended, half consonance/half concordance guitar style deserves more than a few lines, too), so let’s just print them here in their entirety. Go ahead… drink them in:

Do not weep for the sailor who won’t
Prostrate before a storm
That he knew had foretold
There was a red sky in the morning

A sailor’s warning
He watched it forming

A thousand ships we have set sail
A thousand ships to sink
A thousand bottles overboard
But the ocean’s thirst won’t shrink

Still far from the brink
What did they think?

Don’t weep for the drinking man just trying
To find the note
In the Bottle that gets blown away each time
He starts the toast
That orange light no lifeboat, no they’re
Setting off the sun
Into the sand with waves of men, hear the
Pound of marching band

Weeping men will prophesize and prophets
They will weep
The sleeping dog’s a nightmare but the
Madmen, they still preach
In codes of light, of lifeboats
That they’re trying to find the son
In waves of sound, just wave your hand
There goes the marching band

Do not weep for the sailor who won’t
Prostrate before the storm
We all knew had been foretold
There was red sky in the morning

3. “See How the Rain Falls” — Julius Lester

This, the third song ever written (!!!) by Lester circa 1964, came as a late night, drunken, anguished revelation in Tougaloo, Mississippi. For the farmer that ties the noose in aid of the lynch mob, as well as for he who is hung by that noose, the rain provides egalitarian coverage, watering both the farmer’s corn as well as the tree providing the branch from which the lynched man’s body hangs.

As a quiet sibling of songs like “Blowing in the Wind” and “Strange Fruit,” this song, though faint in its footprints, echoes a similar senselessness witnessed in the history of human endeavor. Fame, like rain, is indiscriminate. Rain, like history, covers everything, but little is collected for future use. To hear “See How the Rain Falls” — in all of it’s sad hope — is to be reminded of the incalculable number of beings who grow up and die, who sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the few encumbering personages who have been so magnified in history. Humanity is hidden in the shadows of the magnified, while, contradictorily, humanity further enlarges the magnified by its own ignorance. History, like those of us listening to this song, lives and breathes, erroneously reenacting the cycle of access and subjugation between the magnified and the shadowed.

Today, 46 years after recording this song, Julius Lester is an author of children’s books. Parents around the world should rejoice that someone with such a wellspring of hope is inspiring their children, collecting more of what falls from history.

4. “A Sun That Never Sets” — Neurosis

When confronted with the overall aesthetics of Neurosis, the majority of people will endue the band — that is, if they can give anything when passed the plate — with a type of wisdom usually awarded to maimed Vikings or fetid hobgoblins. As if to say, “I mean, yea, they’re a decent band and everything, but just look at them.” Neurosis’s commitment to evoking dread, their long-form sonic manifestation of doom, and generally dressing the part of your local teenage necromancer automatically relegates them to a far, shadowy corner of the music world.

By all accounts, Neurosis is doing fine grappling with their place among the shadows. They’ve been together a quarter century, and in that time, have become pioneers in their form of underground music. Looking at Neurosis as a leader of an independent movement, generally — and the lyrical content of “A Sun That Never Sets,” specifically — one can view their leadership as analogous to the wisdom we owe today to the thinkers of long ago.

When we look back on the lives of great men, that is, the actual day-to-day living of those great men, we find an assortment of gypsies, pederasts, heretics and freaks. Lao-tzu, Vishnu, Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther, Galileo, George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, these are all the people we collectively conjure when we begin, “A great man once said…” We attribute wisdom to these people, but in their day they suffered the ignominy of being anarchists, subverting public opinion, breaking laws and corrupting the youth. Socrates was forced to suicide, Jesus was crucified, Martin Luther was burned at the stake, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Wisdom is a ruthless business. We don’t often consider the prospects for prophetic erudition a hundred years from now while we’re casting judgment on today’s outcasts. Will today’s criminals, anarchists and deviants become tomorrow’s scholars? If history has revealed any patterns, it’s that we repeatedly torture and kill the wisest among us. Knowing that, shouldn’t we look at whom we despise most, today, and consider their viewpoint more open-mindedly? Neurosis is certainly a candidate for re-evaluation under such circumstances:

A sun that never sets burns on
New light is this river’s dawn
When to speak of a word so old
Is to relearn what is known
A time to think back and move on
Rebuild the loves of lives long gone
The blood that flows through me is not my own
The blood is from the past, not my own
The blood that leads my life is not my own
The blood is strength, I’m not alone

I’m not attempting prophecy, nor am I offering Neurosis as wise men when I put their words next to those who are firmly established in the “brainy quote” canon. I am saying that, as an age with access to such limitless history, we are still quite narrow-minded in the way we endue wisdom. Setting aside for the moment the general doom and gloom of Neurosis’s delivery, one could certainly draw a parallel between “A Sun That Never Sets” and the collected wisdom of Heraclitus, or the way and the power of Lao-tzu, or the push/pull in the contradiction of Rumi. Put another way, I bet real money if I dressed up the lyrics to “A Sun That Never Sets” on some ancient papyrus the troop of truth seekers could be convinced of the existence of a new master.

There’s an argument to be made that Neurosis is a simulacrum of Heraclitian wisdom, and we should instead look far afield for the sage of tomorrow, because wisdom of this age shouldn’t be a reduplication of that age. Lil’ B as prophet of tomorrow, perhaps? Baby Dee as s/he who finally illuminates the subject of oppression for this generation? Peter Sotos as philosopher of our society’s prurient fascination with crime and how wallowing in the details makes us akin to the criminals?

No one is a devil, if fully heard.

5. “Snowfall Summer” — Bonfire Madigan

If we’re gonna talk about new standards for weirdness-cum-wisdom, and allow some seats at the Masters Table for the fairer sex, well then let’s talk weird wisdom. “And we were burned by that brand new snow. Hold On! Sensing the new moon right around the corner, I just wanted to go where June goes. It’s real clear we hold a pity tear, well fed or welfare?”

Well fed and apathetic who will take starved and impassioned

This open-ended wisdom is applicable to ten thousand things. Travel with it in bad weather for a while and let me know how it goes.

6. “As She Came Out of the Water” — Matt Bauer

As part of a narrative about a murdered girl, “As She Came Out of the Water” is a tempestuous wind disguised in a quiet, little tune. The song seems to tell a story of how a storm can subtly change the shape of an island, and how the murder of a girl, while sending a message to a community, can stir waters different in every one of her survivors.

As she came out of the water
Her hair a bed of eels
The creek held to her wrists
Saying don’t go tell our secret
The water falling off her
Ice spires and silver ropes
Clear towers to her fingers
Tiny planets made of nothing
My boots stirred shells and moss
Crushed crayfish in their haunts
Salamanders black and orange
Midnight stars across their foreheads
Shale rains down into darkness
Yellow perch like bulls at the bank
Spit bugs walk on the water
The island moved in the storm

An interesting, and perhaps unconsciously unsettling aspect of Matt Bauer’s music for some listeners is Bauer’s desire to have it delivered in a whisper, as if a secret. This one-on-one transference betrays the standard musical dichotomy of artist and audience. The breathy susurration can automatically disrupt expectations. I suspect it’s those people who prefer to have their music act as a backdrop to some other activity instead of an activity in itself that find Bauer’s music too much. This discomfort, then, in my estimation, reveals more about the listener than it does the singer. You talking to me?

7. “Here Comes the Water Now” — Tom Brosseau

A contemporary of Matt Bauer, Tom Brosseau delivers his wisdom within the form of another disaster, the 1997 flood of Grand Forks. This song begins at a point after the vigilant have evacuated, and finds those who’ve decided to ride out the storm with a calm narrator announcing, “There’s only so much that time will allow/ here comes the water now.”

The general drift of this song shares a similarity with the Pure Land School from some two-thousand years ago, where Hui Yüan lead Chinese followers of Mahayana Buddhism down roads of salvation. The lilt in Tom Brosseau’s delivery of disaster warnings, spoken to a broad congregation of everyday types lost amidst the chaos, is the same kind of general deliverance offered by the Pure Land School, which promised “salvation by faith alone.” Unlike the élite Confucians who were drawn to the Ch’an or Meditation School’s enlightenment through self-effort directed toward the liberation of the mind from all entangling alliances with the phenomenal world, the Pure Land practice was better suited for the masses. While orthodox Buddhism teaches of the illusory character of this life and the need for surmounting its miseries, the Pure Land masters turned to the sutras that promised help in reaching “Other Shores.” In the Essence of Wisdom Sutra, a devotee is instructed:

So we know that the ‘Perfect Wisdom’ by means of which one reaches the Other Shore, is a great divine formula which can remove all kinds of suffering. The formula is said thus:

Ferry, ferry, ferry over to the Other Shore!
Ferry all beings over to the Other Shore!
Perfect Wisdom! Hail!

Whether nirvana or some other kind of salvation, the idea of voyage has long been linked to a metamorphic revival. Travel as an antithesis to tourism — that is, taking something away from the journey — has been the subject of many expeditions: the Situationist dérive, the sufi ‘Caravan of Summer,’ Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, hoboing, whatever motivates one to put space between what he once was and what he hopes to be, this impulse to change one’s surroundings is that part of the never-ending desire to, as Chuang Tzu said, “identify yourself with the infinite and wander freely in the unfathomable.”

The Pure Land formula for ferrying to Other Shores, meant for endless repetition until the devotee arrives at nirvana, is not unlike Brosseau’s own chorus of, “here comes the water now.” It’s also reminiscent of another childhood rhyme:

Verily, verily, verily, life is but a dream

8. “Pushing All The Clouds” — Uzeda

This song, she is of band descent from isola Italia, sì. Is good, no? She blows like wind of sea, this song. Is gust of charm and big poof forcing hairs away from head of  he, sì? How do you say… Giovanna, is singer she of song from Uzeda band, sì, and is mate in band of Augustino, who reside in isola Sicilia, yes? This band, is mama of all fake Italia users. Is good, no? This one, she blows very pretty power winds in all of my sails. Is like day at sea, this song, push push from winda and then is still for piccoli momentos, then is BOOM, she blows agains. Is windy wisdoms, sì?

There was a big sun
and a big white cloud;
there was a little boy and a little girl
building burning walls of fire:
she knows well, she can hear his mind
she can heat everything he hides
he’s so wise, he’s so wise
while they’re looking at me
Pushing all the clouds, they’re trying while they’re
pushing all
the big white clouds

How can it disappear?
She knows him and all he needs
He says: why am I growing here?
Keep your smile, keep your smile, time is hanging
I know and this is mine; I know and this is mine
Pushing all the clouds, they’re trying while they’re
pushing all the big white clouds

That’s my home
its flying over seas
This is all I can really dream
Its so high, its so high, and I’m so well
I know and this is mine; I know and this is mine
Pushing all the clouds, they’re trying while they’re
pushing all the big white clouds

9. “Summer Here Kids” — Grandaddy

In continuing with the Fake Italian way of playing with everyone’s sense of the absurd and making the mundane more memorable, I present this genius piece of twenty-first century hermit scripture:

Do as I didn’t do because
I’m a picture of imdumbivinity
Stay alone, put a record on
Listen to the songs
Keep yourself at home

10. “The Rain” — Eddie Gale

Conclusion without explanation… See also, forecast.

* Bonus Round: “Cold Weather is Back” — The Ex

Launching this prophetic announcement into the future so, when in 500 million years, they dig this blog post from under a layer of fossilized iPhones, during a time when “no one uses computers anymore,” I can posthumously ask, “Do you still listen to mp3s?”

Now I’m not trying to take your hincty sweets from you but it seems to me the time has come to decide what you are and what you’re going to do.
—Jack Kerouac

 

All legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.
—J.D. Salinger

 

Carol sang classic songs: girls who are beautiful at fifteen, their boyfriends gone to war. Girls who lose a golden ring by the riverside, lamenting the passing of the seasons, who never give up on love. Girls who go into the woods, girls one misses later, at sea, and the voyage will never end.
—Michèle Bernstein

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