[Honorable Mention in the 2016 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest. Published in abbreviated form in Sunstone Fall 2018; this version, then, is the unabridged Director’s Cut, so to speak.]
In the days before CDs and Auxiliary-jacks came standard, I recall having to hit the Seek button on the cassette-deck of my parent’s 1996 Ford Taurus in order to find the next song; the player would search for the next empty space devoid of music on the tape, and assume that that was the space between songs. This feature, primitive though it may appear to us now, actually worked quite reliably—except with the Tab choir cassette that was de rigueur for Sundays in our house. I recall “O Divine Redeemer” in particular was so full of silent lulls, that the tape-player kept stopping repeatedly in the middle of that song. Eventually I ceased trying to skip the song altogether. Slowly, I began to see the silences as a feature, not a bug. Finally, I began to consider those silences sacred, integral to the sublimity of the song. Years later on my mission, on a night when my companion and I were scarcely on speaking terms and our contact list had collapsed and I was at my lowest, I put on “O Divine Redeemer” and realized that those silences were the groanings beyond utterance, the expansiveness of eternity, the home of the Holy Spirit, the whole reason I was out there in the first place. In that moment, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ceased to be mere background music for a Sunday but headphones music, an all-engulfing experience unto itself. It would be many years more before I stumbled upon anyone else who knew how to inhabit those silences so sacredly.
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The veteran indie-trio Low, when they are noted at all, are typically noted for two points: 1) for being “that slow, quiet band” that produces minimalist music at a deliberate pace and hushed volume; and 2) that the husband-wife duo at the band’s core are practicing Mormons. Point 1 has not been strictly true for about 5 albums now, though their slow embrasure of the distortion pedal and amplifier has not apparently harmed their minimalist ethos (nor their critical love or the devotion of their cult following). Point 2 tends to come up only in passing, to explain such oblique lines as “Oh speak to me/Adam and Eve” from the song “Missouri,” off their 1999 album Secret Name; or “You want religion, you want assurance/A resurrection, some kind of purpose,” from the song “DJ”, the closer on their 2015 album Ones and Sixes (though the way that stanza finishes with “I ain’t your DJ, you’ve gotta shake that” indicates that there’s some teeth to their faith). But these discreet-LDS references are few and scattered across their prolific, 20-plus year discography; and though band-leader Alan Sparhawk has stated in interviews that he doesn’t differentiate between his spirituality and his art, Low is not a proselyting group (no pass-along cards are to be found at their shows). Few if any would classify Low as a “Mormon band,” or even as “a band with Mormons in it.”
Nevertheless, once I discovered them, they entered my Sabbath rotation so often that it would sometimes feel as strange to listen to them on a weekday as the Tab choir did. In the days when I began to wonder what a genuinely sublime LDS art would look like, one that somehow eschewed the trappings of easy sentimentality and a banality all the more offensive in its inoffensiveness, I realized that Low had already beaten me there—beaten us all there—by two solid decades. Low long ago mastered what the rest of us aspire to. They have found the sublimity in the silences.
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Emerson famously wrote, “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.” But for most of us, when there are long gaps between testimonies on Fast Sundays, the overwhelming feeling in the congregation is one of discomfort, as though we were failing in our duties, failing the Spirit, as though the silence itself could never be a testimony. Yet a former Singles-Ward Bishop of mine, at his release, lamented his return to a Family Ward with a plaintive: “You don’t know how much I’ve appreciated it, how much I’ve treasured it beyond riches, to sit in actual, complete silence during the passing of the Sacrament.” When I made the return to a Family Ward myself, I at last understood what he meant: the ceaseless stirring of children, muffled infant cries, adults coughing and the shuffling of feat, all conspire against the silence. Like a John Cage piece, the passing of the Sacrament calls attention to how little silence there really is.
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Paul Signac, the neo-impressionist painter, is attributed to have said, “The anarchist artist is not the one who creates anarchist paintings.” That is, it’s not the painting’s content that renders it revolutionary, but its form; e.g. some Soviet propagandist mural done in the Greco-Roman style may be radical in its politics, yet utterly conventional in its traditional form. Similarly, a Mormon artist may produce art that is “Mormon” in content yet devoid of a Mormon spiritual ethos in execution; hence we have Michael McLean’s “The Forgotten Carols” in the mawkish style of Broadway musicals, a genre so formulaic that even the hacks behind “South Park” were able to ape it to Tony-sweeping effect in the “Book of Mormon”. (Their show-stopper “I Believe” could, with only a few slightly-less-ironic lyric changes—and not even that many—be sung unironically by real missionaries). McClean is Signac’s faux-anarchist, LDS in content but not form; but Low, while only rarely LDS in content, is distinctly LDS in a form that Trey and Matt couldn’t even conceive of copying. That is, I believe Low’s Minimalism and Mormonism go hand in hand (and not just for the handy alliteration). Specifically, I argue that it is Low’s minimalism, their fearlessness in embracing the silences between notes, allows them to create a space for the very things that can’t be said, that can’t be represented, the “unspeakable” thing outside discourse that is most responsible for Mormon spiritual conversion. Low does not fear the silence; for them it is not nihilistic void, but where the religious experience lies. It is this ethos of silence that I believe is quintessentially LDS in form.
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I recently presented at a conference in Havana, Cuba. On the ride back to José Martí airport, my Taxi driver waxed rhapsodic on “los triunfos de la revolución”, the Triumphs of the 1959 Revolution. He spoke not with the dry air of the propagandist but with the real zeal of the converted. He took special pride in pointing out all those 1950s Chevrolets still on the road, now in their impossible seventh decade of running; they are “el patrimonio de la gente” he declared, the everlasting inheritance of the people, a living testimony to the resourcefulness of the Cuban nation and of the eternal perseverance of the Revolution.
Of course, he told me all this while driving a 2014 Chinese import, while wearing blue-jeans, a Hollister polo-shirt, and nicer sunglasses than me, after having picked me up from an Airbnb. He was celebrating the victory of Cuban Socialism in the very moment it was eroding irrevocably. But I didn’t smile or smirk, no—to tell the truth, he felt disconcertingly familiar. For how often have I heard extolled the glories of the United Order, of the Law of Consecration—so much wiser than communism and the philosophies of men—all while the First Presidency warns us against MLMs and Ponzi scams? How many of my peers served missions with Songs of Zion on their lips, only to come home recruiting for Summer Sales? Propagandistic billboards line the highways of Cuba, but even more line the I-15. We extol the gospel of Christ in content, but how often in form? What would that even look like?
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It is this embracing of the silence, of the spaces between notes, between words, that for me sets apart both Low and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as distinctly LDS in form. For Mormons, unlike many Christian denominations, are not Biblical absolutists, or at least we’re not supposed to be; we believe the Bible only insofar “as it is translated correctly,” implying that its words often fail to transmit meaning correctly—as do all words, for that matter. Our own Book of Mormon is filled with laments of the inadequacy of language, of “our weakness in writing” (Ether 12:23), of how words cannot communicate even “a hundredth part” (3 Ne. 26:6; WoM 1:5; 3 Ne. 5:8; Jacob 3:13; Ether 15:33; Hel. 3:14), of the “imperfections” (Morm. 9:31, 33) inherent in this or any text, of how “Neither am I mighty in writing, like unto speaking, for when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost…it carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men” (2 Nephi 33:1), clearly delineating how Spirit is often communicated in spite of the words, not because of them. The Holy Spirit merely accompanies words, but is not contained in them; and this Spirit is a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12) that often requires complete silence to be detected—though “often times it maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest” (D&C 85:6), and grows in amplification to overpower all else—much like the mid-aughts music of Low, when they finally turned the amplifiers all the way up.
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The perennial experience of my teenage years was to sit alone in the bedroom, headphones on, lost in the experience, reverently reading the liner-notes as I listened.
I’d wondered if kids these days still did all that in this era of streaming-services (where we are all casual listeners now); but then this last New Years, I was exploring the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the young man next to me said I had, just had, to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid m.A.A.d city straight through, beginning to end, with just my headphones on, doing nothing else, to get the full effect—and I suddenly realized I hadn’t done that in years. Not even with my Low albums. I needed to repent.
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Mormon missionaries are trained to “preach the gospel; and if necessary, use words” (so says Elder Holland quoting St. Francis), implying that words are the least relevant element of Spiritual conversion. The trend in Mormon missionary programs has been to try to push towards less speaking, fewer discussions, for the Spirit itself does “not multiply many words” (3 Nephi 19:24), since words just get in the way. LDS missionaries proselyte with the word-filled Book of Mormon, but they do so in hopes not that the potential-converts will be convinced by well-worded treatises, but by a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that accompanies these words, the “unspeakable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15; D&C 121:26), that “maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26)—in short, in Mormonism, the Spirit is a thing outside discourse, beyond words, beyond utterance, that exists in the silence spaces where words fail to mean. It is not a hot emotional surge, it is not a sudden outburst; though the Spirit may produce these things, it is not these things. The best missionaries understand that their words must get out of the way of the Spirit—as does the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—as does Low.
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On my mission to Puerto Rico, we had hit a wall with Marta; she clung tenaciously, even desperately, to her Catholicism, especially after her husband and daughter both died during Lent years ago.
“I am so tired, Elders, I am so tired…” she broke down one morning, the tears running well-worn paths down her face, “I have been carrying this weight for so, so long …”
Not even trying to understand something we couldn’t, we paused to search for the words, knowing that any we found would be lame and hollow, yet trying anyways: “Marta, mira—”
“When can I be baptized?” she shouted suddenly, “I want to be baptized!”
We definitely had no words for that.
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This philosophy of embracing the silences that bypass words is perhaps best enacted in “Words,” the first song on Low’s first record (1993’s I Could Live In Hope), which song may very well function as their mission statement of sorts. If you give it a listen, you will find that actual words make up very little of “Words,” for words are the least relevant part of the experience. The arrangement is simple to the point of austere. The strange verses communicate a mood more than a meaning. The most discernible line among these cryptic lyrics is “too many words/too many words,” expressing a desire to be free of the cluttering words that impede the religious-aesthetic experience of silence. The chorus line of “And I can hear ‘em…” acknowledges the presence of the words without ascribing them meaning, thus keeping the words out of the way of the unspeakable beyond utterance.
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Shortly after our marriage, my wife got a Facebook message from an old High School friend she hadn’t spoken to in years. After congratulating her on her recent nuptials, she asked my wife if either she or “her man” needed employment this summer, explaining that her husband was taking a crew to sell Pest Control out east. My wife politely declined, but her old friend persisted, refusing to take no for an answer, sallying back against each of her gentle objections with a ready-made response. Finally, my wife cut to the chase and asked if she was reading from a script, affirming once more that we had no desire to sell Pest Control or anything else this summer, but if she would like to catch up over lunch sometime she would be more than happy to. Apparently that struck a nerve, for she was then inundated with veritable essay-length IMs, long polemics accusing my wife of being the vicious one, protesting that she was only trying to help, that she had helped many other friends before, that there was no reason to be so mean. My wife didn’t respond. Shortly thereafter, she closed her Facebook for good. There were just too many words, too many words…
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In the “Words” video, the band members stand far apart from each other, in a large room that calls attention to the spaces between them. Their performance is inter-spliced with shots of them on a frozen-over Lake Superior, pushing a canoe on the ice in a blizzard, where the spaces between become cosmic. The song alone fills the empty spaces between the band members, just as the notes fill the unbridgeable gap between word and meaning, just as the silences bridge the gaps between the notes. The silences are as integral to Low’s songs as the instrumentation. The silence, in fact, is where Low’s music actually lies.
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When I reported to the Stake High Council end of my mission, I had a moment of hyper-awareness, that not a single person in this room understood what I had just done, what I had gone through, what I had felt, what I had saw, no matter what words I used. For that matter, I suddenly realized I had no clue what their missions had been like, either. They were as opaque to me as I was to them. But this did not sadden me, there was no melancholy in that moment. Though the space between us were insurmountable, nonetheless we were all sharing that same space together. In fact, that space between us is how we all finally connected.
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Low often gets called a melancholy band—understandably so, the vast majority of us can’t conceive of such slow, minimalistic music without assuming that it must be rooted in despair. (Alan Sparhawk’s history of mental illness and depression hasn’t helped with that view, either.) Nevertheless, I’ve been to a few Low shows in my time, and I can testify, that few musicians experience as much sheer joy as Alan Sparhawk does on stage. “Little Drummer Boy” is my least favorite carol, but once upon a December garage show I beheld him belt the song out with such pure, guileless conviction that it not only became tolerable but transcendent. It is a great fallacy to assume Low is sad, that the silences are empty—they are not empty but full. It took Low for me to finally realize this.