“A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination.”—James Russell Lowell
“Hymn # 101” is my favorite song. To me, it is pretty nearly the Platonic form of a piece of art incarnating the universal into the specific. It’s an original recapturing of the endlessly and universally repeated narrative of the Hero with a Thousand Faces. It wisely stands as a subtle instance of the archetype while simultaneously affirming the mysterious likelihood that the ultimate instance of that archetype was Jesus. If that weren’t enough, it also functions as a confident, self-aware announcement of a folk singer’s arrival onto the cultural scene. And if that weren’t enough, it’s proved to be the thesis statement of Joe Pug’s career. It works like a ruthless, tenderhearted prophecy. “Hymn # 101” is about the archetypal hero; it’s about Jesus; it’s about Joe Pug; it’s about the listener; it’s about the audience; it might be about America; it’s certainly about humanity. And it might as well be the first track on Sketch of a Promised Departure.
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On an episode of the The Working Songwriter, Pug tells his interlocutor (might’ve been Anaïs Mitchell) his goal in life is to write “Amazing Grace.” What I take him to mean is that the Holy Grail for him is to write a song that would escape the cultural and historical circumstances of its composition such that it pervades, for all intents and purposes, the world, becomes known by virtually everyone, even if few remember its creator, and deeply affects anyone who really hears it. There are pieces of doggerel known by billions that have made their conjurers ungodly amounts of money. Pug isn’t talking about this. What he wants to do is to write something so true, good, and beautiful–the mysteries of distribution being equal–that the song transcends all the charts and makes its way, if not into the history books exactly, then into the halls and memories of future generations.
Cultural, technological, and aesthetic circumstances being what they are, one has to wonder if a Pug song that good would actually attain the transcendent notoriety of an “Amazing Grace.” Wilco’s suggestion in “The Late Greats” haunts the question: “The greatest lost track of all time / the Late Greats’ ‘Turpentine’ / You can’t hear it on the radio / You can’t hear it anywhere you go.” I suppose this is an assertion, however playful, about the nature of greatness and contingency, the idea being that the rewards of fate are not based on merit. They’re based on the whims of tech billionaires, streaming service coders, and the tastes of people who “don’t know beauty, just the costume” and “don’t know music, just the volume” (Joe Pug, “Stay and Dance”).
I’ve always taken the ending of Inside Llewyn Davis to mean something similar. In the Coen Brothers’ film, the undeniably talented protagonist, a writer and performer of absolutely top notch folk music–who is nevertheless a total asshole–struggles fecklessly down the starving artists’ path until he winds up jobless, loveless, hopeless, and beaten to a pulp in the back alley of a Greenwich Village club. The film ends with him lying among the garbage cans while on the stage inside the greatest folk singer of all time sings in what could be his first NYC performance. The suggestion to me is that fate is kind of a crap shoot, that all things being equal, Llewyn Davis could have been Bob Dylan, or that maybe if he were less of an asshole, the universe might have treated him more favorably.
It’s a brutal watch and a great film. Ironically, though, it sort of enacts a contradiction of what I take to be its metaphysical thesis. If the Coen Bros had never made it, a lot of people never would have heard of Dave Van Ronk, would have never heard “Green, Green Rocky Road” or any of the other songs that shine as the only rays of light in an otherwise unrelentingly dark experience. While there are plenty of folkies who had heard of Dave Van Ronk and had listened to the traditional ballads Llewyn plays, the movie also kind of argues against its own argument and against Wilco’s suggestion about the greatest lost track of all time. The Coen Bros (perhaps in conscious antithesis) promoted an obscure, overlooked artist to a large audience. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure the song Dylan’s singing in the last scene (“Farewell”) was, until the movie came out, a lost track.
On track six of The Great Despiser, Pug sings, “There’s a world out there, I know there is / Where they play my songs / On their silver harps and their violins.” This plaintive chorus expresses the dubious wish that the speaker's songs ascend to a transcendent realm of heavenly appreciation. It expresses the bleakness of the artist’s immanent circumstances and then pleads with some audience to remember that “when the lights came up, there was nothing left I could give.” Artists like Joe Pug don’t dedicate their lives to writing songs and playing music because they just want fame and money (though Pug is no wallflower or flatfooted idealist). Artists like Joe Pug do what they do because, in a sense, they have to. Whether or not “some God above” has told them they were chosen—they’ve been called. This theme also runs throughout the discography, and on a parallel track runs the idea that answering this call is a “road of bones” and “you get no thanks” (Pug, “Those Thankless Years”). It finds a comic expression in the lines, “I don’t work at a bank,” but “the awful truth I’ve learned… things would be better if I did.” It’s the terrible cost of fulfilling the mission, perhaps “the high price of living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). Pug laid this thematic rail at the beginning of his career, and it starts right there at the end of “Hymn # 101.”
Wordsworth famously said we “murder to dissect,” and perhaps this series has been nothing but an interpretive slaughter. I hope not. Maybe, too, this is what Sontag is promoting in that book I haven’t read–just to witness, just to feel and receive the impressions from a work of art. Well, I consider these essays an extension of those received impressions motivated by the impulse to praise truth, beauty, and goodness and to mull over mysteries. But in a concession to both Sontag and Wordsworth, I’ll do my favorite song minimal damage on this occasion and comment only on the last few lines. They ask:
But will you recognize my face
when God’s awful grace
strips me of my jacket and my vest
and reveals all the treasure in my chest?
These lines limn a messianic challenge to anyone who might encounter the gospel; they also convey a question an artist might put to anyone who runs across their work after the world has gotten its licks in. It’s a question perhaps about what will remain after death has dealt its final blow.
The Messiah and the true artist have this in common–they’re not in it for the money. Whatever Pug may say about working at banks, he went all in when he dropped out of college and moved to Chicago, and anyone who’s listened to his songs is better for it. No doubt, he’s one of the rare ones who did “get signed,” so to speak, and he’s made a living making music, but the fact that he’s fared better than Llewyn Davis ought to give anyone else who’s not in it for the money encouragement. Still, if I were in charge, I’d allot more windfalls to the Joe Pugs of the world.
It takes a certain faith to believe that, for the most part, great work will get the attention it deserves. As to what will make it into the de facto canons of the future–that’s anybody’s guess. I’ve wondered at times if perhaps Joe Pug hadn’t already written an “Amazing Grace” in “Hymn # 101.” The factors that determine whether or not something attains such prominence are beyond anyone’s calculations, but I’m glad Pug keeps trying and that his songs have attained the success they have. May he never quit and may more accolades accrue! If I were in charge, “Hymn # 101” would survive into the future like “Will the Circle be Unbroken?”or “This Land Is Your Land.” I’d have Nation of Heat and Sketch of a Promised Departure remembered along with Blood on the Tracks and American IV: The Man Comes Around (Cash’s greatest, according to this millennial). None of those works, of course, are Isaac Newton's hymn.
“Hymn # 101” and Sketch end up being about death. Jesus lived “with a stone around his neck,” and even as he sat at a wedding at the beginning of John, he was thinking about what he called his hour, by which he meant the hour of his crucifixion. Likewise, Pug’s protagonist says on the second song, “I know how this ends / the worst man you can think of with a pistol in his hand.” Read as part of the artist’s journey, it’s hard to see how such an ending could come about. Anything’s possible, of course but we don’t live in Oceania yet–it’s unlikely any commissar is going to order Pug taken out back to make him an example. Read as an archetypal account of the everyman’s life, however, the thug with the pistol represents death itself. There’s a hidden anxiety, then, in this gospel-contoured album about a folksinger: it’s the life we all live haunted by the known yet much-denied, much-ignored fact that we’re all going to die.
The world is what it is. If you don’t compromise, you’re in for rough treatment. It would seem better to have never seen the flicker or felt the warmth of an everlasting flame. If you have though, and you haven’t repressed the experience, you can do none other than seek it. You might falter, lose heart, be overwhelmed by the waves, deny the Christ three times, or get tossed into a back alley and regret your entire life. But you can’t go back. And ultimately you will be stripped of your jacket and your vest. That’s either just the way it is, or it’s somehow God’s awful grace.
If it’s God’s awful grace, then there is a God and you do have a soul. No one on this side of time knows, as a matter of empirical knowledge, if there is an afterlife. Death, of course, is “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” It’s an unplayed chord on an unresolved coda.
The fact of death can have one of two effects on the person who unflinchingly confronts it. It can curse you with an all-pervasive despair and torpor. Or it can quicken you to existential alacrity and authenticity. But even in the latter case, your commitment and action are likely to be hopeless unless you believe in an everlasting flame and a world of silver harps and violins.
Jesus wasn’t a Sisyphian hero in a Cormac McCarthy novel (although Sisyphian heroes in Cormac McCarthy novels are Jesus, in a way: cf. Suttree). Any credible account we have of His life, non-canonical gospels notwithstanding, is shot through with the assumption–and the assertion–that He was the Word of God made flesh and that though He was killed, He was ultimately unkillable. He came to see that nothing was for naught and to rescue all those He would save from the snares of sin and death. Somewhere once I saw someone interpret “all the treasure in my chest” as these souls Christ redeemed. When Jesus harrowed hell, He sprung a trap and escaped a prison from out of which He will lead anyone who knows Him. Believing this account of the matter makes all the difference.
To many, Jesus is as much as and no more than an archetype. “Descent from the Cross by Torchlight” ends on an unresolved chord and there’s no positive affirmation of the Resurrection. But what happens next–what could’ve been on track 11, is perhaps not unrepresented on the album. Take another look at the cover. Even the suggested ascension may be a visual metaphor, not an actual nod to departure to an afterlife. If the whole album is just archetypal and figurative, and whether or not the listener believes in immortality or the Resurrection, I think anyone, the Christian included, should applaud Pug’s evident appreciation for the gospel story. At the very least, he recognizes its beauty–obviously he’s still interested in its truth, even if that truth for him is psychological rather than historical.
I wrote most of this meditation the morning of August 26, 2024. That evening, I happened upon an unbelievably relevant paragraph in a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son, who was in South Africa serving with the RAF during World War II. Evidently, Christopher had asked his dad about the historicity of the book of Genesis and the question of whether or not it was merely a myth. In my meditation on “No Place a Good Man Can Hide,” I touched on postmodern theories of history (qv. Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Ultra-Moral Sense”), wondered about the possibility of writing true accounts of events, and mentioned C.S. Lewis’s confrontation with the historicity of the Gospels. Well, Tolkien answers his son’s question about Genesis and cites Lewis (a close friend of his) as an influence on his views:
As for Eden. I think most Christians, except the v. simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they've sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don't you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have indeed (myself as much as any), as you say, forgotten the beauty of the matter even ‘as a story’. Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay (if published I don't know) [probably “Myth became Fact,” from God in the Dock] showing of what great value the ‘story-value’ was, as mental nourishment–of the whole Chr. story (NT especially). It was a defence [sic] of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. His point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. So that the faintheart ‘admirer’ is really still getting something, which even one of the faithful (stupid, insensitive, shamefaced) may be missing. But partly as a development of my own thought on my lines and work (technical and literary), partly in contact with C.S.L., and in various ways not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater Ecclesia, I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden ‘myth’. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the NT, which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we do not know how many sad exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile'. 30 January 1945 (FS 78), pp. 158-159.
Tolkien and Lewis would commend Joe Pug’s appreciation for the beauty of Jesus’ story. They would also frown upon any Christian who believed the story but didn't care about its formal, aesthetic, and literary qualities. Again, this album isn't making any statement about where Pug stands now, but he wouldn't be the only person around these days who evidently admires aspects of Chrsistianity without believings its doctrine–the historian Tom Holland, for isntance. But Lewis, Tolkien, Rene Girard, and many other modern people might tell this encouraging group of people that they could go ahead and just maybe believe in the resurrection.
If I have betrayed Joe Pug’s confidence at all by discussing what he told me after that show at the Blue Door, perhaps I can atone for it by betraying my own confidence and telling you what I said in response. Earlier in the conversation, we’d talked about movies (he mentioned he’d happened to see Terrence Malick filming with Christian Bale at ACL), and when he told me he couldn’t believe in the resurrection, I may or may not have recommended a movie that featured “a compelling” vision of it–Risen, starring Joseph Fiennes. I’ll admit–I still actually like that movie–but I really wish I hadn’t recommended it. I had just watched it, and more inclined to admire than fault-find anyway, I hadn’t applied much in the way of critical judgment. I doubt Pug took the recommendation, but I can’t imagine it sounding like anything other than an iteration of what Flannery O’Connor called “the pious trash for which we have so long been famous.” If I had to recommend a movie, it would’ve been more relevant to ask if he’d seen The Tree of Life or something. Incidentally, it is rumored Joseph Fiennes will be featured in Terrence Malick’s forthcoming film about the life of Jesus, The Way of the Wind.
As far as bad Christian art goes, I’d a thousand times rather have work by a gifted atheist who has “some nourishment” from the Christian story and who is therefore not “cut off wholly from the sap” than a Metropolitan Museum full of work by Christians, who though they believe the truth of the Gospel, have no savor of its beauty. Especially not if they have no ability to beautifully and tastefully form the content.
Insofar as this album is about Joe Pug himself, I hope the title implies nothing like a real departure from anything. If he does feel like he chased a dream that he shouldn’t have chased, or if his career has at times felt like a road of bones or a Golgotha, then I hope the success of this album has already been a Sunday morning–and not like the one in the Kristofferson song.
As I wrap this project up, a certain set of doubts nags me.
What if Susan Sontag and Nietzsche are right?
What if I’m a sap for believing in meaning, the incarnation, the resurrection, and the sincerity of these songs–like a “Christian left behind at the crossroads of” someone else’s “town,” too scared to quit “the only game I know?” (Pug, "How Good You Are").
What if “What Is Good Will Never Change” and “A Treasury of Prayers” were just written and marketed to suckers like me who can’t resist the lexicon of Christian vehicles in a figurative language game of nihilistic tenors?
Joe Pug–wisely–never comments helpfully on the meaning of his songs. That’s as it should be. I may have slipped into speculating about what he meant at the moment of composition any number of times. But I don’t offer my meditations here as definitive readings. They are a record of the impressions the album evokes in my mind and imagination, and though the lyrics probably light up the same parts of other listeners’ brains, everyone’s experience with this album is going to be different. But part of the reason archetypes are archetypes is that they can work powerfully on anyone. If Tom Holland’s Dominion weren’t right and if Pug weren’t clearly treating the story of Jesus, Sketch of a Promised Departure would be little more than a mysterious, somewhat phantasmagorical concept album scarecly more decipherable than “I Am the Walrus” (however, cf. this). But Tom Holland’s Dominion is right, and Joe Pug is clearly treating the story of Jesus. Anyone familiar with Christianity or any culture it has influenced is going to trace significance in this mysterious, yet deeply cogent album.
I may realize now what I’ve really been up to in these meditations–trying to recognize the face of the man denuded by God. Gaze on the treasure in the chest, the chest of an outlaw, full of harvest-bought seed. My hope is that I’ve understood some of the many things he means.
*Go listen to the music, the podcast, subscribe to the vault, read the dispatches, sign up for the newsletter, and buy stuff.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “96: To Christopher Tolkien (FS 78).” 30 Jan. 1945. The Letters of J.R.R.
Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. New York:
HarperColllinsPublishers, 2023. 158-59.
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