I’m sitting in my back yard, without a coat, without a
sweater, listening to the rumble of lawnmowers on the morning of December 5th,
2015. I should write a post about global
warming, I guess, and this post may come to that in the end.
But something else has been on my mind overnight.
No, not shooters in San Bernardino, or refugees from Syria,
or walls along the border with Mexico either, although it may come to those too,
in the end. The list of things it may
come to in the end is long.
I’ve been thinking about the sublime voices of Goths. Well, of a particular, modern Goth.
Ok, that’s obscure.
I’ll explain. I’m sure this is
some kind of deeply embarrassing sin.
But as long as you promise not to tell anyone, I guess I can confess.
Sometimes, following the crazy tangle of links down the
right side of the YouTube screen, something about the picture that YouTube
displays for one of the “got talent” performances catches my attention. So I glance furtively around to be sure no
one is looking, and then click on it. I
did that a day or two ago, and I found….
Andrew De Leon. Yes,
from 2012. Since I only see these things
on YouTube, and only when I chance on them, I’m always late to find them, and
others are way ahead of me. But if
you’re not, if you haven’t heard this young man, take a few minutes and just
listen.
Start at his first audition here. Really:
you have to look at that first audition first, or the rest of the post
will be confusing. So go watch, I’ll
wait. Don’t be afraid. His eyes may look like they have x-ray powers,
but there is no great harm in them. (At
least I hope not. Andrew, take note: if you
actually do have x-ray powers, please
use them only for good.)
Are you back? Amazing,
wasn’t it? All of that from solitary practice
in his room. It is one more bit of
evidence that there are exceptional things happening in well hidden places
everywhere, things we can’t know about because the people doing them, for
whatever reason, are keeping them close, keeping them from our sight.
Now watch Andrew in his semifinals. I want to say up front that this is what can
happen to a nice, cloistered young Goth when he’s exposed to the defiling
influence of the outside world. I want
to say that, but I suspect this was in him from the start. But you decide. Go ahead, please: Here’s the link. (Crank up the volume for this one…and full
screen, too; much of what I reacted to was visual.)
Did you notice that last note, the last “Amen”, and his eyes
as he finished and looked down at the judges?
At 1:38 in the video.
I do understand that the quiet smile on his face is just a
sense of blessed relief that he nailed the high notes, combined with a quick
check to see what the judges thought. But
that look! At that point, after that
elegant, sweet, mesmerizing performance of a religious work, on that stage lit
like a gothic cathedral, with spots like rays of holy sun transformed to gold
or blue through a stained glass window, he looked like a portrait of a saint,
or an angel (or maybe an archangel since parts of the lyrics of his song were originally
provided by Gabriel). At that instant
those astonishing eyes looked as though they were seeing through the judge’s bodies
and seeing their hearts and souls, and forgiving them in spite of that. I am not religious; the opposite, if anything. But at that instant, just for that instant, I
felt a disturbing tremble in my disbelief; a kind of minor crisis in my lack-of-faith. Andrew at that instant seemed to release his
inner archangel. How many of us ever
have the courage, or the ability, to do that? I was transported out of the drab world by
his performance.
Simply awesome.
It was a comment by one of the judges afterward that brought
me back to ground again. Sharon
Osbourne---yes, Ozzy Osbourne’s wife---recommended that Mr. De Leon dispense
with his Goth look so that he could be taken more seriously. His look was too exotic for Ozzy Osbourne’s wife?? Really??
That’s a little weird. But of
course she didn’t say that, exactly: she
took him seriously and she loved him
from the start and said so. And the audiences clearly loved him. She meant that for the sake of his career he
might need to be taken seriously by the rest of society, all of it, even by the
more rigid subcultures in this land of the free that might dismiss him because of
his appearance. And I know why she had that fear for him. We all know.
There is across the world, in every different place and time, a cultural
arrogance, even in the smaller cultures, in regions or religions or classes or
races, a subcultural arrogance, a
sad, vulgar, coarsening subcultural narcissism, that wants to see in others
exactly what we think we see in ourselves.
Sameness is comforting and undemanding.
Difference, on the other hand, is threatening, and there is an instinct
to spurn and repel it.
And that made me think of our national response to the
Syrian refugees, and to all the refugees across the world that are desperate
for help. And it made me think that if
we allow global warming to continue there may be many more refugees in future
decades, refugees from hunger, disease, and yes, war, a wild assortment of them
in all kinds of colors and religions. We
may even be among them, or some of us may.
There is precedent in this country for mass displacement by
environmental disaster. When was the
last time you read The Grapes of Wrath? (Hey,
I did warn you up front that it might come to this in the end.)
But enough, for now, of that. This day in the sunshine, in my back yard on
the warming earth, is too nice to start down that road. I’ll have to do it, but tomorrow, or the next
day, or some day after that. I’ll have
to write a quick post explaining to all the Governors who are refusing the
Syrian refugees, including my own state’s Governor Hogan, that it’s possible to
see difference not as threatening, but as energizing.
But for now, to Governor Hogan I will just say:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to
strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing
it.”---Hebrews 13:1
And to Mr. De Leon I will say: thanks for that radiant Ave Maria. Stay Goth as long as you like; it looks good
on you. You labored on your voice alone
in your cloistered room, and labored also on your look, and created your own excellent
art in both efforts. You created
yourself. From all appearances available
to me in these two videos you did a damned fine job of it. I think we can trust you to continue to
create yourself in the future.
And to you readers, who now know my secret weakness, my
embarrassing habit of YouTubing talent-shows, I’ll just quote the famous prayer
of that other sinful hedonist Saint Augustine of Hippo: “Lord, grant me
chastity and continence---but not yet”.
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