Long Past the Midnight Curfew

Yesterday I played Paul Simon's "Peace Like a River" as the sermon response in the Zoom service of my little Brooklyn church, and I had mixed feelings about it. I chose it in reference to the bewildering past week, in which home-grown anti-democratic terrorism followed immediately on the heels of landmark elections in Georgia, all of which made a sick-making climax to a year of protest and isolation.

There is no song that can capture that whole panoply of feelings. The Sunday after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis cops and protests erupted around that last summer, I sang Rufus Wainwright's "Going to a Town", and I've trotted out Dylan's "Hard Rain" and Paul Simon's "American Tune" a number of times over the past four harrowing years. But this week has been both more upsetting and more transfixing. The news isn't just bad, it's beyond bad—but it's also not all bad. It feels like a hinge of history, a crossroads, and the next turns will determine all.

"Peace Like a River" somehow fits that kind of moment, in some appropriately unlikely and potentially unsettling ways. It's a song from the point of view of someone who has participated in a protest or oppositional action that seems to have been contained or suppressed for the moment—but our narrator still ends up feeling "reconciled." I can't track it down now, but I'm almost sure I once read or heard Paul Simon describe its lyrics as springing from his direct experience with an anti-war or Civil Rights protest. So when he opens by singing, over a hypnotic, blues-inflected guitar ostinato:

Peace like a river ran through the city

Long past the midnight curfew, we sat starry-eyed

We were satisfied

I have long filled in the blanks with the scene I seem to recall him describing: of his feeling drained but contented after a day spent in some kind of protest or march, looking back on it with the tired satisfaction of having been there on that day and made a small nudge of the dial in the direction of justice, and how for him that contentment itself felt like the peace the movement was struggling for, at least for that moment. The suggestion that he's part of some loosely organized movement is suggested by the next stanza:

I remember misinformation followed us like a plague

Nobody knew from time to time if the plans were changed

Next there's a bridge that suggests the extent to which this protest might have turned violent at the hands of the police:

You can beat us with wires

You can beat us with chains

You can run out your rules

But you know you can't outrun the history train

I seen a glorious day

In other words, it's a very "We shall overcome" sentiment, and its association with the righteous causes of the 1960s would, in normal times, make it go down relatively easy—a postcard from the sit-in. But to play this song a few days after white militants stormed the Capitol to overturn the election on behalf of a wannabe dictator—militants who have reportedly seen the events of Jan. 6 as a huge propaganda victory—inevitably feels different, even uncomfortably so. Even conceding that what the MAGA mob did was not strictly a protest at all but something closer to an attempted coup (or an autogolpe), the lyrics above could be mapped without much trouble onto the sentiments of a participant in the day's mayhem.

I don't think that's how most congregants received the song yesterday; the invocation of a "midnight curfew" and "misinformation" felt appropriate enough given recent headlines, and most of the folks in my liberal-leaning church have a good idea which way the "history train" is going and what that "glorious day" looks like, or at least who it will be for (i.e., all of us). And if they did register the song's narrative voice, I'm thinking they associated it not so much with this week's horror-film parody of protest but with a legacy of true direct action against injustice—with folks from Selma to Stonewall to Ferguson who've put their lives on the line to speak the people's truth to entrenched power, not fought to a rear-guard action to preserve it for their dear leader.

I also share the hope of many progressives that even as we justly prosecute and punish those who committed seditious crimes last week, we do not criminalize or stigmatize legitimate protest itself. As Michael Hobbes aptly put it on Twitter:

It's actually fine to have different standards of decorum for protests against fascism and protests defending it. No one has procedural or tactical beliefs that are entirely independent of their goals and it's absurd to pretend otherwise.

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) January 8, 2021

Even more than the song's quiet reclamation of protest, though, I find that in a raw, indeterminate moment like this, a lyric with such a human scale and multivalent sympathies is more satisfying, more fitting, and more true than a straightforward jeremiad or lamentation could ever be. I don't know exactly what to think or feel right now, and I'm a little suspicious of those who say they do, or who think this is all very simple, let alone Tweet-able. If it were, do you think we'd be at this crossroads, facing this existential crisis?

Indeed, what finally brought the song home yesterday, I think, was its ambivalent conclusion, which leaves the specificity of the protest moment to render a sense of the kind of sleepless, dark-night-of-the-soul anxiety this period has visited on many of us, along with the glimmering hope that we may find, if we're lucky, some clarity or peace at the end of this:

Four in the morning, I woke up from out of my dreams

Nowhere to go but back to sleep, but I'm reconciled

Oh, I'm gonna be up for a while

How many of us have not had a sleepless, anxious night or two in this past year, or in the past four years, about our families, our communities, our cities, our country, our battered world? We are due for a few more, it seems clear. 

As for the music: The song's intriguing sound has an intriguing origin. Though I couldn't locate the interview I thought I'd read with Simon about the song's lyrical inspiration, I did find this fascinating tidbit from an interview with Jon Landau:

SIMON: “Peace Like a River” is a serious song. It’s a serious song, although it’s not as down as you think. The last verse is sort of nothing, it sort of puts the thing back up in the air, which is where it should be. You end up, you think about these things that are, something to do with a riot, or something in my mind in the city.

LANDAU:The middle part was very surreal.

SIMON: Part of the reason the thing sounds surreal by the way, is that there’s a sound effect in that record which I don’t think you can hear, but it’s there, and it creates a very real effect. What I did was to take a piano, hit the bottom notes of the piano with a hand, like with my fist, like that, played it at half speed backwards, and took a middle section out, which sounds something like Rrrrrrrrr. It’s just a low level rumble, but it creates a tension, and that thing is just in there. It’s in the track. You can’t hear it. The only time you can hear it is in the last verse where it’s out. It’s just a dark color. It creates tension in that song. Also the track was a loop.

LANDAU: What do you mean? The whole track?

SIMON: That whole bass, the whole drum thing. I recorded a whole thing and I didn’t use it, and a guy while he was standing there with a conga drum was talking and he was playing doom dakka doonka doonk doom dakka doonka doonk. I just did things like that for three minutes and made a loop out of it and then recorded over it.

LANDAU: The music is pretty but the words are very frightening.

SIMON: That’s just a thing with me, to do something that sounds pretty or light to have a nastiness in it. That’s just a style, I don’t do it consciously, it just comes out naturally with me.

That's not really a style, but a point of view, a worldview even. For better or worse it somehow suits the moment.