Winter

I love discovering hidden songs from favorite artists and eras. I recall a friend mentioning Astral Weeks from Van Morrison when I was 20. When I heard it years later, I was rapt. Everything stopped.The lyrics were visual, kinetic, and emergent--a stream of consciousness that flowed between description and exposition. I was transported to ‘another place and another time.’ The instrumentation was layered and played spontaneously. Joy permeated the poesy. The songs, exuberant, arrived in simple garb.After that seminal 1968 album, I wondered if other artists felt liberated to approach their music with similar abandon and subversion.I recently discovered the solemn Winter, by the Rolling Stones. I thought it a stylistic homage to Astral Weeks and yet distinct–a stirring meditation that made me pause. It told me something about love that I had missed, which is why we listen.Then I listened again and again—like I do—on repeat–decoding and decanting. Letting this unearthed appellation breathe. Sitting with the break in the internal dialogue that it caused. Beckoning its strings to shower their electricity onto my waiting ears. Riding the locomotion of the drums as they crashed the emotional waves and stirred the momentum of thawing ingredients.A transmission from the Gods. A gleaming artifact unearthed. An artist’s expressionist rendering of a moment and a mood so distinct, so fascinatingly mundane. We are invited into his and her private wavelength, their sacred love-bubble. Yet such offerings stand as a universal decree about what it means to suffer life’s vagaries while alive and human and ensouled.These offerings grant us secret permission to feel and yearn. To chase the essence of a moment–to bridge the distance between two beleaguered spirits. Like any real love song, Winter is a public baring of the soul. An unconditional surrender. Where no recourse is sought or revealed. When no salve soothes the ache, art is the only afforded option. They and we venture to distill a fading sunset and its synchronistic starlings as they flutter and vanish. As our perfect moments fade.The song couches its meaning in elemental allusions–seasons and winds–and the imagery they inspire. This imparts a cold weariness, but the telling feels warm and open as I listen. He speaks his laments and yet counters with a hope that change and renewal will arrive with Spring. ‘When the light of love will be burning bright.’I love how the narrator speaks of events and locations that don’t reveal much to the listener. Maybe it’s not for us to know what those places mean. California and Stone Canyon. We are left to imagine what secret meaning is encoded. Perhaps the song is saying that the details and locations are superfluous. Because the details don’t last. They’re the map, not the territory. Perhaps it’s enough for us to just witness his love letter.And to remember the odes we’ve sent--and the missives not fired.To cherish our memories as he savors his. To honor our connections, strained though they may be. The souls we know and knew. The people and places and faces we remember--that showed us who we are. Those that awoke us from slumber. The ones that stir us still.And yet, part of me knew there was something deeper at play with Winter. This song was about exile. Winter was a gentle metaphor for his banishment. I knew it, yet I didn’t know why. There was nothing overt in the song that told me, until I searched a little deeper. The narrator says “I’ve been burning my bell, book and candle. And the restoration plays have all gone round.” At first I wanted to leave these details out of the essay because the song affected me so much without their addition. But ‘bell, book and candle’ describes an old Catholic rite of expulsion that has come to mean estrangement or a curse. So when he says he’s been ‘burning’ his ‘bell, book and candle,’ he was removing his curse. This song is his incantation. The recitation of verses, the repetition, the circularity. The swirling intensity of the strings. His counter-spell, cast at the four winds. His penance. Samson at the grinding wheel.The ‘restoration plays’ refer to 17th century plays in Europe that were bawdy and grandiose. Perhaps he had had affairs and distractions and busyness, but that these enterprises had worn thin.For the final incantation, he speaks directly to his lover as the song comes to a crescendo before closing.‘Sometimes I think about you, baby’‘Sometimes I cry about you’‘Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you’‘Sometimes I wanna keep you warm’This is the heart of the song and the song of his heart.As the strings rise and swellNo request for forgiveness No quibbling about the terms of his banishmentNo bid for reassurance or even connectionThinking only of his belovedWanting only to keep her warmTo humbly protect, to shelterA bulwark from the elementsA shepherd, a beacon, a lighthouseBearing warm love with nowhere to goA familial and timeless loveBonded and graciousNot sullied by the coldBut fortified and burnishedHis deepest love revealedAs all else falls away This is a public episode. 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