SUMMERING: Follow the Tease

On the return of ‘warmth, bloom, and song’

Summer isn’t just a season. Or a state of mind. It is an imperative. In the hope of insight about what to do with summer, we will feature a series of essays over the next two months on the theme of summering.

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Gershwin says the livin’ is easy, come summertime. Teasey’s more like it. In fact, summer’s the biggest tease of all. The winds of paradise blow warm, blow sweet. Summer may dart back to spring or dash ahead to fall; brush us with a tornado or hit us with a hurricane. No matter. We move to Florida all the same. Its caprice is its charm, its confidence its bait. Summer has something we want and it knows it.

We are flowers of the field, after all. What flower doesn’t like summer? Summer arrives and our life doesn’t pass before our eyes—it runs way ahead of them. We see what’s possible. We see what’s real. We’re shocked by hopes we’d beaten down, dreams we’ve squandered and spilled. Summer is resurrection, redemption, revival, return. 

For a time, at least—and usually far less time than the season’s three months. Can we survive the tease? 

In a sabbath poem about spring, Wendell Berry hits us with a quietly disorienting supposition: “[W]hat are we but welcomers / of that ancient joy, always / coming, always passing?” Can we bear this designation—humble waiting welcomers—when everything in us yearns toward, as he writes, “warmth, bloom, and song”? 

We had better. Our freedom depends on it. It depends on a grounded recognition that at every level of our being our hope lies beyond us. We are not our own summer. 

Humble welcomers—patient welcomers—turn disorientation into reorientation: a renewed centering of the soul on the mystery and purpose that lie beyond the self. It’s an old hope—that I, tiny, flawed, and finite, may yet come into a fuller alignment with being itself and so find my way deeper into this verdant mystery, life. It’s what millions over centuries and across continents have lived for, have in fact defined as the richest possible end of earthly life. 

But it’s a vision we have a hard time seeing today, even in summer. Our mounting “incredulity towards metanarratives,” as Lyotard, in epoch-defining fashion, termed it nearly a half-century ago, has left the self with outsized credibility. Diminishing our high estimate of the self has proved difficult, even as abiding by it has proved dangerous. We’re holed up in what Charles Taylor calls the “the inexhaustible inner domain,” and the scent of freedom doesn’t seem any nearer, though we fall with sublime regularity for the lie that it does. “‘Thinking critically’ almost sounds like a negative thing to my ears that have been trained to listen for the slightest offense as an attack on the identity someone is shaping for themselves,” wrote an astute student in one of my classes this past year. 

But what if my identity—what if my mind—isn’t something I must shape for myself so much as something that comes into its own by my submitting to what lies beyond me: that glory with which I am somehow already, however tenuously, in relation? 

This was the old idea, the moral offshoot of a venerable cosmology. Not coincidentally, the era in which Lyotard coined his famous phrase was perhaps the last moment, in the United States at least, when that cosmology found public sustenance. As the 1970s were playing out, conversion to a particular faith could still be imagined not as a choice but a discovery. 

Consider the curious case of the company of pop musicians who testified to Christian conversion as the sixties were receding. Bob Dylan’s proclamation of a newly discovered pathway is only the most famous. Kerry Livgren (Kansas), Donna Summer, Dion, Philip Bailey (Earth, Wind, Fire), Leon Patillo (Santana), Dan Peek (America) stand in for the many artists who in those years proclaimed that they had found their way to something. And those listening seemed to get what these artists meant.

The Christian conversion of another who would become a figure on this scene took place just before his professional ascent in the 1980s: the musician, singer, composer, and producer Charles Ashworth, known professionally as Charlie Peacock, who in 2012 would garner a Grammy for his production of The Civil Wars’ Barton Hollow. But Peacock’s own first album, Lie Down in the Grass, released forty years ago this summer, captured his conversion with wild brilliance. The New Wave moment in pop, with its quirky and creative seizing of the musical revolutions of the previous three decades, proved marvelously suited for Peacock’s purposes. New Wave bent and broke rules with the kind of heady, playful sophistication that in the hands of a talent like Peacock offered a spacious medium for his rendering of radical reorientation.

Listening to Lie Down in the Grass, you remember what pilgrimage is. You grasp why Dante and Milton and Bunyan and Dostoevsky and Tolkien have had such an unyielding grip on our psyche: They saw a world just around the bend—and they took us there. In his opening lines Peacock, with a pulsing rhythmic push, draws the listener outside into the living world: “A voice in the daytime, a dream in the night / Out the screen door in the moonlight / Take a look, can you see / Someone is saying ‘Come unto Me.’” Peacock, still in his twenties but long immersed in the San Francisco art world, makes his witness to that world. He knows where those who inhabit it are. He suggests where they need to go.

Close your eyes, rest awhile
Let the noise of life surround you
Friends in the front room, stereo
Hear your heart beat, beat, beat
Read some book of knowledge
For your own information
There must be, there must be something
Lost in translation

Eight songs into a thirty-three-minute whirl of portraiture and confession, he paints his own moment of awakening and redirection. 

My groove was tight, it always clicked
The snare was popping, the bass had kicked 
A hole inside my heart that night
I took a drink and sat upright
The world had been selling me a lie
The world had been selling me a lie
I was ready to hit the walls again
Till you caught my eye

About five years after the album was released I saw Peacock, on what had clearly been a wind-swept journey along a harrowing way. He was touring with a guitarist, Jimmy Abegg, and a backing vocalist, Vince Ebo. Although he had released records with A&M and Island and had been managed by the legendary rock impresario Bill Graham, he was at the moment reduced to self-releasing his work and selling cassettes at concerts, a luminous trilogy called West Coast Diaries. This night the trail had led him to a gym at Messiah College, where maybe 100 were gathered. 

The show was anything but one. It was, rather, a testament—three friends evoking a world of live, lush possibility. Peacock talked of his alcoholism and sang of the dangerous passageways that had taken him, as he put it, “Down in the Lowlands.” But reorientation had come. “I’m depending on another power / I’m depending on another love,” he confessed, and bid us come along. I was working in black-and-white photography at the time, and what I captured on film, in that dim gymnasium, was a pilgrim band, weary and hopeful and resolute: There’s a home to come to, a universe to see. And there’s a battle to fight, for the possibility of warmth and bloom and song. It was a reassuring and reinvigorating declaration of ancient, eternal hope.

The late poet Father Richard Novak, CSC, once wrote, of his union with God, “Each day that sings / Our love is more July.” I suspect Peacock would know just what he meant, in season and out. We may not be our own summer. But summer is always just ahead. That’s a promise, not a tease.

Eric Miller is Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, where he directs the honors program. His books include Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, and Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Inside and Outside Look (co-edited with Ronald J. Morgan). He is the Editor of Current.

^{Image: Negative Space}