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THE SONGWRITER AS POET:
IAN MCCULLOCH AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRADITION
Kristin F. Smith
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Chapter 7: Religious Ambiguity in Rossetti and McCulloch
Both McCulloch and Rossetti draw heavily upon Judeo-Christian religious themes and imagery. An innate spirituality runs throughout their works. Good and evil, right and wrong, sin and redemption structure their worldviews. Yet each man expresses strong ambivalence about religion itself. Each has clearly struggled with the problem of a desire for faith set against his own doubts (which apparently stem from reasons particular to each.) The writings of both men show changes in thought throughout their working lives. For each, religion has its own purpose and meaning outside of the eschatological goals of the religion itself.
The Holy Grail [1995] makes McCulloch's most explicitly positive statement concerning traditional western religious faith. In Start Again [CANDLELAND; 1989], he tells us, simply: "Nothing dies/Nothing ever dies". The chorus of a 1997 song, Don't Let It Get You Down, also seems unequivocal in its declaration that:
"God's above us
And Jesus loves us
Yeah, God's above us
And Jesus loves us….
If you want it, you can get it…." [IM; Don't Let It Get You Down; EVERGREEN; 1997]
But McCulloch often casts statements relating to God and the Hereafter in the subjunctive. And sometimes the Poet expresses more doubt than uncertainty, and not a little resentment [italics mine]:
"Fingers crossed that there's a heaven" [IM; Horse's Head; CANDLELAND; 1989]
"Father forget us
Or Father forgive us" [IM; An Eternity Turns; FLOWERS; 2001]
"God's on high and so am I
My truth just goes to prove the lie" [IM; Never; BURNED; 1995]
"God's above and all He's really thinking of is
How much pain you've gotta pay" [IM; Altamont; EVERGREEN; 1997]
"I'm torn between
What you know and what I've seen" [IM; Moses; GORGEOUS (808 State album); 1992]
We have here the dilemma of every thinking human being: the need to believe in something larger than ourselves set against our own rational thought processes and personal experience.
McCulloch makes several attempts to sort through these issues on the eponymous 1987 Bunnymen album. Bomber's Bay and All My Life, a pair of songs with a shared line, debate how "God's one miracle", the human soul, can still maintain itself and grow in the midst of a world often gone astray. Bomber's Bay, one of McCulloch's rare commentaries on the world situation, takes the larger perspective. The song opens by lamenting humanity's endless cycles of militarism and war:
"The planes flew in
And laid the ground
We built upon
And spun around
God's one miracle
Lost in circles...." [IM; Bomber's Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
"The planes", as impersonal as a force of nature, rain devastation, heedless of the human misery they create below. Thus the troubles of the outside world intrude upon - and sometimes destroy - individual lives. We may all be drawn in, whether we wish it or not:
"Cannon fire came to call
Stood us up and watched us fall
---------------------------------------
Our costumes changed to uniforms" [IM; Bomber's Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
This periodic march to destruction has gone on throughout history, and McCulloch, employing a few lines of a song from World War I [Note 4], advises turning to one's own smaller world for comfort:
"Pack up your troubles and you'll all get by
Smile boys, that's the style...." [IM; Bomber's Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
This is the camaraderie of the soldiers in the trenches. Stick together ("you'll all get by"), and maintain a positive outlook. The world, McCulloch concludes, has its own ways of dealing with its problems. Religion serves a protective function. Evolution and change come about in the world because we believe they can, and we base that belief around some higher power:
"They give us hope and teach us well
With magic moons that cast a spell
And hypnotise, and draw us in
I believe
I'm believing
God's one miracle
Moves in circles...." [IM; Bomber's Bay; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
The first part of this suggests cynicism - religion promoted by the state as a panacea for the masses -- but the concluding couplet pulls us away from that interpretation. These "circles" are the dichotomous counterparts to the destructive "circles" of the planes. Nothing has been truly "lost".
All My Life picks up on this theme, from the perspective of individual men and women faced with their own particular moral dilemmas in a fallen and confused world:
"Men not devils have claimed us
Purity deserting
God's one miracle
Lost in circles...." [IM; All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
McCulloch replaces the cycles of war with "laughter and crying", the joys and sorrows around which our lives revolve. The larger world of Bomber's Bay does come briefly into focus, making explicit the link between the two songs:
"Cannon fire burning
On the hillside...." [IM; All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
The faceless automatons of war (which McCulloch refers to slightingly as "tin soldiers") are heard in the distance. Forces beyond our control hover over our lives. We are besieged from within and without. All seems "Lost in circles".
As it so often does for both Rossetti and McCulloch, the answer lies (pun intended) in the love world. All My Life gives a subtle but clear indication of the interconnectedness of romantic/physical love and spirituality:
"Songs for life's lost lovers
Bittersweet their healing
Their prayers prayed under covers
Need not kneeling
God's one miracle
Moves in circles...." [IM; All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
Both Bomber's Bay and All My Life speak out strongly for the individual in an indifferent, dehumanized world. Machines ("the planes") destroy what men have built. States make pawns of their citizens in games of war and death. Evil, once comfortably embodied in the "devils" of old (so everyone knew where it was), has now garbed itself in mufti ("Men not devils have claimed us"). "Purity" has fallen by the way. All of this sounds like a Pre-Raphaelite manifesto from 1848. The Pre-Raphaelites were reacting against the industrial movement and its effects on 19th Century society. Our own age poses its own dangers to "God's one miracle", as McCulloch has noted. "Oh how the times have changed us", his Poet sighs [IM; All My Life; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]. The Pre-Raphaelite solution involved a return to an older, simpler, more 'pure' time. McCulloch usually does not go so far as that. Nor does his strain of anti-modernity run so deep. He does counsel a turn inward, to the love world and the individual self, and the nurturing of the soul's innate spirituality.
McCulloch habitually distinguishes between religious doctrines and dogmas, which his Poet views with suspicion if not contempt, and this natural, inborn spirituality, an agent of growth and cohesiveness. Seven Seas, a jubilant celebration of life and the freedom of spirit found within the love world, suggests the soul's renewal through a return to a simpler and more ancient form of religiosity:
"Hear the cavemen singing
Good news they're bringing
----------------------------------
A longing for some fresher feeling
Belonging or just forever kneeling
Where's the sense in stealing
Without the grace to be it?" [IM; Seven Seas; OCEAN RAIN; 1984]
The inhabitants of this regenerate world strike out upon their own spiritual path, "Burning the witches with mother religious" - and though these "witches" are not identified, one suspects they bear such names as 'Dogma' and 'Doctrine'. Religious feeling, in McCulloch's worldview, should come from within, not be dictated by outside authority:
"You say belief
Is in our eyes
But how can I believe
In blind lies?" [IM; In Bluer Skies; PORCUPINE; 1983]
Nor should man's inherent capacity for intelligent, rational thought be rejected in favor of unquestioning faith - a particular point of contention for McCulloch's Poet:
"I pray
And nothing happens
Jesus
It's all in my mind
You say
Stop looking for answers
And reasons
They're all in your mind" [IM; All in Your Mind; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
There is some interesting word usage here. "Jesus" may be the subject, the personage being addressed, or an exclamation. Those who tell the Poet that "answers and reasons" are "all in your mind" probably intend this as 'they lie within yourself', but the Poet interprets it as 'they are all imaginary'. Perhaps this is why etiquette books advise against religion as a topic of casual conversation.
All In Your Mind and New Direction pull in the focus from abstract doctrines to those who preach them. McCulloch apparently follows the old maxim that all priests and shamen should be presumed guilty unless proven innocent. The Poet declares, with studied contempt:
"You've learned to speak and you're professing
The right to teach us our direction
But I found out on close inspection
True imperfection" [IM; New Direction; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
McCulloch reserves his strongest venom for those religious proselytizers who not only presume to dictate morality and belief, but mislead or take advantage of their followers, "Counting the flock while collecting their pounds" [IM; All in Your Mind; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]. "Pounds" is a pun, referring to both the British monetary unit and pounds of wool. Things boil over as the Poet, to use the vernacular, pitches a mad-fit:
"All you thieving wheeler-dealers in the healing zone
Giving me fever fever fever fever
Down to my bones" [IM; All in Your Mind; ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN; 1987]
Hypocrisy, and the fleecing of the gullible, draw McCulloch's ire much more than any doctrines themselves, though he clearly prefers reasoned doubt to blind belief. Since Christian (specifically Catholic) references appear throughout his work, employed with apparent sincerity, it seems his quarrel is not with the idealized concept of the Church, but with those who corrupt it in reality. Again, there is an analogy with the Pre-Raphaelite desire for a return to a (nonexistent) time of purity and honest feeling in both art and religion. This is of course an unattainable goal, and the idealist who seeks it is left to contend with all-too-human forces. The biting (and far superior) original version of McCulloch's 1987 song New Direction ends with a scathing commentary, culminating in one of his few truly cynical lines:
"I was told when I was seven
All good things must go to Heaven
All my evils would be blessed
If to God I did confess
He'd wipe the slate of sin and fire
Ate the bread and drank the wine
So as you're leaving the fake procession
Just grab a bottle and start confessing" [IM; New Direction (original version); CRYSTAL DAYS (retrospective box set); 2001]
McCulloch, a spiritual man who expresses distrust of the structures and forms of religion (he does seem to like the trappings), uses religious ideas and imagery extensively in his work. Rossetti, a professed (albeit very superstitious) agnostic, loved the formalities of traditional western religion. His mother and both his sisters believed devoutly, and the Rossetti household reverberated with high Anglican and Tractarian sentiments [Note 5]. But the greatest influence was Dante. The young Rossetti's carefully-wrought translations of La Vita Nuova and works by other medieval Italian poets [1861] (begun perhaps as early as 1845, when Rossetti was only seventeen) drenched him in the culture of a world in which the Church stood at the immovable center, a world he regarded as his heritage. Though not sure if he believed in God, he did believe in Dante. Hand and Soul, a short story written when he was twenty-one, amounts to a medieval artist's mission statement:
"But who bade thee strike the point betwixt love and faith? Wouldst thou sift the warm breeze from the sun that quickens it?....Give thou to God no more than He asketh of thee; but to man also, that which is man's....
Know that there is but this means whereby thou mayest serve God with man:--Set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with God." [DGR; Hand and Soul; 1850]
Subtitute the word 'Nature' for "God" and we have a Pre-Raphaelite mission statement. The idealistic young Rossetti no doubt believed wholeheartedly in every word. And a slightly older Rossetti changed the word to 'Love' and never lost his faith.
This religious historicism shines forth in The Blessed Damozel, Rossetti's best known -- and arguably his most intrinsically Rossettian -- poem. Set upon a Heavenly stage, its themes of woman as savior and the undying power of love play out in what Rossetti described as a counterpart to Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Instead of the bereaved lover on earth, we see the Damozel ['damsel'] in Heaven:
"It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on;
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It lies in Heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge" [DGR; The Blessed Damozel; 1847-1870]
This stunning bit of imagery gives Heaven concreteness, placing it firmly in real space. Rossetti's vision of Heaven is unique; Dante and his more fleshly early Italian poet brethren intermingled with Rossetti's own vivid imagination and desires, heartily seasoned with Tractarian symbolism and a good dash of Poe. One aspect stands out. Dante's Heavenly denizens do not yearn for earthly pleasures, nor even for their Beloveds. Rossetti's clearly do. As the Damozel leans upon "the gold bar of Heaven", thinking of her lover, we are told that:
"Around her, lovers, newly met
'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remembered names
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames." [DGR; The Blessed Damozel; 1847-1870]
Rossetti's Heaven startles in the very human physicality of those souls who dwell there. The Damozel, though she be "blessed", remains a beautiful and desirable woman. Rossetti tells us of her deep, calm eyes, "Like waters stilled at even", her golden hair, her voice, "like the voice the stars/Had when they sang together". He even suggests "her bosom must have made/The bar she leaned on warm" -- certainly a comment Dante never made about his Beatrice.
The Damozel longs for her lover's arrival, and has but one heartfelt, very Rossettian desire:
"There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me:--
Only to live as once on earth
With Love,--only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he…." [DGR; The Blessed Damozel; 1847-1870]
In other words, she is going to ask Jesus if she can have earthly love in Heaven. Moreover, she is not happy in Heaven without her lover. All the glories of the Hereafter, Mary, Jesus and all the saints are not enough without him. The poem ends with her weeping.
The Damozel's plight is simple, touching, and highly subversive to most religious teaching. Never conventional in his thought, Rossetti began moving away from personal religious faith in his early twenties. Though he held on to his idiosyncratic vision of what Heaven should be, he clearly felt no assurance of its reality:
"Cling heart to heart; nor of this hour demand
Whether in very truth, when we are dead,
Our hearts shall wake to know Love's golden head
Sole sunshine of the imperishable land;
Or but discern, through night's unfeatured scope,
Scorn-fired at length the illusive eyes of Hope." [DGR; Love and Hope; 1871]
For Rossetti, God was always the god Love, and Heaven the love world. The Dark Glass, another sonnet from 1871, may stand as his definitive statement on religion:
"...what am I to Love, the lord of all?
One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,--
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand.
Yet through thine [the Beloved's] eyes he grants me clearest call
And veriest touch of powers primordial
That any hour-girt life may understand." [DGR; The Dark Glass; 1871]
Not being a medieval Italian acolyte (and preferring to leave abstract concepts in the abstract), McCulloch offers no dramatically detailed Heavenly tableaux. The closest he comes to any description of the Hereafter is in the Poet's adjuration to someone unnamed but apparently departed:
"So tell me how it feels
Tell me how it feels
To touch the flame
Tell me who I am
Tell me who I really am
What's my name?" [IM; Don't Let It Get You Down; EVERGREEN; 1997]
McCulloch presents us with uncertainties, not definitions. Rossetti questioned as well, but often filled in answers from his medieval models. His artistic vision drew upon religion in an historical/cultural context, not as theology. McCulloch looks inward and offers a poignant contemplation of questions no human being can truly claim to have answers for:
"Don't want to know when
Don't wanna know why
Don't wanna believe that life is just to die
--------------------------------------------------
I wanna go out, the way I came in
My flame blowing out
In the Summer wind…." [IM; Buried Alive; FLOWERS; 2001]
Note 4: This may also reference the Richard Farina song, Pack Up Your Sorrows, which bears similarities in theme to In Bluer Skies, Ocean Rain, and the closing refrain of Nothing Lasts Forever. Farina wrote a novel, BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT SEEMS LIKE UP TO ME, which is (possibly) referenced in Too Far Gone. Back to text
Note 5: Rossetti's older sister, Maria, herself a Dante scholar, became an Anglican nun. The younger, Christina, was a poet whose fame rivals his. Much of her poetry was devotional, and her secular, Pre-Raphaelite works show strong religious influences. Back to text
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An Annotated Discography: Works by Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, Electrafixion and Glide (off-site link)
Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion: Album Reviews (off-site link)
The Bunnymen Concert Log: A comprehensive, annotated listing of concert dates, venues and set lists for Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion (off-site link)
Bunnymen.info - The (Unofficial) News Source (off-site link, run by Charles Pham)
Aldems' Political Quotations: Apt and Otherwise
BlindFool and Scruffy Dog: Dilettantes-at-Large
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