Finding New Patron Saints
It’s hard to say goodbye to the things that helped save your life. Words, ideas, songs, books, habits. All things that kept me moving. Kept me seen. Things that loved me real well and things I tried to love back the same way. Stuff I needed at the time.
Dan Barrett, dude behind the solo avant-folk masterpiece Giles Corey, one of the most harrowing, true-2-life artistic depictions of depression I’ve ever encountered, wrote a book that was meant to accompany the album. Reading the book alongside the album was a defining artistic experience for me. Christmas afternoon, off-balance after digesting Barrett’s fractured fictional but hyper-believable narrative about a cult leader and his bizarre alternative philosophy. The album itself was already one of my favorites of all time. It’s a crushing, haunting collection of inky songs and soundscapes that feel like meditations on the merciful end of an exhausted world. It’s genuinely harrowing. It’s the first time i’ve felt like I had truly understanding company in desperation.
As much as it’s meant to me over the years, it’s not something I can recommend listening to in good conscience. Some things need to be engaged on their own terms. It’s the kind of art that finds its way to you when you need it. The kind that should be taken seriously. It’s ugly, unyielding, and uncompromisingly honest. Not something to experiment with. Something to be prepared for. The only surefire way to be prepared is to have faced the something of the kind of desperation it is formed from.
The titular character, Giles Corey, a central figure in the very real Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. He was, by all accounts, a problem. He almost certainly beat an indentured servant to death for reasons we can’t quite make out. He was notoriously disagreeable, designedly obstinate, and resolutely unafraid of being hated by his entire community. In short, he was a perfect candidate for execution in the midst of a bonafide witch hunt that was, in part, used as a way to conveniently eliminate the more frustrating members of the Salem community.
The Salem Witch Trials were filled with sympathetic characters; many innocent lives were cut short over petty grievances and unwarranted hysteria. Giles Corey is one of the most difficult victims to feel truly sorry for. To be sure, being an 80 year old man falsely accused of witchcraft is an unenviable position, but Corey’s history makes his accusation feel like some kind of recompense for old sins: a lifetime defined by cruelties, large and small. However, Corey’s behavior during his trial gives us a bit more to think about.
Unsurprisingly, and possibly admirably, Corey remained the same kind of recalcitrant during his accusation that he had been throughout his life. Even when confession meant some chance at survival, Corey did everything in his power to mock, frustrate, and otherwise inconvenience the proceedings he and much of the community saw as an insane sham. He treated it the way most of us might wish we could, with an indignant refusal to cooperate with injustice and a tireless vitriol towards everyone and everything involved. He was sentenced to death by crushing, which is exactly what it sounds like. His last words, appropriate in every measure, were a request for “more weight.”
It is this image of Corey that Barrett frames his album around. The old man who lived his life in bitterness and left it crushed and immobilized by a force he couldn’t hope to defend himself against. His treatment of depression and desperation emphasize the way it crushes. Immobilizes. The theft of choice. The death of option. The way it melts the will and paralyzes desire. The crushing of Giles Corey is Barrett’s depressive parallel, so much so that Corey becomes his ‘patron saint of sadness, forever.’
At the time I found it, I needed something like Giles Corey. I needed a patron saint of sadness. Something to watch over me that I could feel. I could hear. I could pick apart and know with something like depth. I needed a story and a song. I needed to be known in moments. Known with a particularity I could put into words. Giles Corey gave me those moments. Something to think about that wasn’t entirely myself.
I think that’s an important part of art. It gives us patron saints, if only for moments. Stories and ideas and experiences that carry us to the next moment. Points of revelation and understanding that push us towards something. Pieces of companionship and fellowship and love and truth that take you outside of yourself and force you to recognize the extent to which your understandings are incomplete. Good art and its good patron saints lead you to pursue fuller understandings. In some cases, you only need them for a little while. They guide you to the next saint. The next truth. The next night.
Maturing means realizing that you will not always need the same saints. I don’t need Giles Corey anymore. I don’t need a patron saint of sadness anymore, at least not that kind of sadness. As you heal and grow, you learn to look for things more befitting of your condition and more amenable to getting you where you want to go. You start to notice that there are an infinity of patron saints everywhere for every conceivable purpose. Innumerable sources of guidance and motion, to hold you in the moment and bring you to the next one. Blessings to search for, discern through, and learn to love. Recognizing the truth of where you are and what you need. You start to see your life as a progression. Towards better, towards something coherent. A string of things you loved and still love, but don’t need anymore. Small steps you needed to take towards healing. The company you needed in nights before you could provide it. The people you needed to lead you before you could lead. The sadness you had to survive before you could learn from it.
Giles Corey led me to new saints of sadness. John Milton’s Samson, Arthurian Legend’s Fisher King, Jack Kerouac’s Gerard Duluoz, The Bible’s Lamentations, St. Augustine, Jesus. It also led me to the realization that I can have patron saints of other things as well. Humility, patience, gentleness. It’s eternal movement forward. Eternal seeking, eternal community. Eternal communion with beautiful things. Honoring them and remembering the role they played in forming you and moving you into better times.
I’m learning to choose my saints well. With discretion. With an understanding of the Spirit I am of. Of the unfathomable blessing I have been given so freely. O Lord please give me the guidance I need to chose well and to honor those that brought me to you.