The Beetle King On A Coconut Estate
On mewithoutYou's most slept-on-by-me album and how I am so very sorry for calling it "Aaron's record about vegetables or something"
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The Beetle King On A Coconut Estate
I didn’t understand mewithoutYou’s It’s All Crazy, It’s All False, It’s All A Dream, It’s Alright when it came out. (But oh my gosh — look at that picture! Don’t you miss them?!) I am embarrassed to say that — while recently listening to it with ears to hear and lamenting this fact — a fan reached out to me to say, “I remember an interview you gave years ago, wherein you referred to the record as ‘Aaron’s album about vegetables or something.’”
God. Kill me. 🤦♀️ 🙄 🤦♀️
It’s true that, stylistically, I wasn’t in the mood for the kind of musical departure It’s All Crazy was from Brother, Sister, but boy… if ever I begin to wonder whether or not consciousness actually expands, at least I’ve got a statement like that on record as some signifier. (“Be grateful for your sins. They are carriers of grace.”)1
Anyway, I’m vibing.
There’s a song called The Beetle King On A Coconut Estate that’s taking the cake in my life right now. The lyrics are long (linked here) and storied, so you’ll need them to see why, but here’s my take:
A king recognizes that “the Great Mystery has been lit once again.” He wants to send servants — and there are many, ready and willing — to go find it and bring back word about what it is. They try — the Professor with his intellect and the Lieutenant with his self-assuredness — but are each confounded and fail to return with an adequate description. The king realizes something like — as annoying as this is to write out now that I’m doing it — “God has no grandchildren.”
There is no way to be told about the Mystery. One must enter into it.
And so finally, the King recognizes that “his hour at last has drawn nigh” and understands that he must move from the realms of that which can be learned to that which must be experienced.
In the words of Joseph Campbell, “Enlightenment [Salvation, Nirvana, enter-your-words], cannot be communicated, but only the Way to Enlightenment.”
“Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts, ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience.”
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
The King reflects this reality in his frustrated responses to his predecessors:
The Professor: “But when the Beetle Professor returned — he crawled on all six, as his wings had been burned — and described to the finest detail all he'd learned, but there was neither a light nor a heat in his words.”
The Lieutenant: “The Beetle King slammed down his fist: why, your flowery description is no better than his! We sent for the Great Light and you bring us this? We didn't ask what it seems like, we asked what it IS!”)
And so, the King accepts his fate. He gathers his children and begins to describe all that he knows about the Great Mystery — their True Dad — and when all that he knows, riddled with beauty and pain and paradox and the tensions of opposites, is exhausted, he flies “headlong into the blazing unknown,” singing:
“Why not be utterly changed into fire?”
Jewish legend says that on the day of Sinai’s revelation, “God did not appear from one direction, but from all simultaneously, which, however, did not prevent His glory from filling the heaven as well as the earth.”2
No one can be told about the Center from the circumference in a way that satisfies the experience of Being there, but once the Beloved has been utterly changed into fire? — so says Voltaire — the Center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere…
“The Life within all that you see.”
Anthony DeMello
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1911) vol. III, pp. 90-94.