The Graceland exegesis

“The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar . . . .”

You ever seen a National?  High-buffed all-nickel-steel body—up there, under the stage lights, or out in the sun at an afternoon bluegrass jam, they gleam all blue and silver like solidified moonlight.  That’s the color I think the Delta was, the night Paul Simon’s pilgrim drove from Tupelo to Memphis with his son, looking to follow the secular god of music, the truck-driving kid with ambition and a guitar and a head already full of movies in which he was the star.

The Delta was blue and silver that night; a full moon washed the land clean, turning woods to black cutouts standing against a navy sky, making scattered chrome plate of each puddle standing in a furrow empty of cotton and cane the land could no longer support.

Under that moon, cars and buses rolled toward the place he had made for himself and, so doing, made a place for them too.  The poor boys and the pilgrims, traveling toward the land of grace, toward the state of grace—the grace their religions always promised them but somehow could never deliver in this life.  They are coming, looking for healing, hoping to leave behind the ghosts of failure, or failed love, of failed lives, of failures they could no more name than understand.

The pilgrim hoped to be healed there, to find a way to close the space blown open like a slatting window in his chest, a hole where love had blown away on a wind that carried his lover with it.  That’s how it feels, for certain.  You have this huge empty place where your love used to be, and now it’s not there any longer.  And the only thing you can do is to pray, to whatever it is you believe in, that someday you will also be received into the Grace land.

Many years ago, a lover and I lay together and I told her about how this song makes me feel, and what I think it means.  And when we broke up, the window in my heart opened wide and didn’t close for a very long time, and I knew again that Paul Simon was right, and the song was right, and he’d written two or three of the most perfect lines in all of American pop music in this lyric.  And what you just read is what I said that night, as closely as I can re-create it.