Part V - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug's Sketch of a Promised Departure

4. What Is Good Will Never Change

This song is truly remarkable. It flies in the face of almost a century of modern philosophy and stands in line with over two millennia of pre-20th Century thought and three or four millennia of religion. To claim that goodness is immutable is to assert that it is real and that it is transcendent. It is to deny claims such as that there are no moral absolutes, that what is good is culturally determined, or that, to quote an early Pug song, “There’s nothing wrong with doing wrong.” To believe in anything transcendent or immutable at all is a genuine feat in our day and age, and to believe that goodness has those qualities is almost superhuman. Yet here Pug is, asserting something Platonists, Aristotelians, Kantians, Muslims, Jews, and Christians can all get behind. 

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A listener might wonder why this needs to be said at all. A person who wonders this might be a stoic or a Christian, happily ignorant of postmodern dogmas such as, “All truth claims are power claims.” They might have the unshakeable belief that no matter what happens on earth to matter and bodies, institutions and cultures, what is right and valuable endures and applies to all persons through all time. Even if you burn every Bible on earth and drown every copy of The Phaedo deeper than Prospero’s books, what is true, good, and beautiful will not be changed or killed.

The zeitgeist that has animated mainstream culture and elite institutions for a long time does not see it this way. It is to people animated by this zeitgeist that this song might as well be addressed. The persons contradicted by this song think that if you destroy the physical vessels believed to hold value, then you can make new vessels to hold new values. They think you can create your own goods by transvaluing the old ones. They are party members in Oceania; they set up Ministries of Truth and think that by erasing records of history they can change what history is. Down the memory hole with the old facts and new facts can be established. There is no Truth, Beauty, or Goodness at the top of Being–there’s just Power, and Power gets to install whatever it wants in the heavens. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and they can condition the beholder to find anything beautiful. For such people, there is no transcendence; there is only immanence. Immanence is all flux and it all ends in the heat death of the universe.

The ones contradicted by this song do not believe that what is good will never change. They “lie and say it does.” They are wont to “overturn a statue” and “drag it through the mud” in the attempt to dethrone the stars from the sky and make mockery of them. Against such immanent revolutionaries, the speaker of this song asserts that “Far above this broken city / There’s a beauty that remains / What is lost won’t be forgotten / What is good will never change.” Our civilization, our institutions, might be in states of disaster, but Beauty abides in the heavens, and no matter what happens to its physical vessel by way of war, revolution, vandalism, or decay, the Forms endure. 

The chorus reminds me of the moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam and Frodo have hit rock bottom in the land of Mordor. They’re out of energy, out of time, and out of hope. They can see no way to finish the quest, and it looks like evil will conquer the world. At this moment, Sam looks up at the night sky:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Tolkien, The Return of the King, pp. 199

I won’t say anything about that moment, but I will point out that Pug has gone even further than he does in the song “The Measure.” On that track from Bright Beginnings, he sings, “All we’ve lost is nothing to what we’ve found.” That isn’t contradicted in these lines, but here even what’s been lost won’t be forgotten. And that wouldn’t be possible if there weren’t someone always around to remember what was lost. And in light of the fact that everyone will die, and that someday, there won’t be anyone around to read whatever’s left of history, we have to wonder if the existence of at least one immortal Being isn’t being assumed here. 

The chorus affirms the immutability of Goodness and Beauty, but what about the third Transcendental–Truth? The word doesn’t occur in the song, but it’s opposite does. Furthermore, the speaker assumes truth’s existence. After affirming that goodness doesn’t change, Pug sings, “you can lie and say it does.” Apparently, there is a way things are and humans are capable of misrepresenting it. Furthermore, the abiding nature of Goodness and Beauty enforces the existence of Truth by the very fact of their existence. The Truth about Goodness and Beauty necessarily exists if Goodness and Beauty exist and never change. A further discussion of Being, or especially of “Reality,” goes beyond the point of this piece, but the speaker in the song has no truck with the notion that Reality is merely a human construction. Human efforts can’t ultimately affect it's nature.

The chorus almost contains a suggestion (which Pug almost certainly does not mean to make) that is almost more shocking than that of the eternal existence of goodness. And let me preface this by saying I have no doubt that Joe Pug is an upstanding, completey decent citizen: this verse only shocks me because in this age of hamfisted political and moral dimwitedness, making wise utterances adjacent to such matters and trusting your audience to assume the best is brave. So if it comes down to it, cancel me, not Joe Pug. But the statue metaphor he uses in the chorus isn’t without its literal antecedents. When the speaker suggests that not even the destruction and degradation of statuary can damage the Beauty or Goodness represented therein, a denizen of early 21st Century American can’t help but recall all the hullabaloo about tearing down civil war monuments and effigies of individuals that have been identified as racist. The incident I always think of is the clash in front of the “The Apotheosis of St. Louis” in the statue’s subject’s eponymous city. In the video I watched, Catholic defenders of the statue nonviolently squared off against woke protestors wielding air horns, painted slogans, and a pointed lack of anything resembling manners or regard for the statue’s defenders' values. I don’t know who was actually standing in the way of the iconoclasts, but it’s safe to guess they like the Catholic saint and what he stands for. A little half-assed internet research will tell you he’s regarded as the ideal Christian monarch. He may have funded a crusade or two, but he was also a patron of the arts, and according to Wikipedia, fed one hundred poor persons in his house a day, sometimes even serving them himself. If that’s true, I can think of far worse subjects for public statuary.

For me, that particular statue clash was pretty easy to judge. I’m more ambivalent about civil war monuments. The legacy of racism and slavery is impossible to disentangle from the Confederacy, but I’m generally disinclined to support the obliteration of any trace of historically significant individuals because of their worst flaws. I don’t believe that 99% of the enlightened modern people judging the dead from the comfortable perch of the 21st Century would’ve done any better if they were born into the bad old meanies’ position. But even that statement, and the evaluations implicit in what I’m saying, is only possible because I believe what Joe Pug sings: what is good will never change. It was never right to enslave Africans. It was never right to be an antisemite. It was never right to send children on crusades to wage war against Muslims. But it’s also never right to pharisaically exclude yourself from the moral culpability and universal fallenness of the human race. Besides, some of the same people who want to tear down statues of Robert E. Lee would happily decapitate, dismember, and pulverize the David of Michelangelo. It’s a product of the same eurocentric, white-supremacist culture that produced Jefferson Davis after all.

Again, cancel me, not Joe Pug.

I have no real idea how he feels about our modern iconoclasm. To me, he’s never overtly or merely political, but having heard him express some of his values, many of which are pretty liberal, no one can tell me he’s racist, on the wrong side of history, or aligned with the “Lost Cause.” After all, the speaker of “I Do My Father’s Drugs” says, “You will see me at the protest.” It therefore seems highly unlikely that the chorus is meant in defense of keeping Confederate monuments in prominent places. But as I said, those aren’t the only kinds of statues people want to demolish, and if Pug hopes his children will “work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of,” I bet I can tell you how he’d feel about people splattering portraits with tomato soup or desecrating statues of the Virgin Mary. And to give the Devil his due, I should point out that every age has its vandals and iconoclasts. Protestants even have a pretty salty record of smashing stained glass windows, burning effigies, and slashing portraits. 

The second verse adds to the affirmation of Transcendence a guarantee of something like the perseverance of good character and the possibility of redemption. Pug again draws from scripture when he sings: “No matter where you’ve wandered off to / No matter how far afield you’ve strayed / Underneath a heavy ocean / Deep inside a rotten cave.” In Psalm 139 David sings about God’s omnipresence and omniscience: 

If I ascend to heaven, You are there;

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn,

If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,

Even there your hand will lead me,

And your right hand will lay hold of me. Verses 8-10

It doesn’t take too much work to pair the locations in the song lyrics to the locations in the psalm, but it’s worth adding a few other instances in which individuals have found themselves in such undesirable places. The prophet Jonah, having fled from God’s calling, found himself tossed into the heart of the Mediterranean (see his prayer in chapter 2 of his eponymous Old Testament Book). A rotten cave isn’t unlike a tomb, either, and though Christ can’t be said to have wandered or strayed into a cave, He is the true and better Jonah who didn’t run away from God’s calling, who nevertheless spent three days in the tomb, just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish, and who came out onto dry land and the light of day on Easter Sunday. Any cave reference is liable to provoke thoughts of Plato’s cave, too, and in the context of the error implied by wandering and straying, this connotation of the word is almost more appropriate than the reading of rotten cave as tomb. Something like the world of Forms is up there, and cave dwellers do well to remember it.

But what possibility of redemption remains for you if you find yourself under a heavy ocean or deep inside a rotten cave? “Still you sing a song that’s holy,” sings Pug, “Still you burn a perfect flame,” and then comes the refrain: “What is lost won’t be forgotten / What is good will never change.” Religious language applied to secular phenomena is not unprecedented, and this “holy song” here could be Pug’s way of characterizing good music, literally, or of metaphorically indicating the hope and light someone carries with them, like the bluebird Miranda Lambert keeps in her heart. But it would also be fitting if a “holy song” also alludes to the source of the images in the second verse, which could be something not unlike a psalm. In any case, the singing of this holy song recalls the first track, in which the speaker sings a song he doesn’t want to sing. 

Here, I might as well pause to point out that the speaker in track one, who clearly resembles Jesus in many ways, also resembles Joe Pug. He is a singer by trade, after all. And it wouldn’t be unheard of for a singer to get tired of doing his job–or of having to play his most popular song over and over, even if they’ve grown tired of it. Pug has even expressed something not unlike regret at having pursued his calling as a musician. For evidence of that claim, check out the single “I Don’t Work at a Bank” and the essay, “Dispatch 06: All Roads Lead to BowlingStallet.” 

In addition to singing this holy song in even the worst circumstances, the “you” described in verse two also “burns a perfect flame.” This image of a flame becomes a motif in the album, and it is displayed nowhere more prominently than in the refrain of the next track, “Brother John (Charcoal on Paper).” But here “the perfect flame” is a single tongue of fire, a unit of life and light that shines in spite of darkness. I could reference an Elton John song or go on about the various sources possibly alluded to through this metaphor and its various meanings. It’s all better left unsaid. The meaning of the metaphor is self-evident, and I’ll not mangle it further. I can make no promises, however, for the flame’s return in the next song.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1955.

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