Joseph O’Connor: Paul Simon knows the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away

This time of year brings a shimmer of memories of summertime in Connemara, a place for which my Dublin father has immense fondness. In Spiddal on a Sunday, he’d take me to Mass, at which a small choir of local men sang the Psalms in Irish.

This was muscular music, the Psalms as unadorned work songs, music to pull a bull out of a ditch to. I can never hear Seán Ó Riada’s choral settings, written to be sung in unison, not harmony, without travelling back down the years.

I thought of them when I heard Paul Simon’s new record Seven Psalms, played in its magnificent entirety by John Kelly on his Lyric FM programme a few weeks ago, perhaps the first time the maestro of mystery has played a whole album in one show. With storytelling heft but instrumental sparseness, this epistle from Paul hits home.

Some will say it isn’t an album in the usual meaning of the word. The seven pieces flow in and out of each other, tributaries always moving back to the source. It’s a strange and strangely beautiful listening experience. Opening to the sound of bells, the work lasts a little over half an hour but never really stops once you’ve heard it.

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Paul Simon has been a part of my listening life for so long that I barely noticed he was there. As a teenage punk fan, into X-Ray Spex and The Stranglers, I pretended to dislike his witty, urbane personae and the folky overtones it was essential to beslobber with scorn in that dayglo era. But I knew he was a marvel, even while dissing him.

I remember the unfortunate man whose lot was to teach me English for the Inter Cert, trying to explain what onomatopoeia was: “You know that song, The Boxer? Well, think of the T sound where Paul Simon sings, ‘CUT him’.”

Surely the ghost of Allen Ginsberg (“Where are we going, Walt Whitman?”) whispers behind such poignant questions as “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

The storyteller who began his greatest album with the irresistible words “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar” sprinkles metaphors like glitter at Glastonbury. “Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose.” “Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake.” As with all great poets, loss features often. “Losing love is like a window in the heart.”

His beautiful croon was nurtured on the harmonies of doo-wop and soul, the lyricism that arose in the wake of the oceanic liner that was Dylan. Here is a writer who has always known what some never realise, that words are sounds before they are anything else. In the beginning was not the meaning, but the word.

The biblical influence in his work is discernible from the outset. Psalm 147 shores up the lyric of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Mrs Robinson is reminded that “Heaven holds a place for those who pray.” But, as Ecclesiastes puts it, and as Westlife proved, there is no new thing beneath the sun.

I was young in the era where Psalm 137 became the slightly worrying Boney M hit, By the Rivers of Babylon. Scriptural cadences and Blakean visions empowered the majesty of my heroine, Patti Smith. The Psalms may be glimpsed in reggae and the blues, in Nick Cave, Aretha Franklin, U2, Van Morrison and in Lenny Kaye’s collaborations with Jessi Coulter.

The long literary tradition of imaging the divine may have commenced with the psalmist. God is a fortress in the work of the metaphysical poets, a bird in the works of Hopkins, a lighthouse or lifeboat in the gospel glories recorded by the Blind Boys of Alabama and Mahalia Jackson.

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On the brilliant Seven Psalms, Simon steps into this living stream of imagery. “The Lord is my engineer”, and “a forest ranger”, “a swift and terrible sword”, “a meal for the poorest of the poor, a door to the stranger”, “the earth I ride on”, “a face in the atmosphere”. But there are darker takes too. Even “the Covid virus is the Lord”. Paul Simon is too great an artist for evasions.

It was wonderful to see his recent praise for Irish writer Donal Ryan and, in some ways, not surprising. Paul Simon, like Donal, finds high lyricism in quotidian speech. Not for Simon the brilliant labyrinthine somersaults of mid-career Lennon but rather a spikier demotic that anticipates Laurie Anderson and David Byrne. On Seven Psalms, he musters everyday language to powerful effect.

All the emotional tones of the original psalms are here. Rage, doubt, righteousness, reverence. Simon rows his boat with skilful, rugged honesty, negotiating the strange archipelago that arises when you realise the number of people younger than you is growing, the number of those older is lessening, but the full understanding you sought hasn’t come and it mightn’t. Those words you wrote in an old song might turn out to be true. The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away.

But this magnificent record suggests that the world still has graces and new mercies, even when they’re hardest to see.

Joseph O’Connor’s latest novel, My Father’s House, is published by Vintage. He will read with poet Mary O’Malley at BallaghDream Arts Fest, Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, on Tuesday, August 8th. ballaghdreamartsfest.ie