The Welsh have a word.

It has no simple English translation but roughly means a longing for a place or time to
which you cannot return. A yearning for that which no longer exists or, perhaps, never
really was.

Hiraeth is the grief for lost and unreachable places. For home.

Home is the first thing you know. It crawls into you young and then slowly begins to
dissolve. It dissolves into far off cities and ambition. It boils away under a flame of desire
and confidence that the future will be sweeter than the past.

Until one day you find yourself surrounded by strangers and compromise, and home, is
suddenly unreachable. What's left is only the smoke from a fire that once warmed you.
As inescapable and as it is beyond grasp.

Before long you carry an old photo in your wallet, a relic of who you used to be. A
passport for a country that no longer exists. You stare at it like a map that will someday
offer a way back from all that Time has taken.

The first time I felt the hiraeth was listening to Paul Simon through the small stereo my
older brother kept between our beds. I was just a boy and Simon was not much more
than a boy himself.

Homeward Bound… I wish I was.

​

Even then he seemed trapped in a kind of loneliness to me. Wedded to the scratches
and manacled to the groove.

As a boy I wanted only the world beyond my bedroom. To be older and free. I wanted
anywhere else and longed for leaving.

Much later I did. And alone in the world occasionally I would hear that song again.
Scraping for rent or had not eaten in a couple days. Sleeping in church pews and on
floors or friend’s couches.

I found my way to New York City and an Irish neighborhood in the shadow of the 59th
St. Bridge. I was young and poor and living alone. Unsure that I belonged to anything
but some kind of unbelonging.

By then something else had crept into the song. The lyric carried a new weight. I didn’t
know the word then but understood the feeling. Hiraeth.

I heard it in Paul Simon’s voice. He explained it with his sound.

Homeward Bound, I wish I was.

By then Paul Simon had found his way back to America. He sang My Little Town, about
returning to his home, that though still intact, had gone missing in some other essential
way.

“Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.” As though home or the very
idea of it, had evaporated.

“Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” Simon called out again and again from the
radio.

“Where have you gone…”

Joe never answered. So, each of us, Simon and I, began searching. Another kind of
home run.

Searching for a country that, while all around us still, had in some other way
disappeared. Disappeared into Vietnam and Watergate. Into supply side theory, 911,
two wars, a global financial collapse, the rise of fascism both here and abroad.
Jolting Joe has left and gone away. Disappeared into the hiraeth.

I wasn’t much more than a boy, searching 7th Avenue with my pockets full of promises.
And like The Boxer I too was cleansed of my innocence, and began to grapple with the
first and permanent stain of loneliness. The kind that reaches in, introduces itself and,
even after you’ve tried to throw it out, never altogether leaves. And I began to dream of
returning home. Of made beds and soft glances.

​

Like Simon, I went home to the place home used to occupy. We all try. And I too
discovered, as each of us must, that I had become a stranger to my own past. Trying in
vain to recover some place that, as Simon had warned, no longer existed.

When I hear The Boxer now I still listen with the ears of that boy. An artless artist, a
wordless writer. Drinking in all I felt pulsing beneath the eyes of strangers. I still recall
the feel of 3 am cold, my hands cracked from nightshift winter, shivering trying to unlock
the door of a tiny apartment.

Songwriters guard word space like coyotes guard roadkill. I could never understand the
waste of word space in The Boxer chorus.

Li la li …li la li…you know it.

But in countries that do not understand English, there is no mistaking its power as a
choir of thousands echo a wordless anthem about an everyday unfairness and the
common kind of courage that can rise to meet it. About taking the small day to day
beatings yet remaining intact in some other unspeakable but essential way.

The fighter forever leaving, remains. Endlessly battered, but forever unbroken.

“I am leaving, I am leaving," he vows again and again.

Like all of us, over the years I have listened to the calls of the leavers. The lost lovers
and friends, the suicides, the refugees from their own dreams crying out that they could
no longer bear to stay.

I too whispered late at night into a mirror…I am leaving, I am leaving.

Still, I remained. Li - La - Li.

Paul remained as well. He remained faithful to the hiraeth, searching across the years
not only for a lost hometown but then also something greater. A country.

“Kathy I’m lost,” he sang to a country of pilgrims slowly spinning their tires, like 33s on a
turntable. “All come to look for America.”

All drenched in the hiraeth.

I too drove in circles for more years than I care to remember. But there comes a time
when you can no longer believe in distant places. When you finally lay down all the
useless maps. When you have finally satisfied yourself there is no GPS yet invented for
that place you hear beating like blood in your ears.

Simon had begun to sing of another kind of highway. Not the kind found on any map.
The kind you clear and pave yourself. A toll road that requires you pay only with all you
have endured and leads only in one direction.

​

To graceland.

Years ago a photographer an old friend showed me his darkroom. He had lost his wife
to cancer that year and thrown himself into his work to save himself from the bite of
grief.

He had been shooting some ancient maps for a museum exhibit he wanted to show me.
That night in his studio there was a radio playing low in the background. Graceland
came on.

In the shadows he held up a negative then exposed it to light, transferring the image to
blank paper.

“Watch,” he said as he soaked the paper in a bath of acetic acids. And slowly the hidden
image, an ancient map, rose into view.

He took another roll, followed the same method. Light and acid. An image of his smiling
wife swam up from the blank sheet. He hung the two images side by side. The map and
his wife.

I turned to see him staring at them, and listened

as Simon sang softly in the dark.

“I’m going to Graceland…poor boys and pilgrims…we’re all going to Graceland.”
That road, the road to Graceland, is paved with lost loves and abandoned friends. With
suicides and the excuses we make, with badly built vows and betrayals of ourselves
and others.

And grace, if it comes at all, rises as a kind of residue, from enduring those things each
of us would have given anything to avoid. From the struggle and the suffering of being
human.

Until by some design all the wrong turns and dead ends, all the heartbreak and
sorrow… all the Acid and all the Light become the only way to ever make that road,
finally appear.

“For reasons I cannot explain... some part of me wants to see Graceland”

By then I had begun, in fits and starts, to lay down the endless string of bars and perfect
strangers, their telephone numbers and beds. Their faithless confessions and my own.
That first careless self serving kind of love. The kind without the essential weight of
sacrifice.

But listening once more to Simon, Bridge Over Troubled Water described another kind
of love. Something far greater than just hit and miss hunger. The leaver kind of love.

Instead love slowly became the refusal to turn away when another’s dreams are sanded
down by disappointment or unfairness or heartache.

Bridge Over Troubled Water became for me a hymn. Not to the loud clamor of love but
rather the quiet dogged insistence of it. The decision, no matter the cost, to become a
place of refuge.

And a promise of how the heat of it can finally, simply, surrender to its light.

Simon took on other big ideas too, like mortality in Slip Sliding Away. The song offers a
series of vignettes, of souls struggling as Time slides past each. It ends with a small
story of a father devoted to his distant son. He travels a great distance hoping to explain
himself only to be overcome by the sound of his own silence.

In the end all he is able to do is kiss his sleeping son before departing. A silent
benediction of unspeakable love to which both father and son are born. Each touched
by a longing for something unreachable. For the hiraeth. To my ear it is one of the most
affecting lyrics of our time.

In his latest, 7 Psalms, Simon finally reveals what careful listeners have understood for
years. Somewhere across the decades his songs became hymns and now, at long last,
undisguised prayers.

This time, however, he turns directly to the Engineer, God behind the glass, turning dials
trying to perfect both singer and song.

He argues…praises…beseeches the silence. And then, as every pilgrim must, accepts
the mystery embedded in the pilgrimage.

“ We're all walking down the same road… all refugees of sorts… ”

A couple months ago I heard Simon, now 82, once again singing Homeward Bound. It
was that same voice I heard as a boy, still singing above the vinyl scratches. Still trying
to reach the unreachable place. A voice calling out still, as he did as a young man, for a
way home.

But listening now, the song seems to have deepened. It is shadowed by time and
seasoned by a different kind of longing. At 82 Paul Simon, possessed still by the
hiraeth, sings now for another kind of home. This home, is no longer behind, but ahead.

But I hear something else too. The recordings no longer spin slowly on a turntable.
Instead they now circle the globe at the speed of light. And, though they are now
pristine, I can hear the scratches left. By time and effort. By hard earned grace. By the
hireath.

And it reminds me of my own scratches and grooves. It sings for them.

​

In some mysterious way our greatest writers become receivers, copying down
something unspeakable offered to us through them. By what?

It has many names. The Unconscious. The Muse. The Holy Ghost.

It is some fractured mosaic, a broken whisper, painstakingly pieced together. Waiting to
be dragged up whole from the shadows into sound and light.

Paul Simon is one of these. Migrant. Pilgrim. The patron saint of hiraeth tuned to the
wavelength of a soundless song. Singing his own map.

In interviews for this latest record Simon discussed his gradual and now near total loss
of hearing in one ear.

I hope he recovers. But age and time are pitiless companions. They strip us of our
talents and vanities until only the unadorned core, the soul undressed, remains. When I
listen to him now, that is what I hear.

Theologians tell us the language of God is silence. If that is so I’d like to think the
Engineer… the Record producer is trying to teach Paul Simon a new song, buried
beneath the sound of silence.

I’d like to think He is whispering a secret answer to the hiraeth.

The negative transformed by acid into a map.

The directions home.