5. Matthew 25:21
In September 2007, the Mountain Goats cancelled a tour date in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Darnielle flew immediately to Ventura, California, where his fifty-nine-year-old mother-in-law, Nancy Chavanothai, was dying of cancer. She died a couple of days after his visit. Six months later, in a hotel in Northampton, he wrote “Matthew 25:21,” a retelling of the trip from the east coast to her bedside. The song is at the heart of The Life of the World to Come—“[its] emotional nakedness is somewhere near the center of the record, and all these stories around it are just sort of sparking off that energy,” he said in a 2010 interview—and, for a lot of people, at the heart of his whole body of work. Who is he, as an artist? He’s someone who is capable of doing this.
It begins at a distance, on the east coast, in an elegiac mood; the evenly spaced D chords (Dmaj7-D6sus2-Dsus4-D5), played with two fingers on the fourth and fifth strings, are very beautiful but also very composed. The rhythm and the D-centered tonality are basically unbroken for the song’s entire five minutes and forty-seven seconds—there’s a couple of other progressions, but the D rings through each of them. The speaker’s feelings aren’t totally in line with that pace and tonality, though. He wants to be composed (And I docked in Santa Barbara/Tried to brace myself), because he knows that you’re not supposed to exhibit your horror and grief. But he also knows that “you can’t brace yourself when the time comes/You just have to roll with the blast.” My ten-year-old son Eli cried out our cat’s name right after its body stiffened from the vet’s injection and then wet his finger in his mouth and put it in our cat’s mouth, over and over, until we finally stopped him. I hear the word “blast,” over a tension-and-release A7sus4, and I see that again. “Whether you choose to grieve or not, grief will go through you in its given time,” Darnielle said in a 2017 interview. Its time, not yours.
The speaker performs a series of actions—finding the Harbor Freeway, heading south, getting off, finding Telegraph Road, finding the parking lot, and turning right—as if each one is difficult and strange. At first, it’s like he’s in shock (Real tired/Head kind of light) but as the verse goes on, it becomes clear that he’s experiencing things in a sharply defined, half-dreaming way:
I felt all the details
Carving out space in my head
Tropicanas on the walkway
Neon red
Between the pain and the pills trying to hold it at bay
Stands a traveler going somewhere far away
The details aren’t just lodging in his memory; they’re opening up a whole new space in his mind. From that perspective, he associates, letting images arise from within. The non-self-like states of pain and druggedness, a self still there between them, for a little while; the trancelike iambic pentameter of the last line. An eighteen-wheeler without brakes going downhill; a plane falling out of the sky.
“And then came to your bedside,” Darnielle sings in the delayed opening of the second verse. “And as it turns out, I’m not ready.” Before he knows it—while it still has no name in his mind, no story to fit into—he’s undergoing a shockingly new experience: “And as though you were speaking through a thick haze/You said hello to me.” A little time goes by (the song is full of silences). The word “hello” starts to separate itself from the words around it. “We all stood there around you,” he sings. “Happy to hear you speak.”
The last of something bright burning, still burning
Beyond the cancer and the chemotherapyAnd you were a presence full of light upon this earth
And I am a witness to your life and to its worth
It’s three days later when I get the call
And there’s nobody around to break my fall
In his attentive, associative state of mind, the speaker is capable of hearing and seeing the tones of other beings, the styles of their presences, the essences that will vanish from existence when they die. Rather than accommodate his perceptions to concepts like “the soul” and “the spirit,” he stays, as much as possible, with those perceptions. And in doing so, he models a special kind of experience for us, in which strong perception flows into strong witnessing, which then flows, at a certain point, into strong expression.
Art exists “[so] that one may recover the sensation of life,” the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky writes. “[I]t exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” I can imagine someone saying that “Matthew 25:21” is about how depressing it is when someone in your family dies, and I can imagine really vehemently disagreeing. I’m in pain in the song because it’s making me feel things, and by “things” I mean 1) things like ruby-red Tropicana juice bottles and the sound of the word “hello,” and 2) things like a brightness burning and a presence full of light. It’s possible that some people secretly prefer a shut-down state, in the face of another being’s dying and death. It wouldn’t be surprising; those are difficult experiences, and people tend to seek safety and comfort. But we all deserve better than that. To me, “Matthew 25:21” is about the onset of an open perception of someone else’s being, about the gradual and then sudden arrival of an almost otherworldly acuteness. “The gifts we bring to one another are all that matter in the end,” Darnielle wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in October 2001. “We should spend our time and resources finding ways to treasure them.”