I'm finding out more and more as time goes by that people see things differently from their own vantage points, and there's just no accounting for tastes and divergent values it seems. "Mercy House" was immediately and has remained so much my favorite song from the Home album; whereas the song apparently leaves others cold or means relatively little to them personally. Even the Nields themselves, preoccupied with much greater or more pressing matters to all appearances, have seemed to me to be fairly indifferent to this song, as just one song among others, to be played or not played at whim. Of course the fate of "The Trade," another wonderfully thoughtful song, has been one of even greater obscurity I may have heard TN play "The Trade" maybe once or twice at most, and by me saying twice I'm pushing it. Slow ballads like "Mercy House" and "The Trade" just have a really hard time getting airtime in shows I guess, with all of the other competition from songs old and new alike.

It's puzzling to me, since "Mercy House" has struck such a resonant chord in my own soul. But what's that song the Padre sings in Man of LaMancha about the chaser after butterflies of wonder, Don Quixote? "To Each His Dulcinea"... though she's only made of flame and air.

Part 2

The end of the road --- coming to the end of one's rope --- coming up face to face with a dead-end brick wall --- caught between a rock and a hard place - --- No Way Out. Where do we go from here?

What a friendless hapless and hopeless place this world can be --- unmitigatingly desperate --- cruelly mocking and senseless --- devoid of light, life, meaning, or purpose --- when the sky comes crashing down all around one's head, and the only merciful end in sight is an end to it all.

Ships going down in a relentless cruel sea, pulled down by gravity's angel, under an immensely empty and indifferent sky from which no help comes --- sailors going down in the drink, drinking their last gulp in their last voyage to the bottom, their desperate cries of SOS unheard or unheeded --- the inexorable grinding of the mill wheel of time, dragging all along without mercy and without hope of escape amidst the flotsam and jetsam of universal shipwreck ---

Do you have the guts to face it, and take your stand once and for all, or do you just go on blissfully ignorant, heedless of the passing of the days in convenient comfort, hoping against hope that the future will never happen and that you will somehow be spared from facing the rack and ruin of the overlord Time.

The world of shattered lives and battered dreams is where "Mercy House" begins, and it is in this same world that songs like "Mercy House" make maybe the only lick of sense in an otherwise senseless and dying world. Where can you come home to, when your heart is yearning for a place to call home, and there is no place left to go.

The English poet John Clare lived in a Mercy House in his native land namely in St. Andrews Asylum for the Insane, for most of the last 30 years of his life. He sought asylum there as much to protect himself from the grinding wheels of the outside world, as to protect the world from him. A person whose life is crushed to a pulp doesn't stand much of a chance of lasting long in a jet-setting world built on the standards of efficiency, business-as-usual, utilitarian values, and the bottom line. What use does a life serve when it has lost its usefulness to the world, and become useless even to itself?

"I Am," one of Clare's most haunting lyrics, was written in his insanity from the confines of his own Mercy House, the asylum of St. Andrew's.

 
   I AM

  "I am yet what I am none cares or knows,
    My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
   I am the self-consumer of my woes ---
    They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
   Like shadows on love's frenzied stifled throes ---
    And yet I am, and live --- like vapors tossed

   Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
    Into the living sea of waking dreams,
   Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
    But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
   And e'en the dearest, that I love the best,
    Are strange --- nay, rather stranger than the rest.

   I long for scenes where man hath never trod,
    A place where woman never smiled or wept ---
   There to abide with my Creator, God,
    And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
   Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
    The grass below --- above the vaulted sky."
                            --- John Clare, 1848

Part 3

For better or for worse, "Mercy House" reminds me greatly of Dylan, "Knocking on Heaven's Door." I prefer to think that the affinity is for the most part for the better; if I were a songbird, I'd want to fly and sing with the best of them as well. It could be seen as a compliment, not a bringdown, to say, "Your song reminds me of some of the best of Bob Dylan." )

 
 "To Mercy House we came
  Over and over again;
  We tell her where we've been
 "Do you think you could take us in?"
  The answer is always the same..."

Haven't you ever lost patience with someone, and wished they would just stop coming around? I know I have not naming any names. But then I think, God what a jerk *I* can be sometimes --- and I remember just how unwelcome I have been made to feel by people who meant a lot to me, and how deeply that hurt me. So I think of the Nields Nook as a Mercy House too, where at least a few kind souls are always glad you came, to cop the line from "Cheers." )

"Do you think you could take us in?" "Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door..." The connection between "Mercy House" and "Knocking on Heaven's Door" fits in more ways than one, I think. I'm going to pursue this connection further.

Simone Weil makes an interesting distinction between Justice and Mercy. Justice is getting what you have coming to you, even if what you have coming to you is really really bad. But Mercy is *not* getting what you have coming to you, but rather something better, out of sheer Grace, no more and no less.

It's "just," according to Simone Weil, when a tidal wave wipes out entire villages because it's in the very *nature* of a tidal wave to do that; that's what tidal waves *do*; the tidal wave was only obeying the inner necessity of its own nature. So there's a sort of poetic justice in having your home and even your life washed away in a moment, going Down in the Flood, if you happen to be so unlucky as to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the Big Kahuna hits home.

But how could it *not* be seen as a miracle, as incalculable Mercy, and as a Grace totally not to be expected from the forces of Nature, if the implacable power of destruction somehow leaves homes and lives intact --- like the Angel of Death passing by your door. It's like being caught up in the jaws of the dragon --- and living to tell the tale. "Think of the stories you will tell..." *That's* Mercy!

Mercy defies the natural "order of things" --- so whereas Simone Weil says that Justice is "natural," i.e. following the path of least resistance, executing the inevitable workings-out of things as they are in the world, like clockwork --- she says that Mercy is always and everywhere, whenever it occurs, "supernatural." It is a transcendence of the natural order of things when Mercy happens, where only Justice was necessary. Mercy doesn't follow the "path of least resistance" it takes something more than that to make Mercy happen. It is far easier to condemn than to forgive.

Mercy is like Sisyphus doggedly dragging or pushing that humongous boulder *uphill* --- it is like being in a boat going down shit's creek, all the while paddling *upstream*, in defiance of the flow of necessity --- it is going against the grain of what is required by the demands of Justice. Mercy suspends the inevitable it defies the gravity of Justice. Mercy is not getting what you deserved, but maybe getting what you wanted, against all odds.

How often Nerissa or David have said, in the song intro for IKWKOLTI, "This is about someone getting what they wanted, but not necessarily what they deserved." But is this true? It is only fitting and just, when one gets what they had coming to them, no matter how awful the outcome. Justice, poetic and otherwise, doesn't play favorites. Only Mercy can suspend the inevitable, and can play favorites. If gossiping people are "like that," it is only natural that a person's reputation would be spoiled, no matter the actual facts of the matter. The world is "like that" the world where we live is heartless, unmerciful, and unkind, like Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity." This Town Is Wrong.

So a Mercy House is like a shelter from the storm, at the dark end of the street, at the darkness at the edge of town --- a place where the natural order of backbiting, backstabbing, and the dog-eat-dog of eat-your-neighbor is suspended for awhile and need not apply --- only so long as you are within the merciful embrace that's holding off the wolves at the door.

"Come home, come home, come home..."

In a cruel and heartless world of ravenous and ineluctable necessity, Where Is the Love? Where is the Land of Heart's Desire? Where is Home? "A House is not a Home..." For too many of us, we live in a virtual state of homelessness even within four walls, more like a prison than a Home --- like the House of the Rising Sun --- "And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God I know I'm one."

Maybe this world really is *not* our *real* home --- as Hank Williams Sr. sang, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." Maybe there really *is* "a place for us, Somewhere," as Tony and Maria sing in "West Side Story" --- a place where love lasts, and where nothing that is fine and good and true is ever really lost forever.

This is "Heaven" as I see it the Kingdom of which TN say they have the Keys, of which they confidently and jubilantly sing, "No more will you be without your family, you've got the keys to the kingdom, come on home." The same place of which Gillian Welch sings in the Nields-covered "Orphan Girl" "I'll see my father, my mother, my sister, my brother No more an Orphan Girl..." Home is Belonging, Home is finding the Real You, Home is really being yourself, Home is loving and being loved for who you really are, faults and all. And which one of us is without fault?

The ragged and rejected ones who knock at the door pleading, "Do you think you could take us in?" --- the lost and lonesome losers, seeking shelter from the storm in Mercy House --- are so reminiscent of the "Orphan Girl" of whom Katryna sings so beautifully and so soulfully, so passionately. Another Nields encore favorite by which Katryna can always light up a fire, is "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," another parallel song to "Orphan Girl," also chosen by TN as representative of what floats their boat, musically, emotionally, and spiritually. "Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by...?"

"Orphan Girl," on a lighter note, is paralleled in yet another cover song which TN have selected --- the hilarious "Me and Little Andy," about a pathetic orphan who begs to spend the night, seeking shelter from the storm in Mercy House. And of course the both of them, both the orphan Sandy and the little puppy dog, wind up going to Heaven at the end of the song! Sort of the comic side of Mercy House. )

I have a book called "Helping Heaven Happen." I see a Mercy House as a kind of Heaven on Earth, a little safe harbor where the ocean storms of life, where the natural forces of hunger and defilement stand at *bay*, held off by the supernatural force of Love --- since at bottom a Mercy House, as a kind of Home for the lost orphans of this world, is a holy harbor of Peace and Love, a holy sanctuary where Peace and Love are protected and preserved, a sanctuary in more than one sense, where living things are allowed to live and sprout and grow --- where the caged bird can sing, like Angela "spreading her wings to be gone" --- like a tiny glimpse of what it means to be free forever, where one need no more fear the tidal wave of time nor need to take refuge in the shelter from the storm. "Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, I am free at last!" MLK Jr.

"It is not growing like a tree
  In bulk, that makes man better be
 Nor standing long an oak, three hundred year,
  To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere
    A lily of a day
     Is fairer far in May,
    Although it fall and die that night,
     It was the plant and flower of light.
 In small proportion, we just Beauty see
  And in short measure, Life may perfect be."
                                --- Ben Jonson

That's Mercy House to me a little slice of the Perfect, in short measure, where we can Help Heaven Happen, by the supernatural, world-defying power of Love.

Bruce

© 2001