July 12, 2022

Re: Time, Kevin Morby, and Existentialist Rock

The question of “time” is a familiar one in philosophy. It’s not hard to understand why. As human beings, everything we do is couched in temporal categories: “Yesterday I had a meeting,” one might report, “but right now I’m writing. Tomorrow I’ll be on the road.” This way of speaking is so common as to be taken for granted. At times, however, we realize that the categories of past, present, and future bear deeper significance. For some, the past grips us in such a way that we never overcome it. As the great Mississippi novelist William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” For others, the future is most important. American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos has insisted that his companies—most notably Amazon—give priority to the future: “What we need to do is always lean into the future. When the world changes around you and when it changes against you—what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind—you have to lean into that and figure out what to do.” Meanwhile, many religious teachers, including figures in the Christian mystical tradition, emphasize that the present should take precedence. As Chinese philosopher and spiritual master Lao Tzu once wrote: “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”

Which perspective is right? This is a thorny question, but a number of thinkers have tried to develop a kind of “philosophy of time.” Perhaps no one is better known for this endeavor than German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose magnum opus Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) draws on a variety of sources (Aristotle, Luther, Kierkegaard, Husserl) in order to think through the concept of temporality. For Heidegger, the familiar way of organizing time into past, present, and future is problematic. Not only does it simplify that which is textured and rich, but it creates a false dichotomy between the temporal and the eternal. Indeed, at its worst, this way of thinking can deprive time of its meaning. Who cares about temporality when eternity is waiting for you on the other side?

Thus Heidegger seeks, as it were, to redeem the time. He argues that our existential task is to embrace the temporal, to refuse to let it slip through our hands. On the surface, this suggestion is as old as the phrase immortalized in the Odes of Roman poet Horace (65 BCE - 8 BCE): “Even as we speak, envious time / has slipped away. Seize the day (carpe diem), / trust not the future.” Heidegger, however, makes an important qualification. For him, if we are to make time our own, we must grab hold of the present in simultaneity with the past and the future. That is to say, in acknowledging that we have been “thrown” into time (birth), and yet also recognizing that our time will one day run out (death), we obtain a heightened awareness the present moment of action. The present does not just flutter by but, rather, is vivified by the facticity of our existence.

This is obviously a mere sketch of Heidegger’s thinking on this matter. Much more could be said, including Heidegger’s plain indebtedness to Kierkegaard’s theological conception of “the moment” (Øieblikket). Still, this summary should be adequate to help us dig into one of the best songs of the year—Kevin Morby’s “This Is a Photograph,” the lead track on his new album of the same name (pictured above). I’ve written about Morby before: he is a singer-songwriter of keen philosophical-cum-theological interests. For example, Morby’s debut album Harlem River (2013) concludes with “The Dead They Don’t Come Back,” a haunting blues song that uses an encounter with a cemetery (intentionally or not, a Kierkegaardian conceit!) as a means of exploring life’s solitariness:

And on my way to school
I passed that old graveyard
Life is mighty lonely
And life is mighty hard
Dead they don't wake up
Dead they don't wake up
Dead they don't, dead they don't, dead they don't wake up

These and other related themes crop up throughout Morby’s oeuvre, from mystical encounters with the divine (“I Have Been to the Mountain”) to musings on Judgment Day (“Pearly Gates”). Moreover, he continues to write at an impressive pace, releasing Oh My God in 2019, Sundowner in 2020, and now This Is a Photograph in 2022. It may not be a stretch to say that he’s the most prolific singer-songwriter of the last decade.

On “This Is a Photograph,” Morby aims, both in form and in content, to lend urgency to the present by attending to the past and the future. In a recent interview, Morby reveals that the song was inspired by a health scare in his family—one that encouraged him to rummage through a box of old family photos. He came across several pictures of his parents when they were younger, when their lives were full of vibrance and death seemingly far away. As Morby sings over a thumping Delta-blues guitar riff:

This is a photograph
A window to the past
Of your father on the front lawn
With no shirt on
Ready to take the world on
Beneath the West Texas sun
The year that you were born
The year that you are now
His wife behind the camera
His daughter and his baby boy

And yet, this photograph bears deeper implications: it’s not just a snapshot but a study of temporality. The man in the picture is surrounded by present goods, ostensibly “frozen” in time. Yet, realizing that he is looking into the past, Morby knows better. In truth, these things were already changing, constantly evolving until they pass out of time into death. As Morby concludes the stanza:

Got a glimmer in his eye
Seems to say, this is what I'll miss after I die
And this is what I'll miss about being alive
My body
My girls
My boy
The sun

In order to illustrate this point, Morby draws on sports—a fitting metaphor, since (baseball notwithstanding) time is deeply embedded into the structure of popular games. Morby alludes to the so-called “No Más Fight” between Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán and his American rival Sugar Ray Leonard. In June 1980, Durán defeated Leonard by unanimous decision, but in November of the same year the two had a rematch. Younger by five years, Leonard was much sharper in this bout, at times dancing around Durán with unmistakable bluster. Eventually, after withstanding a number of blows, Durán quit in the eighth round, allegedly telling the referee “No más”:

In “This Is a Photograph,” Morby casts time in the role of Leonard and our fragile lives in the role of Durán:

Now time's the undefeated
The heavyweight champ
Laughing in his face
As it dances like Sugar Ray
Used to be, "C'mon, c'mon"
But now, "No más, no más"
Used to be "C'mon, c'mon"
But now "No más, no más"

Returning to his box of old photos, including one of his mother “In the cool Kentucky dirt / Laughing in the garden,” Morby makes an unexpected move. The song’s country stomp gives way to something more urgent—an intensifying cacophony of noise, over which Morby exhorts himself (and the listener) to live into the present moment with an eye towards the passing of time and the inexorable futurity of death:

This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss after I die
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss after I die
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss about being alive
This is what I'll miss after I die

Indeed, in the song’s final stanza, Morby applies the lessons he’s learned from his parents’ pictures to his own life. No longer philosophically musing on the meaning of time, he is ready to take ownership of the present. Thus he fashions a snapshot of himself in his newly adopted town of Memphis:

This is a photograph
A window to the past
Of me on a front lawn
Ready to take the world on
Beneath the Tennessee sun
Inside the kingdom
Got a glimmer in my eye
Seems to say

In examining the “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of the past, and in confronting the “undefeated” record of time’s end, Morby is ready to seize the day—here, now, in the blink of an eye. He is ready to lay claim to “the kingdom” and also dares to ask: “Are you?”

Here is the video for “This Is a Photograph.” Of course, the album can be streamed on Spotify and elsewhere.