Too Sick To Pray: "Spirit" in Willie Nelson

Beginning with a Christological concept album in 1971, Yesterday's Wine, Willie Nelson used music as a medium to discern a theology of spirituality. This procedure reaches a climax in the 1996 album spirit. This record is a series of explorations into the meaning of “spirit” as an experienced reality. More than a claim that the concept affords numerous meanings, the album posits that this multivalence is the meaning of Spirit. The lyrical content is the most obvious place where this happens, as Nelson's lyrics develop Spirit as the lingering presence of a past love, as the persistent presence of a forgotten God, and as the collective posture of cultural defiance. But the album does not stop there. It includes four instrumentals which add other dimensions of meaning, one of which is titled “The Spirit of E9 (Instrumental).” 

The claim that spirit is meaningful in its multivalency is not too far from Charles Taylor’s description of “spirituality” as an experience with a “fullness.” For Taylor, fullness is an intense encounter where the whole of a harmonious order is concentrated into a single presence. This can be anything from the “presence of God” to the “voice of nature” to the “force which flows through everything.” Taylor also notes that Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play is a paradigm of this sort of fullness. In the 1795 text The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller describes play as an experience of “annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity.” This reconciliation occurs within both the subject and object of the encounter. For the object, play is perceived as a break from the causal order of the world. The object, perhaps a work of art or the splendor of an evening sky, appears as “free” even in its inanimacy. It moves out of step with its natural environment, almost dancing against its background. This dance is its play. And, as the subject experiences it, a sense of inner-harmony is accrued. A person begins to find a place for their freedom in a world of cold, scientific determinism. In a more dramatic fashion, Schiller describes play as a “gift from nature” that “shortens our tedious journey; it lightens the shackles of necessity and with gaiety and jocularity leads us up to the dangerous places where we must act as pure spirit and cast off everything physical.”

What Schiller’s work highlights, though, is that the fullness of spirituality is not something like an essence purified of unnecessary details. It is rather all of those details condensed into a unified phenomenon. Taylor highlights various ways such a fullness can be described. One such way is through poetic modes of speech, through narrative, metaphor, and, fitting here, simile. The creativity and relative strangeness of poetry allows it to say more at any one moment than discursive speech. The experience of the content conveyed in poetry is more direct and reaches deeper into the soul.

For spirit, both its poetic and symbolic presence means that the album is not an attempt to explain Spirit. Rather, it is an event where the meaning of Spirit is discovered. This would equally apply to Nelson as the composer and performer as it does to the listener. Spirit, here, is not quietly discussed, being held at a safe distance from the existential strife and resonance of contemporary life. Through this album, spirit is experienced in its multivalency. Its meaning is lived-through as one delves into the album. This is how it marks a moment of “fullness.”

Most fitting for Nelson’s album, this fullness is identified as a source of inspiration. As evidenced through the various meanings of Spirit within the album, Nelson returned again and again to the well, always finding another meaning to take and develop. This is the uniqueness of this album. Like his previous concept albums, which are types of stories, the whole form does not appear without keeping everything from the beginning to the end in view. Distinct from these, there is a lack of a developing plot, or a sense of teleology. The meaning of spirit is present at every point as an end in itself, but an end that echoes over and over again, gaining meaning as its fragile sonics reflect off of developing lyrical forms.