"There is work to be done on your heart"
Cameron Winter's "Warning" is an angry, devastating and God-haunted jeremiad about what happens when there's no one to forgive you.
In my writings here so far, I have focused on visual media — television, movies, and political reporting. But I contain multitudes, and storytelling comes in a nearly endless variety of forms.
The first form was aural. When hunter-gatherers sat around a fire sharing the myths and fables that structured their worldview, they weren’t reading. They were listening.
So, before you read any further — and in the interest of minimizing the contradiction of writing about how not all stories can be understood through the written word, I’ll keep my comments brief — I want you to stop and listen to a new song by Cameron Winter, the lead singer and chief songwriter of Geese (your hipster dad’s favorite new band).
The song is called “Warning,” and it’s part of a new compilation, HELP(2), from War Child Records, to support children in conflict zones.
This is a worthy cause at all times, of course, but one that is especially vital at a time when the government of Israel is perpetrating, at the very least, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and when USAID, which was once one of the chief vehicles for delivering aid to those most in need, has been fed “into the wood chipper.”
I guarantee you it is the angriest and most devastating thing you’ll hear all day.
I am not going to describe the music or try to translate into text a work of art that is nontextual — that’s not even a xerox of a xerox, but something worse.
But I want you to read some of the lyrics. They’re deceptively simple but cumulatively devastating.
Good morning
This is your warning
This is your warning
You’re gonna appear before a stranger
I don’t know if you’ll be in any danger
For some are not pulled into moving cars
Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears
Some get away with it, some get away with it for many years
And are not punished, but some are
The stranger
Two lines are especially noteworthy here: “You’re gonna appear before a stranger” and “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears.”
Initially, Winter’s reference to “a stranger” sounds like he’s talking about God — a suspicion confirmed later in the song when he refers to “a tall far-off thing with eyes / Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove / Looking at everybody all the time.”
But that phrase, “a stranger,” has special meaning and resonance within Judaism.1
Exodus 22:21 says: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
And in Leviticus 19:34, we’re told: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
What Winter is suggesting, I believe, is that if God is real — “Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove” — then God is “a stranger.” In this respect, he’s echoing what Jesus says in Matthew 25:35-40 (emphasis mine):
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.
Recall that this is a song for a compilation about children in “conflict zones.” If anyone is a stranger, it is them.
Remember, too, what Jesus said: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
As to the second line — “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears” — I think the allusion is clear enough that it doesn’t require further elaboration:
The reckoning
As rich and powerful as these lyrics are, it’s not until we reach the end of the song that “Warning” becomes something more than a jeremiad.
If you’re not wrong and there’s really nobody out there who can do the impossible
And who’s gonna forgive you?
Who is gonna forgive you?
This is a fascinating reversal of the idea that a Godless universe is one in which those who do evil — the people who “get away with it … for many years” — go unpunished.
What Winter sees here is the inverse: If there is no reckoning, there is also no forgiveness.
The “stranger” who is being hurt by this evildoer, and the people who love the “stranger” and identify with them, will not forget what has been done to them. And they won’t forgive it, either.
The work that must be done
Next come what I think are the most affecting lyrics in the whole song, a series of lines that I believe are coming from the strangers who will not forgive what has been done to them.
They are both cryptic and chilling, an eerie combination of sadistic reverie and ambient menace:
Now, there is work to be done on the sides of your body
And there are hot things that are unusually long and they burn very badly
There are things I hope one day to hook around the corners of your mouth
There are plans that I have in this house, written down
And there are plenty of people that I can very easily call who can come over here within an hour
And do the work that must be done on your heart
There is so, so, so, so much work to be done on your heart
There is so much work to be done on your heart
And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house
“There is so much work to be done on your heart / And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house.”
If that doesn’t put the fear of God — or, more to the point, the fear of there being no God — into one’s heart, I don’t know what could.
And this, in the end, is Winter’s “warning.” Woe to those who refuse to hear it.
While Winter does not identify as religiously Jewish, both of his parents are Jewish; and in an interview with the Guardian, he once responded to a question about his religious beliefs by saying: “the big guy deserves a shout out every once in a while.”