Van Morrison Explains the Universe
Art by Mahailya Hinsey
I.
I am fourteen and attending my second funeral in three months. The loudspeakers play “Into the Mystic,” and instead of thinking about the man in the casket a few rows up, I am thinking about Van Morrison. Wondering if he knows how big a hit he is with dead people. With those they leave behind. By the first few notes, most of the adults in the room are crying. My mother, in her signature black felt hat, squeezes me into her side. She thinks if she holds me tight enough, nothing will ever take me away. The adults cry and yet it’s not the kind of sobbing that makes my palms sweat, the way kids get nervous when their parents drop their Mature Adult faces. They’re all smiling and swaying slightly in their pews like zonked-out college students. If the casket was gone, the ushers and the priest and pews too, we would be a single, rapturous people.
The funeral is for Dan, one of my dad’s closest friends, and the father of one of my brother’s and my oldest friends. Large photos propped up on easels flank his casket. In all of them, he is smiling. My favorite is a candid of Dan in sports sunglasses and his signature Paul Bunyan beard, holding up a massive trout in his hands. He twists back in his canoe to show the fish to the photographer, likely his son, and there is not a single trace of cancer to be found. The irony is not lost on me. Here we are listening to a man sing about sailing off into the great unknown, the mystic, and Dan smiles at us from a boat of his own. Yet he faces no unknown in this photo. He faces his family.
II.
Van Morrison's songs live in a world of poetry and the power of nature. “Into the Mystic,” in particular, is a song diving headlong into metaphor, so much so that Morrison himself has admitted to not knowing exactly where the song was going when he wrote it, although he once said, “I guess the song is just about being part of the universe.” One interpretation of the song is that it describes an act of love (signified by the ending “too late to stop now”). Or perhaps the song is about homecoming, romanticizing life in the world. “Into the Mystic” is a popular first dance song at weddings. But I have only ever heard it at funerals.
One thing widely agreed upon is that the song is, like many of Morrison’s songs, about a spiritual quest, almost mythological in its imagery. The lines “I don’t have to fear it [the foghorn] and I want to rock your gypsy soul / Just like way back in the days of old / And magnificently we will flow into the mystic” are reminiscent of Greek mythology, tales of sailors like Odysseus returning home after a long journey. This is the meaning I subscribe to, the one of spiritual homecoming. It’s hard to hear a song play at every funeral you go to without imagining it as a song about death. And yet it’s not a song about the perils of death but the peace that comes with it, especially for the one doing the dying. The foghorn—a warning to all the speaker’s loved ones—actually calls his soul home. The waters he travels on are not only for transportation but for transformation. The speaker has lived a full life of adventure. He calls a girl along with him, a girl he loves, and by the end of the song, he enters the mystic, the realm beyond which the living reside. The water he travels through is not only death but rebirth and contains the small universe of his life. It leads him to a place where only he knows what happens next.
III.
Confession: Dan’s funeral is not the first time I’ve heard “Into the Mystic” after someone’s passing. The song played two months before at that first funeral I went to—one for my neighbor, Mike. I didn’t know much about him besides the fact of his death by gunshot. I knew he lived a few houses down and had way too many of those annoying little yappy dogs. But my parents were friends of his, so I was dragged along like we were on a grocery run. I wish I could say Mike’s funeral affected me as deeply as Dan’s, but it honestly doesn’t stand out to me in any way other than being the first funeral I can remember.
When “Into the Mystic” played over the loudspeakers, I wasn’t struck by any existential wondering. It was the first time I’d heard the song in several years, since my dad used to play Van Morrison’s Moondance album and twirl me around the living room. And in that place, twenty feet from the body of a man I should have been mourning, I was happy, remembering my early childhood. But I was struck that the funeral home was playing my dad’s song, something I’d only ever thought of as a reason for celebration. This was a dancing song. Why play it for the dead?
Only at Dan’s funeral do I hear the inherent sadness in the lyrics. Maybe it’s the sadness in the day that gives Morrison’s words an extra meaning. I’ve been confronted by death before, with the passing of several seemingly ancient relatives, but Dan’s passing was the first to hit me hard, the first death that seemed out of place. What’s that saying? We all fear what we do not know. If this is true, we are hardwired to fear death. I sit in the hard oak pews in front of all those smiling pictures of Dan, my butt slowly going numb, and imagine a world in which death is a handheld thing. Where I can manhandle the hell out of it, figure out just how it ticks. Then, when I’m tired of exploring it, put death away in a closet somewhere like all the other keepsakes we hide, only to find them again someday, and reminisce.
IV.
My father first introduced Morrison’s music to me when I was in elementary school. I remember listening to “Into the Mystic” and feeling the weight of lives I had never lived and wouldn’t live for a while. At age six, I bobbed my head along with a man singing about the unknowns of his future and his contentment with the past and present and believed I could really understand what he felt. I’d never sailed on the open ocean, never been in love with another. I had never even been in love with myself, for that matter, but I wanted the feeling.
Van Morrison once said, “I don’t think nostalgia has to be a negative thing.” There is power in the past, there is emotional weight. This is why we study history, why, at funerals, we look back on the life a person has led. Nostalgia is what we turn to when our futures seem most uncertain, because in our beginnings we can see how we triumphed, even in the lowest moments.
Because there is power in nostalgia, there is inherent power in “Into the Mystic.” The song transforms the negative into the positive. Morrison sings, “And when that foghorn blows / I will be coming home.” Foghorns are meant to be used as warnings for what we cannot see. They tell oncoming ships of hazards like rocky coastlines, other boats, massive kraken in the fog. But when Morrison hears the foghorn, he hears his home. Maybe he hears something the rest of us cannot.
V.
Before Dan dies, his wife invites his closest friends to see him one last time. A house vigil. He looks burned from the inside out and cartoonishly skinny, like someone has slowly been letting the air out of his body. His daughter perches next to him on the bed, combing what little hair her father has left through her fingers. Every chance Dan’s daughter gets, she kisses his
forehead. Dan himself barely speaks but surveys the people gathered around him with a sage-like serenity. In two days, he will pass away. He feels it before anyone else in the room does. Dan and his family face different unknowns. His wife and children wonder how life will go on without their husband and father. Dan faces whatever comes after death, heaven or reincarnation or nothing, but he faces it backed by the life he has already led, the people he has loved.
The reason we play “Into the Mystic” at funerals, the reason why Van Morrison himself played the song at his friend’s funeral, isn’t because it’s a sad song, or because it reflects on life after death. We play the song because for three minutes and thirty-one seconds, everything is going to be okay. Because Van Morrison knew what he was talking about when he said, “I guess the song is just about being part of the universe.” For a little while, we are all living the same moment together, completely informed by the past and all the life it held, completely sure that one day a moment like this will come again and we will feel nothing but peace.