24 Frames

You thought God was an architect, now you know
He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that's all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames

~ Jason Isbell

I've been treading carefully with this blog so far, but now that I'm getting more comfortable with it, I'm ready to shake it up a bit.  When I first heard Jason Isbell's 24 Frames, these lines blew me away. I was so excited about them, I posted them on Facebook.  Unlike my usual dozens of "likes," the post only got two.  I sensed that I might have offended people?  And that bothered me.  Well, here's my opportunity to talk about why I find these lines compelling.

The song's title refers to the 24 frames that pass before the camera each second during a film.  I'm not a cinematographer -- I still think cameras use magic to capture images -- but I can easily imagine any event, any encounter, any stirring moment being flashed in front of my eyes in 24 frames.  In slow motion, maybe.  The song offers a handful of vignettes that seem to support this idea.  But I don't want to analyze the entire song, just the lines quoted above.

Most of us don't get to our seventh decade without some joy and without some heartache along the way.  I know people whose sadness is borne of tragedy I cannot begin to comprehend, but I know others who repeatedly claim to be "blessed," as their lives have been comparatively perfect.  Perhaps my most often-quoted line is this:  Life is a crapshoot.  Having been widowed at a relatively young age with three fatherless children to raise, I had to accept the randomness of the Universe.  I did not pursue finding someone or something to blame; what would have been the point?  Some misfirings in my husband's anatomy set the stage for a painful and cruel death.  What the Architect had created, that beautiful physical being, was returned to some ethereal origin for no logical reason.  Like a pipe bomb that blew.

In a discussion of his poem The Dancing, Gerald Stern talks about a wild and merciful God who "allowed" the Holocaust to happen.  He suggests that this wild God was distracted by something beautiful that he was creating somewhere else, and he looked away for a moment.  Because he is wild.  But he is also beautiful and merciful.  He's sitting in a black car ready to go, sings Jason Isbell. It's a haunting image, I know.  But it is not offensive.  It's just reality.