The Untethered Theology of Morrissey
I feel no pull towards the church, but I understand that there is nothing else. Catholicism has you tracked and trailed for life with an overwhelming sense of self-doubt, and every church churns with painful pews and mourners’ stalls. - Steven Patrick Morrissey.
By Charlie Llewellin from Austin, USA - Morrissey at La Zona Rosa
Morrissey: a heady mixture of disaffection and ironic malaise. Born in the throes of the Baby Boomer generation with the desperate feeling that the “21st century [was] breathing down [his] neck”, he has always been on the run.
From what?
Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big, but soon it is I, and not my mother, on the critical list. I cannot swallow and I spend months hospitalized, my stomach ripped open, my throat pulled wide. Disappearing beneath a mass of criss-crossed blanket stitches, I grip onto the short life that has already throttled me.
After this near deathly emergence he found little respite, soon finding himself growing up around “underground cavities where murder and sex and self-destruction seep from cracks of local stone … where aborted babies found deathly peace instead of unforgiving life.” Was this deathly, hellish thing — life?
For Morrissey, it seems so: to him, the world cannot contain the hell that crawls up through the cracks, planting pain and suffering on the living. But this dark vision isn’t so different from what most, if not all, of us see - a world that is full of sin and, by that sin, full of suffering. We see the broken world, to give it a name, because we are standing together in the same place, we are seeing with similar eyes, from a similar point of view, out into the same broken world.
Not everyone sees this broken world though; not everyone would call it broken either. Take Einstein’s train experiment: when lighting strikes the front and the back of the train, the person standing outside the train sees the strikes simultaneously, but the person standing in the train sees the strikes one before the other. What we see depends on where we are standing. So too with what we see in the world. But unlike with the train our spiritual perception cannot be reconciled by a physical account. We cannot, as humans, step outside of our condition and so are left to interpret from within it. So where is Morrissey standing?
The first question for Morrissey is not this at all but rather how to survive in this broken world. He is unaware of the split perception he experiences.
As a sensitive young boy he witnessed a traumatic scene of domestic violence against his mother. An attack made brazenly in the street, his grandmother rushing them away to a nearby church, pleading for refuge. But they were met by a nun who slammed the door in their faces; whereby his grandmother led them “back home through a maze of mean and narrow streets . . . in fear and trembling.”
But even back home, out of the city’s mean streets, the mundane violence of suburban life made itself loud.
One Saturday afternoon a group of boys are stoning a rat to its death. The rat is large and Manchester-tough and manages to crawl halfway up the wall of the builder’s yard, but the mob is relentless and suddenly the rat falls back on itself and surrenders to death in the rubble, whereupon the boys stroll off, itchy for the next amusement.
Against his nihilistic tendencies, Morrissey sees in all this pain and cruelty an undeniable dignity to life to which he ascribes some type of meaning. He is a goldfish swimming in Christian waters, as historian Tom Holland might explain. With no God to wrestle with and no resulting theodicy to work out, he is free from a cohesive worldview.
It is tempting to dismiss him as melodramatic, an obvious egocentric. But behind all the “Morrissey” there is a clear moralistic worldview that despite his efforts he has not outpaced. It goes something like this: the world is cruel and cares nothing for soft and beautiful things; these things exist in spite of the pain of the world; so beauty is a greater force than pain; therefore one should focus on making beautiful things.
Morrissey found his escape in pop culture and, in it, clarity on the world. He came to believe that “effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death.”
And so his practice and understanding of virtue developed, or mutated, into an extreme sensitivity to the tribulations of the weak and vulnerable: the voiceless. For him - animals, and the avatar for his religious fervor, PETA. “I refuse to eat anything that had a mother,” he told an interviewer. A powerful and morally loaded statement that likely goes beyond mere care for the vulnerability of animals. But his secular moral worldview constrains him to animals - and away from, for instance, the unborn - inoculating him from the deeper interrogation of the dignity of human life.
Morrissey with his band The Smiths, 1984
Morrissey, though enigmatic and eccentric, is understandable. His worldview is legible even if not cohesive. It is forgivable even. For instance, how could he not see in the terrible scene of his beaten mother and worried grandmother scurrying down the dank alleys of a broken England — a family of Manchester-tough rats fighting an inevitable surrender to death from a cruel world.
Looking out into a world of silenced voices, Morrissey sought both meaning and beauty in their opposite: singing, “where the language of despair becomes beautiful.” In singing, he is able to find a transcendence from his own story of stifled silence: the human voice. “How is the voice imprinted on the cheap plastic?” He ponders. These raptures of song finally led him to decide in his own dramatic way that “[he] will sing, too. If not, [he] will have to die.”
And his songs do sing, and often, a common song, as in “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”:
But still I’d rather be famous
Than righteous or holy, any day . . .
But sometimes I’d feel more fulfilled
Making Christmas cards with the mentally ill
I want to live and I want to love
He is acutely aware of the pain involved in becoming who we are meant to be because there is pain in suffering, and because who we want to become and who we are tasked to become are so rarely the same. Thy will and my will are in constant competition.
“Morrissey” is who he then became, who he aimed to become. In some sense, “Morrissey” is the man on the train, fleeing from a central point that is who he is meant to become. And Steven Patrick Morrissey stands outside the train as his original, God given self, left behind on the moral landscape. But it is Morrissey who sings. It is Morrissey who runs away from that thing tracking him and instead moves toward fame, toward the world. Each has their own perspective but lives inside of one human; again representative of that indelible condition of humanity in which we cannot step outside.
Is “Morrissey” then an escape from the dog at the heels of Steven Patrick Morrissey? It is after all Morrissey who is famous and therefore not righteous or holy. It is Steven Patrick Morrissey who pines for the meaningful experience of writing Christmas cards with the vulnerable and voiceless.
Steven Patrick Morrissey, the God given name that he (or the world) traded for “Morrissey” who would serve as their lodestar. He is the face of “The Smiths”, a band that even wore a generic name as if representative of all people. The world would look up to this shining star and see the condition of an age that could see wrong but could not explain it - reflected back at them.
His autobiography, itself titled Autobiography, is a biography of an age, told through the life of one man. The book was even released as a Penguin Classic, a title only given to reissues of classic books such as Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby. Explained away as a marketing ploy, it revealed much more than just strategic advertising; it continued a theme, unknown but felt. There are no chapters in this story, which is written in the present tense (it is now and always), and there are no clean divisions: scenes of life are interposed with old family photos and his pompous proclivity for alliteration litters the pages, consciously but beautifully.
There is no question “who” Morrissey is. He is a rare combination of pure affect and raw earnestness. He is a conflict. He is human. And he is a character in his own story, named “Morrissey”. What is he then? And what is it that he represents that is at once individual and universal? - this theme felt but unknown.
Like the gestalt of the age, he has held onto all the Christian moral instincts but none of the Christ. Morrissey’s great divorce is that of the West generally. And the results are a confused mess of good intentions untethered from their theological ground: the world is full of Christian virtues gone mad, says Chesterton.
So “what” is he, then? “Morrissey” is human. And a full one at that. Restless and raucous, selfish but loving, full of life but often tired (and ungrateful) of it too. A constant, striving, individual will. He is a performer, playing both director and actor, like Hamlet trying to catch “the conscience of [some] King” who has wronged him. There is a bit of madness in him that causes him to fail to see beyond the scrim to the light that never goes out. So too, like many humans.
The end of “Autobiography” is unwritten in our time, but we know that the character of Morrissey will be, in his own words, “tracked and trailed for life”. At the end, I like to imagine that he will be successfully chased down, weary but still restless, by the very Being that wants to give him his rest and life in abundance.
