I Shall Search My Very Soul

Listening to Van Morrison's "Listen to the Lion"

It’s October, or as we like to call it in the desert, “late summer.” The spike from relatively mild weather to more triple digits heat has wrecked my head and disposition, but we’re making due. That “false fall” gets you every time.

The following is an essay I’ve read live a few times now, about my experiences with Van Morrison’s “Listen to the Lion,” from 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview. It’s long been one of my favorite songs, a song that opened up new worlds to me.

20 years ago, we’d listen to “Listen to the Lion” on repeat. Jake and I upstairs in the green room in the cold war green house behind the doctor’s office. At the song’s end, properly enchanted, maybe a few High Lifes deep—we’d lift the needle and gently set it back down again, in front of that long block of grooves that closes out the album’s first side. 

Morrison’s voice sounds like it’s coming from another dimension, a celestial echo. The ebullient R&B belter of the opener “Jackie Wilson Says” has departed. Now he’s settled into incantatory territory, come down from the church steps on the album cover. From there, he’ll make a route “away from Denmark,” and begin a long ascent up to Caledonia soul country. 

For 11 minutes, he’s channeling spirits from a distant galaxy, far away from the punk yelps “Gloria” but paradoxically, fulfilling that song’s teenaged spiritual promise. He sounds like a scruffy animal, pawing at revelation: “And all my tears like water flown.” He sounds like he’s pulling something down from the uppermost reaches, but dredging something up from lowest depths too. Somewhere in between perhaps; harmonic alignment in opposites, what William Blake called “a marriage of heaven and hell.” Who is the lion? The one that lays with a lamb? One who mauls some folks at a zoom? How do I tune my ears to listen to what he has to say? “Huh!” Van grunts. Jake and I nod along. 

That tension, between the sublime and terrifying, the transcendent and the mundane, has always fueled Morrison’s best work. The Irish singer has always been split between the desire for complete freedom and a love of tight structure. To quote my Pitchfork review of his 2019 album Three Chords and the Truth: “That tension, between the sublime and the terrifying, has always fueled Morrison’s best work. He’s always been split between the desire for complete freedom and a love of tight structure; He’s a guy who once shouted out L. Ron Hubbard in the liner notes to Inarticulate Speech of the Heart but also ‘wouldn’t touch [religion] with a 10-foot pole.’ He’s been a prophet of metaphysical openness and also the chronicler, as author Steven Hyden has noted, of ‘an infinite number of grievances, both real and imagined.’” In Morrison’s songs, grousing and testifying are never separated by all that much distance. Why, the lion growls grumpily, must he always explain?

Just before the pandemic of 2020, my wife Becky and I took a trip to see Van in Las Vegas. It’s a weird town. The most American city, maybe—a place of pure artifice, fake splendor, and sanctioned vice, where you’re catered to by normal people trying to lead dignified lives out in the endless desert suburban sprawl (there is a reason a good chunk of Twin Peaks: The Return took place there). And it was a perfect place to see Morrison. Years before U2 took over The Sphere, Van brought Ireland to The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, prowling the stage in a zoot suit defensively, seemingly angered at his band, his mood as uninterested as I was at purchasing one of the tacky shirts for sale at the merch table. He didn’t want to be there, but sang as if he had no choice in the matter, his voice clear, strong, and soulful. 

As the lockdown took hold—and here in Arizona, I must admit, it didn’t really—I found myself staying home, listening to my Van Morrison LPs for something beyond comfort, a kind of sustenance. I pored over songs: “Rave On John Donne,” "“Summertime In England,” and “Alan Watts Blues,” with its revealing opening lines: “Well I'm taking some time with my quiet friend/Well I'm takin' some time on my own.”

When Morrison began protesting pandemic-era precautions—partly in recognition of the toll isolation was taking on so many but with a healthy dose of “We need to return to me getting paid to appear places” avarice in the mix, it all pretty much made sense to me. “Anyone who’s ever listened to Van Morrison knows he hates his fans and wants them dead,” my friend Joe Maynard joked.

But still, that voice. When I allow myself to open up a quiet, private space of contemplation, I hear in his howls the articulation of profound mysteries, both serene and savage. “Van Morrison once sang ‘Listen to the Lion’ and made you feel as if you’d been cornered by one,”

Greil Marcus

wrote in 1977.

What does that grandiose beast have to say? In the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, featuring the so-called “secret teachings” of Christ, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

That is what the lion’s roar signifies—it is a call from deep within that will force you into the darkest nights before any shining dawn. In C.S. Lewis’ Narnia saga, the mighty lion Aslan symbolizes Christ himself. When one of the young protagonists asks Mr. Beaver about whether or not he’s “quite safe,” he replies, “Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good.”

Reflecting in 2009 on the inclusion of “Listen to the Lion,” appended with a new section, “The Lion Speaks,” as the closer of his Astral Weeks shows, Morrison told Randy Lewis of the Los Angeles Times: “It’s a song I guess about me—probably the only one about me. The second bit I do on the harp is ‘the lion speaks.’ If you listen to that, I am playing as if the lion is trying to speak with no voice. He only has his soul and I think—I hope—that came across. It’s about getting out of one’s way so the soul can be heard, I suppose.”

Back at the house in Coolidge, there was a long room at the top of the stairs, more akin to a very lengthy, very tall closet. Perhaps it was intended as a narrow library? There were stacks of old Playboys in there when we moved in, Mad Magazines, old medical texts. I remember one of the roommates nicking a big stack, and taking it to Bookmans in the Valley to trade in. I wonder how much they got for those magazines.

We kept the drum kit in the far corner; the bass amp, my Bassman, and a Casio were all piled up on the far side, under the window overlooking the corner of 3rd St. and Wilson. It got so hot in there, and yet I spent hours in the room.

There was a mounted image of a lion on the wall, it was there when we moved in and we left it there when we moved out. One night, in solitary reverie, I stared at that lion’s visage, strumming a repeating chord sequence and humming. Suddenly, time lost shape and definition. I found myself in the slipstream, “whereabouts unknown.”

I had lost myself in song before: at church, screaming along at punk and indie rock shows, playing my clarinet as part of the marching band. But this was something different, a deeper plunge, a shock. It scared and delighted me. It was not safe, but it was good. “All my love come tumblin' down,” I pray. “Oh, listen, listen, listen.”