THE SILENCE IS INTOLERABLE...:

What might this dissolution of world, self, and belief amount to? Sheer negation or deconstruction? Not so, and the climactic track of It's All Crazy, "The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate," shows why. One of the band's most beloved and brilliant songs, "The King Beetle" presents the clearest picture of the apophatic theology in mwY's music. Weiss sings the tale of a colony of beetles who regularly wonder in amazement at the fire burned on their estate every year, the "Great Mystery," as the beetles call it. The Beetle King offers generous rewards for any citizen who can carry back the Great Mystery to the King, and a professor and an army lieutenant volunteer for the task. Both fail; the former due to presumption that his knowledge qualified him for contact with the fire, and the latter because of the delusion that his strength could prepare him to face the great unknown. The King's wrath toward the lieutenant appears in one of the band's most dramatic lines: "The Beetle King slammed down his fist,/  'Your flowery description's no better than his/ We sent for the Great Light and you bring us this./ We didn't ask what it seems like--/ we asked what it is.'" With these words, the Beetle King takes leave of his family and kingdom to fly straight into that Great Light, the "blazing unknown," as Weiss calls it. The result is a chorus from his subjects, proclaiming, "Our Beloved's not dead, but His Highness instead/ has been utterly changed into fire." The chorus continues its chant, "Why not be utterly changed into fire?" until the final, hushed note of the song.

This is the apophatic vision of God championed by the great religious traditions: to strip the self of concepts which hinder the attainment of mystical union with the One whose very being cannot be touched without the complete loss--or transformation--of self. The chorus' final cry comes from the collection of Sayings of the Desert Fathers, specifically from the counsel of early Christian desert father Abba Joseph to Abba Lot. Lot inquires of Joseph what else he can do to further his monastic vocation, and Abba Joseph responds by raising his hands to heaven, his fingers becoming like ten lamps of fire. He then asks Abba Lot the very question Weiss poses to his listeners at the end of "The King Beetle." Seen in this light, the apophatic extremism of mwY is a necessary purgation before encountering the greater mystery of God.

One final look at the lyrics of a song from Foxes, this time from the closing track, "Son of a Widow," will paint a picture of the process and results of such a mystical union. The song begins with Weiss plaintively singing, "I'll ring your doorbell/ until you let me in./ I can no longer tell/ where You end and I begin." The main guitar begins its slide downward just as Weiss finishes the word 'doorbell,' coming in at such a similar pitch that the listener can easily mistake the guitar for a continuation of Weiss' voice. The same effect occurs again in the next line, but this time the guitar comes in as Weiss sings "tell," creating the same continuing effect, but also effecting a union between voice and guitar which parallels the union of human and divine Weiss sings of.

This union is accomplished through incessant supplication ("ring your doorbell until you let me in"), an allusion to Jesus' parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge in Luke 18 (which itself connects with the title of the song). Like a lone grape on a vine, longing for the company of the other grapes that have been already plucked, Weiss suggests this union can only be accomplished by being pressed into wine. Here the band plays with Jesus' statement in John 15 that he is the "true Vine" in which his disciples live. To know the life of that vine, to truly become one with it, the grape must lose itself, its form, and its life: it must be crushed. And that--to let go of ideas, of the world, and selves in order to become one with the One, "Alone to the Alone"--is the apophatic theology of mwY's music.

In the end, apophatic theology only makes sense within a religious tradition: it is the negative side of what we say about God, a purgative for the positive affirmations of what religious believers trust to be true. MwY's music pushes listeners to examine again and again what they say and what they believe, not so that they might dispense with faith, but that they might not let their theological language and beliefs solidify into the idols humans relentlessly construct in the place of the true God.

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