Souls That Have Turned Strange: David Berman’s Posthumanist Project
Words: Laura Tamayo
April 22nd, 2025
I have had trouble discerning why the discography of Silver Jews particularly enamors me; I’ve known it is highly motivated by deadpan lyricism, and I enjoy the rudimentary musical backing and feel comforted by David Berman’s sandpaper croaking. But there has been something evading me that I could not parse out without writing about it (still have not really parsed out, as we’ll come to realize). I seem to think I have located it somewhere around the thoughtlessness of it all. The very weighty thoughtlessness.
In her 1967 essay “Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag discusses the relatively novel development of art’s reckoning with the hope of spiritual transcendence and the problem of language; before then these had been primarily the territory of religion, ie. the distinguishing of what is “human” and what is “divine.” She argues that contemporary art both suffers from and points toward a double discontent— “words are [language is] crude, and they’re also too busy.” Our words (and likewise, our images, our movements) are heavy with history today, particularly in this age of information overload. This burden alienates. It does not condone the treading of new waters, yet fails to engender the experience of truth as it is now.
Language simultaneously creates and eviscerates our worlds. Particularly at the turn of the twenty-first century—the time in which Silver Jews released music— the reign of technology and the internet aggressively stained our language’s meaning. This mass media millennium is the time of the pastiche, the reproduction; many of our everyday interactions (with objects, with others, with ourselves) are mediated by replicas. With our realities defined by falsities, our language, which largely intends to simulate reality, is impacted by the same psychosis. [Won’t soul music change/ Now that our souls have turned strange.] How does one remedy this incommensurable struggle, soften the friction that marks the experience of contemporary being? Sontag argues that in seeking to answer this, we have come to develop a new goal for art: the creation of silence. Silence that marks the completeness of a thought, a seemingly impossible feat. Silence that marks a new way of thinking. Silence that, because it is empty of all language and thus all historicity, allows for deliverance from consciousness. But, how can art achieve such a thing when its very medium is necessarily its language?
This dilemma riddles the songs of Silver Jews. [We’ve been raised on replicas of fake and winding roads/ And day after day up on this beautiful stage/ We’ve been playing tambourine for minimum wage]; [Some power that hardly looked like power/ Said I’m perfect in an empty room]; [I saw God’s shadow on the world/ I could not love the world entire/ I took a hammer to it all]. Again and again, eternity, which is always emphasized with vacuousness, presses against a damp past, which is always deemed oppressive. There is a staggering wish to demolish current modes of knowledge to locate more fulfilling possibilities, with art serving as both the bulldozer and the debris. It is (ideally) a self-immolating technique. Berman’s project, though contained by words, was concerned with going beyond them. At the same time, against skepticism of language’s capacity to relay truth, the project was maintained by a fascination with its power in the attempt.
Berman’s weighty thoughtlessness, which took a very twenty-first-century American form, is better defined as a rejection of what Martin Heidegger calls calculative thinking, or thinking that is moved by reason and seeks a productive end. A thinking that seeks to master. The songs of Silver Jews problematize this, and thus prove to be an investigation into new epistemic pathways— one I believe can be called posthumanist through its veneration of irrationality, where distorted space and inconceivable temporality reign, and emphasis on the precariousness of subjectivity. Broadly, it is posthumanist through the breaking down and decentering of the logical human mind in favor of entropy. It is perhaps somewhere in between that [...abandoned drive in/ With ivy growing over the screen] and the [...altar in the valley/ For things in themselves as they are].
True to this aim is the semi-indie nostalgic millennial's favorite of Berman’s tunes, “Random Rules.” The lyrics, [I know that a lot of what I say/ Has been lifted off of men’s room walls], deny the traditional hierarchy that humanism constructs between the self and language. A humanist literature is contained by a limited ontology, where knowledge itself may vary, but the subject (representative of Man) is its sole determiner. In the lyrics above, the self is no longer the subject, but the object of language; it does not matter who wrote the text on the men’s room walls, and it does not matter that it is Berman singing. It is the statements themselves that are the creators of knowledge. The lyrics he relays are a result of his production, but they are not owned by him, and they are not part of an “absolute” work of art. Rather, they are contingent, finite, incomplete moments of an infinite truth that exists with or without the intervention of human labor. The work of art (which can manifest as many, many things…) is the only mode in which such a truth can be interrogated, and yet defiles the sentiment by the very act of speaking it.
A new manner of speech must be explored. Berman uses the American landscape ingeniously in this regard. He backdrops his songs with young cities, cities attempting to reinvigorate themselves, cities with dwindling populations, cities largely in the South. It is places that are suffering through identity crises (which to be fair, is a national dilemma), where the people find Christ to quell an inner lack, where boarded up houses serve as centers of worship, where [The townsfolk stare hard/Like their minds had been marred/By life in a district so downtrodden and drab]. Their presence in the music stems from deeply personal, human experiences, but they’re not serving to complete a rational line of thinking or to create a representational setting. Rather, the imagined localities become the loci of the songs in the same way they are the loci of human beings; their characters do not just color but generate part of the knowledge being created. Berman inquires into these sites but does not exercise power through them, avoiding the use of them for self-representation or to create self-important meaning.
The capacity to render a detailed, logical scene is most often cut off by introducing a series of nonsensical images or seemingly irrelevant statements. Take the song “Dallas,” for example, which names a setting for the listener to imagine but leads with a virtually unrenderable scene. [I passed out on the fourteenth floor/The CPR was so erotic/A blizzard blew in through the door/And little glowing cum buckets in her ankles]. It’s not entirely illegible for the imagination, but it certainly is not following a rational line of thinking. This is a purposeful departure from representational thought, which seeks to categorize places neatly to hold dominion over them. As the song moves forward, the chorus bellows [O Dallas you shine with an evil night/Don’t you know that God stays up all night?/How’d you turn a billion steers/Into buildings made of mirrors/And why am I drawn to you tonight?] The real question emerges, but the mystery of the environment is maintained. Why am I drawn to you tonight? Dallas does not serve as a point of semiotic significance but rather as an autonomous presence. It swallows, induces vertigo, maintains a secret animus, never to be disclosed.
It is not uncommon for Berman’s songs to be schematically set up this way. To begin, seemingly situated in a real environment, but go on to imbricate the setting with many collapsed images, falling into one another without making clear sense, and more importantly, without seeking to make clear sense. In “The Farmer’s Hotel,” one of the few narrative songs in Berman’s discography, the speaker, stuck in an unfamiliar town called Goshen because of a power outage, is incapable of discerning his surroundings, blindly led to a hotel equally as perturbing as it is enticing. Once he arrives, he is unable to navigate to his room. The doors have no numbers, the carpet moves on its own, and the floors are covered in straw. Ultimately, the song finishes with a sudden return to the beginning of the inopportune mishappening; [The lights went out in Goshen/Just like poetry in motion]. Being and poetry are equated, in the glory of their concealedness that is now unconcealed. There is a sense of hidden meaning behind the hotel and each of its unsettling characteristics, but we are not led to any conclusive a-ha moment. Instead, the question mark remains, and we see the will of the narrator diminished. Speaker and listener are simultaneously left to stew in doubt, almost instructed to remain open and to relinquish expectations of both setting and plot. Rather than cognate the place, we can only sense it.
The troubled sense of inner absence throughout Berman’s discography also speaks to the repositioning of the speaking subject. [Chalk lines around my body/Like the shoreline of a lake]; [Suffering jukebox such a sad machine/You’re all filled up with what other people need]. In one song, Berman just repeats [Open field with a window/Open field with no child] for almost three minutes. Its title is (shockingly) “Open Field.” In rendering the self as an open receptacle rather than something full, the lyrics pose the subject not as a center of knowledge but as an intentionally effaced chalkboard to be written on. We no longer have the power of making sense (beyond sensation)— or hold the judgment of sense at all. While a goal of prescription is unlikely, Berman’s songs— though shifting in form— consistently create an experience of listening as waiting (and being unsure of what you’re waiting for). This active passivity brings one closer to a mindfulness that puts will to rest and seeks knowledge from outside the self. The usual positivity of experience is interrupted by not having enough to see or not having enough to define. We are perpetually caught, stagnated, buzzing like television static: a suspended way of being too frequently run from.
Whatever the effects were on the listener, I do not think Berman’s primary goal resided in them. Instead, the songwriting was simply an attempt to say what he meant when confronting a world of increasingly meaningless language. It was a mode of experimentation, a game of freeing the mind from intellectual and perceptual limitations. Berman seemed to have been incessantly asking himself how to [...wander through the night/As a figure in the distance even to my own eye]. He was concerned with the estranged self, irresolutely hoping to both close the gap and further said estrangement until complete separation from the ego. His music, a language tensing against language, was also a drawing with an empty fill. A negative silhouette.
As certain as I am that Berman did not propose any one antidote, there are echoes of possibility emerging from his lyrics. Bear with me for quite a literal reading, but I think there’s potential. [My ski vest has buttons like convenience store mirrors/And they help me see/That everything in this room right now is a part of me]; [Moments can be monuments to you/If your life is interesting and true]; [Grant me one last wish/Life should mean a lot less than this]. Here, Berman’s lyrics argue against typical habits of meaning-making, of (true and false) pattern recognition, of signs and symbols, and argue for what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, a disposition toward engaging with the world on equal footing, impersonal yet attentive. By this, I mean shedding the attachment to unraveling oneself while attempting to understand something else, and thus shedding the attachment to subjective clarity.
Poet Rafael Cadenas writes in the essay Realidad y literatura (Reality and literature), “Society’s king is the weary king of the known. Poetry aims to rip us from him, and lead us to novelty, which is the ordinary, but as if we were to see it for the first time.” Novelty, which is the ordinary. A moment that is a monument. A ski vest button that knows something we do not. The everyday does not seek our attention, nor does it command it. But both the everyday object itself (perhaps less applicable to ski vest buttons, but who’s to say?) and the type of interaction we share with it may be something to learn from. It is secure in its ambiguity as both concealed and hidden, and does not will itself onto others to solve such a contradiction. Our ignorance toward it can be attributed to its inability to conclusively represent the human self; in recognizing this, we might realize the importance of what we do not perceive in the realities we do. Perhaps by shifting our ideas of what merits attention— and abandoning the goals we often attach to the act of giving attention— we can begin to forsake associations of discomfort and ungraspability, and we can create both a way of seeing and of speaking that does not seek dominion through the projection of consciousness. Perhaps here we can begin to distill silence.
Berman’s final album, Purple Mountains, under a moniker of the same name, reads differently from his work with Silver Jews. Excessive images are met with just as many (if not more) platitudes of utter despair and depression, from [...darkness and cold/Rolled in through the holes in the stories I’ve told] to [Go contemplate the evidence and I guarantee you’ll find/The dead know what they’re doing when/ They leave this world behind.] There is a return to personhood, to the singular suffering he felt he was enduring, that marks a departure from his earlier work. I do not think it is that the narrator of Purple Mountains believed less in the earlier aims. He admits in the track “That’s Just The Way That I Feel,” [And the end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting]. It's possible that such a condition of collapse engendered a final submission to our original contradiction, the fact that today “it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself… in truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself.” (Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays)
Berman committed suicide close to a month after the release of Purple Mountains, on August 7, 2019. To what extent he believed in his project’s importance, to what extent he believed in its realization by the end, and to what extent it had anything to do with what I am saying now are things we will never know. What I can pose with (close to) complete certainty is that the trouble was always and will continue to be— [Now that I’m older and sub-space is colder/Just want to say something true].