Eternal Happiness Or Woe
I like any song that sounds like it would be equally at home in a Christmas special or a horror movie. I’m a pretty big fan of Christmas-themed horror in general, which is part of why I love “Eternal Happiness or Woe” so much. I tend to experience Christmas as a media event, so in order to talk about why I think this song is so special, I’m going to have to visit a few other holiday classics.
“Eternal Happiness or Woe” is an addendum to “Idumea,” and much like "Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It All the Way Out in Bushnell" on Illinois, I think it functions as a chance to keep us in the mood of a song. It’s Stevens telling us that the track isn’t quite done with us yet. “Idumea” ends on the line:
Soon as from Earth I go
What will become of me
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my fortune be
And in Stevens’ recording, it’s sung as a gorgeous, ethereal wail. (Here’s Edward Stallknecht Rice’s excellent take on “Idumea”!) My guess is that Stevens wanted us to meditate on the tension in that lyric before shuffling us along to the equally gloomy third iteration of “Ah Holy Jesus.” He gives us a coda that holds us for another long minute. It’s a breath, a moment of pure sound tucked between songs that rely on dense, theologically-heavy lyrics to tell their story.
It’s also intriguing that Stevens chose to follow Idumea, a shape-note song which is driven primarily by the “sacred harp” of a chorus of human voices, with a piece that feels almost like it could fit into The Ascension. The opening notes have nothing human about them, instead relying on a remote, alien hum. It’s pretty, but… eerie. The kind of music that plays in the background as a doomed fairy tale child wanders into a forbidding forest, or the doomed astronaut ventures out into the darkness of space.
When human voices finally come in, they bring no comfort. They are nervous, haunted, and layer into the music almost as though they want to disappear within it. And when bells begin to ring, they’re not the warm church bells that welcome Scrooge back to life or the homely Christmas tree ornament that tells us Clarence earned his wings. They are shrill, relentless, and almost painful. The voices, a hum before, jump into something closer to a wail. It took me a few listens to finally realize what this reminds me of: the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A very different Star, with a very different Baby.
And again, it is a moment that digs into the darker side of Christmas. If you believe in the story, the torture, death on the cross, and resurrection are encoded in this first moment. Every time you’ve ever heard the story, whether it’s a priest telling it during Midnight Mass or Linus stepping into the spotlight in A Charlie Brown Christmas, that death was already there. The song’s title offers eternal happiness as a possibility, but as you listen, it invites us to dwell in the terror of death and the reality of woe.
If you think about it, for people who are Christian, Christmas Eve is one of the most terrifying nights of the year. God has chosen to come and live in the slime and the mud of humanity. It has not chosen a wealthy mother, warm and safe in a rich man’s house—it has chosen to be born as a tiny infant of an unwed teenage refugee. It has chosen a life near the bottom of society, at a time when life was rigidly hierarchical. God has chosen a life of pain so It can truly be among us. What could be more terrifying than seeing divinity brought so low? How can anyone imagine anything but woe when you meditate on the future waiting for that child?
And yet, the song’s beauty pulls me back from woe every time I listen to it. The alien chanting that closes the song opens up and feels like an attempt to reach beyond expectations for a Christmas mood. Like a few of the other moments scattered across Stevens’ holiday work, EHoW tries to carry us out of ourselves, to give us an idea of timelessness—if only for a short moment in time. Especially this year, when we’re living through our tenth consecutive March, and “timelessness” has taken on a whole new life for so many people, this kind of timelessness, an intentional step out of linearity, seems even more precious.
For all its brevity, EHoW is one of my favorites of Stevens’ Christmas songs. Not only is it weird and eerie and beautiful—it feels to me like the contemplative side of Christmas. If you’ll permit me to duck back into the comfort of A Charlie Brown Christmas again—my favorite scene is one of the quieter ones. Charlie Brown has just been castigated for his choice of tree, and Linus has just delivered his mini-sermon. But Linus’ attempt at theology doesn’t bring the group back together, in fact, it does the opposite: Charlie, having decided that he loves his tree for its faults, leaves with it. He heads out into the night and takes a moment to himself under the cold, glittering stars. And that is what I think of when I think of this song. It’s a breath, a pause between the louder, weirder stuff like “X-mas Spirit Catcher” and the more traditional stuff like “Silent Night.” It’s a gap between the noise of commercial Christmas and the piety of religious Christmas. It’s the moment I always wish I could take during the holidays, to really think about what the holiday means. To be quiet for a while. To sit under stars and appreciate their beauty whether they lead me anywhere or not.
Leah Schnelbach became obsessed with Sufjan Stevens somewhere around hour two of the Christmas collection and hasn’t looked back. They’re the Senior Staff Writer for the pop culture website Tor.com (where they write about everything from the religious significance of the Avengers to the best episodes of MST3K) and a fiction editor for the literary journal No Tokens. You can find their writing at The Rumpus, Joyland, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Tin House Online, and Electric Literature, among other estimable places.