mrshl | blog

Sunday Song Lyric: John Vanderslice’s Minaret

I’ve been listening to John Vanderslice’s new record, Emerald City, and I like it a lot. I didn’t listen to his last one, Pixel Revolt, but according to reviews I’ve read, his lyrics have become focused (some would say fixated) on 9 / 11 and its aftermath.

That’s not what I take away from listening to this record. Indeed, something about Vanderslice’s voice seems kind of beige to me. What I mean is that unlike his sometime collaborator John Darnielle (a.k.a., The Mountain Goats), Vanderslice’s vocals don’t really command me to pay attention. And despite the stripped down production of Emerald City, and Vanderslice’s increasing vocal similarity to Darnielle and Colin Meloy, it’s still the production I care about when I’m listening to Vanderslice record.

Anyway, yesterday I was listening to the record in my car, and one line from “Minaret” caught my attention:

An eye for an eye was a way to limit revenge
We’ve done away with all of that
Read how it all begins
It was written years before, same name, same war
I can see both sides and it paralyzed me inside

Turns out, he’s right. The biblical reference to “eye for an eye” is found in the book of Exodus, in the middle of a longer passage prescribing certain punishments for certain offenses:

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake.

And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.

If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit.

The whole idea of “eye for an eye” wasn’t an articulation of revenge, but a substitute for it. It was a law intended to replace the chaos that can result when men respond with violence out of proportion to the act that has provoked them. Wikipedia brings the science:

The principle is found in Babylonian Law, see Code of Hammurabi. It is surmised that in societies not bound by the rule of law, if a person was hurt, then the injured person (or their relative) would take vengeful retribution on the person who caused the injury. The retribution might be much worse than the crime, perhaps even death. Babylonian law put a limit on such actions, restricting the retribution to be no worse than the crime, as long as victim and offender occupied the same status in society, while punishments were less proportional with disputes between social strata: like blasphemy or laesa maiestatis (against a god, viz., monarch, even today in certain societies), crimes against one’s social better were systematically punished as worse.

What I like about “Minaret” is how precisely it avoids / transcends politics. Sure, proportionality with respect to 9/11 is something Americans think a lot about. But there’s something more conceptual going on. “I can see both sides and it paralyzed me inside.” He repeats that line twice, emphasizing the balance sheet mentality required to think about justice in these terms.

There is a reason both Christ and Gandhi rejected even “proportionate” revenge. It creates two injuries from one wrong. Gandhi’s fundamental insight was that limiting revenge is difficult to do. “An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind.” I think it’s this double blindness, and the inability to limit revenge that’s so paralyzing in Minaret.