“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” This was reported by the Talking Heads on their 1979 album Fear of Music, and memorably in their Jonathan Demme concert film Stop Making Sense. In the film, David Byrne, with the big suit and even bigger sense of absurdity, is all alone with his boom box, singing plaintively about being a psycho killer, written when he was a freaky RISD student. It is a film about loneliness, about making the most of it when you are fortunate enough to have company. In walks a pretty girl. She is Tina Weymouth, the bass player. She comes in to join Byrne on “Heaven.” What will happen next? What happens when things stop making sense? “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” Then what, John Donne?
Stop Making Sense just got a rerelease, and though David Byrne spent years not even discussing a reunion—when one of his bandmates even brought it up over dinner, he was met with stony silence—the four members of The Talking Heads were back together to be Talking Heads, to talk to the actual talking heads, who are in more screens talking about more insane things than we could have comprehended 40 years ago. In 5th Grade gym, I brought in their Speaking in Tongues album, and the teacher stopped “Burning Down the House” in its tracks, as if it were a song about arson. “Y’all shouldn’t be listening to that,” she said. That year, I won tickets to see them in concert, but it was decided that I was too young, and the pair went to my brother. That concert was October 24, 1983, at the Dallas Convention Center and Arena, almost exactly 40 years ago. It was their final tour.
Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven
The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song
Play it one more time, play it all night long
Oh, Heaven
Heaven is the place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens
In the 40 years that followed, I chased impossible joy and difficult pleasures. I learned what a hedonist was, and did not want to become one. Heaven was a metaphor. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven.” Wordsworth wrote that in The Prelude. Does it start with a prelude and end with heaven? And would there no longer be a need for poetry? Would poetry be kind of lame compared to this celestial real estate they’re selling? At age 10, in 1983, I could have looked ahead to age 50 in 2023. I could ask myself, well, how did I get here? I was raised as a Reformed Jew. Jews are not given specifications about the afterlife, but I knew that a good piece of cake could be heaven for a few seconds. Then what? Heaven could come in as a compensation. And I, a stranger afraid, in a world I never made. I did not make this world, with the hall monitors and tattle tales and apple polishers and bullies and anti-Semites. Most people were anti-Semites, including most of my friends and teachers. That was reality. Jews didn’t believe in heaven. If there could be a heaven, it would have nothing to do with any of this. I would get through imagining a life much better than this. Would life, the one I was living, become more heavenly? Or would I try to make a life mattered when I could?