I learned of Joe Pug thanks to Nina Joy, who has excellent and frugal tastes in music, meaning, she doesn't buy anything she doesn't love and she doesn't follow the winds of consumptive and competitive listening. This is a compliment and something I quite admire.
Per Nina's suggestion, I've been listening (on repeat) to Joe Pug's song "Hymn #101" from an EP titled Nation of Heat.
I can't listen to it without thinking of the saint and mystic + John Woolman + who was instrumental in beginning the deconstruction of the system of slavery in the United States. He called slavery "the kind of ownership that is ready to walk over dead bodies." Dorothee Soelle notes "Slavery is the radical, most gruesome consequence of the craving for possessions." [1]
Woolman believed and endeavored to explain that hunger for possessions causes deadly harm to both rich and poor alike and that "oppression destroys both oppressor and oppressed." He wondered if "the seeds of war have any nourishment in our possessions or not."
Dorothee Soelle notes that Woolman did not want to profit from kindnesses that were "the gain of oppression." He refused to ride in carriages because he knew how poorly both crew and horses horses were treated. He refused to wear clothes that were dyed because those who had to dye it were often slaves in the West Indies who were exposed to poisonous vapors and brutal exploitation.
Joe Pug's lyrics strike a resonance or echo with John Woolman especially these stanzas:
and i've come to meet the legendary takers
i've only come to ask them for a lot
oh they say i come with less
than i should rightfully possess
i say the more i buy the more i'm bought
and the more i'm bought the less i cost
and i've come
to take their servants and their surplus
and i've come
to take their raincoats and their speed
i've come to get my fill
to ransack and spill
i've come to take the harvest for the seed
i've come to take the harvest for the seed
and you've come
to know me stubborn as a butcher
and you've come
to know me thankless as a guest
will you recognize my face
when God's awful grace
strips me of my jacket and my vest
and reveals all the treasure in my chest
While possessing less than one is rightfully owed creates a misfit in society, Pug sings "the more I buy the more I'm bought and the more I'm bought the less I cost." At what point do our possessions possess us? I'm far past it but perhaps not without hope of detachment from things.
I recently watched and now recommend a short movie called The Story of Stuff. It's right on our impulse of consumption and the vicious cycle of working, shopping, eating, etc.
Earlier in the chapter on Possession and Possessionlessness, Soelle explores the life of + St. Francis of Assisi + and his marriage to Lady Poverty. About him and his conversion she writes, "Love, every love, renders one naked." Being stripped of jacket and vest is not negative but life giving and transforming.
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[1] Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism as Resistance // chapter 13 Possession and Possessionlessness.
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