"Once a crystal choir Appeared while I was sleeping"

In the middle of the journey of our lives, which Dante tells us is the 35th year of each and every one of us, Judee Sill – a mostly unknown singer-songwriter from Los Angeles – died of a drug overdose. The year was 1979, and with only two rather obscure albums that sold poorly, the musician wasn't exactly forgotten because it seemed no one even remembered her anymore. If we believe her Wikipedia page, no obituaries were published anywhere, and some of her friends heard of her death only years later.

If any great artist has but one theme (which is what they tell us), hers was the meeting of the divine with the human. Or rather, her longing for such a meeting. This longing and wish were expressed in many of her songs, most vividly in "The Kiss."

Since ancient times, the dream was believed to possess prophetic powers. In medieval Christianity, this quality became an established literary genre. The Dream Vision, or Visio, where dreamers often encounter great adventures and discover divine truths, is found in many versions, the best known of which is probably "The Pearl." This 14th-century poem tells the story of a father mourning the loss of his pearl. When he meets a maiden, he identifies her as his pearl, and in return, she reveals to him the heavenly city and the retinue of Christ. Excited by that vision, the father tries to cross over to that city only to awaken in his bed and discover that the vision he saw was a dream.

That unbridged distance between the two worlds is expressed in Sill's song with the metaphor of the kiss. A kiss that is the union of the divine and the profane (or just the earthly). William Blake wrote about the marriage of heaven and hell, while in the Zohar (the Jewish Book of Splendor), we are told of one of the rooms in heaven where Moses and God are held in an eternal kiss, never letting go – a symbol of the love between the people of Israel and their Lord. But Sill's kiss was much more personal and more abstract.

There wasn't any real kiss in her song, but a whisper that is compared to a "wind song." As the divine doesn't have a material body, nothing like "our poor bodies," the kiss is a "Holy breath touching me." And it all happens in the form of a dream:

Once a crystal choir
Appeared while I was sleeping
And called my name
And when they came down nearer
Saying, dying is done,
Then a new song was sung
Until somewhere we breathed as one
And still I hear their whisper

Unlike the kiss of God and Moses, this kiss is short-lived. A spiritual peck almost, that leaves an impression – like notes of music still playing in your head. At first, I must say that I was seduced by that awesome vision, by the joy expressed in the song. Later came thoughts about other conversions. Paul was thrown from his horse when he met Jesus on the road. St. Augustine heard a child's voice that told him to read from the scriptures. Both were instantly transformed but their conversion, which is not the experience we see here. Even if we exclude the sorrows of Sill's own life, her untimely death, and her tragic story, here we only get a whisper that lingers on. The wind is singing and the dream choir keep appearing but isn’t God himself silent? And it is not the silence of the philosophers that Maimonides tells us about, but the silence of absence. I might be reading into this song something that is not there, but I do feel that because its tone is joyful it conceals a longing that is never fulfilled. Not in this life anyway. Not "Until somewhere we breathed as one."

ove rising from the mists,
Promise me this and only this,
Holy breath touching me, like a wind song
Sweet communion of a kiss

Sun sifting through the grey
Enter in, reach me with a ray
Silently swooping down, just to show me
How to give my heart away

Once a crystal choir
Appeared while I was sleeping
And called my name
And when they came down nearer
Saying, dying is done,
Then a new song was sung
Until somewhere we breathed as one
And still I hear their whisper

Stars bursting in the sky
Hear the sad nova's dying cry
Shimmering memory, come and hold me
While you show me how to fly

Sun sifting through the grey
Enter in, reach me with a ray
Silently swooping down, just to show me
How to give my heart away

Lately sparkling hosts
Come fill my dreams, descending
On fiery beams
I've seen 'em come clear down
Where our poor bodies lay,
Soothe us gently and say,
Gonna wipe all your tears away
And still I hear their whisper?

Love, rising from the mists
Promise me this and only this,
Holy breath touching me, like a wind song
Sweet communion of a kiss