Face the Wall: Peter Gabriel, Death, and Zen Practice

When I wrote about Peter Gabriel’s “Four Kinds of Horses,” I called it a Buddhist parable set to music. His new album, o\i, arrives November 27 and completes the project that song began. One of its singles is called “Face the Wall.” If you’ve ever sat zazen, you know that isn’t a metaphor. It’s an instruction.

What is Peter Gabriel’s “Face the Wall” about?

Gabriel describes it as a song about looking death directly in the face, and he calls that “a nice, cheerful subject.” It came out on the harvest full moon, September 26, as the tenth song released from o\i. Like everything in this project, it arrived in two versions: the Dark-Side Mix first, with the Bright-Side Mix set to follow at the next new moon.

He’s 76, and he says the lyric is partly about getting older and facing illness, something “we don’t do enough of.” He also calls the closing moment cathartic and says it suggests a reason to hope.

The lyric itself never says “death.” It builds the approach. The song opens at dusk on a shoreline, with gulls overhead and a red sun going down, then follows someone up to a cliff edge to look down at everything they’re letting go. Between the verses, a reassurance repeats: even when everything collapses, something at the center stays untouched, and a person who gets knocked down can get up and rejoin the world. The chorus is where the wall appears, set against a vast darkness. As I hear it, the second verse widens to the people nearby, where hope dims in their eyes, and someone reaches for whatever words might help. The song ends with a witness watching someone make it through.

The single’s artwork carries a different image. It’s Tadashi Kawamata’s installation The Nest, and Gabriel sees a wall that is “a bit like death,” with messy human chairs spilling over the top. He finds it funny and hopeful at once.

Why do Zen practitioners face a wall?

In Soto Zen, you sit zazen facing a blank wall, eyes lowered, with nothing to look at. Legend has it that Bodhidharma, who brought Chan to China, sat facing a cave wall for nine years. The wall isn’t a punishment. It’s what remains when you remove everything to chase: no view, no screen, no decoration, just a surface that gives nothing back. Whatever you meet there, you meet because it’s in you, not because it’s in front of you. It’s the blunter cousin of the mirror that weighs a ton.

There's some energy in facing a wall - is it the obstacle that we need to navigate, a future, or a practice in being present with what's directly in front of us?

Zen has never been shy about death. In many temples, a wooden board is struck at the end of the day, inscribed with a reminder that life and death are the great matter, that time is passing quickly, and that we shouldn’t squander the days we have. The practice treats mortality not as a morbid subject but as the reason to practice. I explored how other traditions keep death close in an essay on death anxiety.

Is the darkness in the song the same as Zen’s emptiness?

Gabriel’s chorus sets the wall against a vast darkness, and the mood is dread. Zen has its own word for what’s there when you look long enough: emptiness. It doesn’t describe it as dark. It means the absence of anything fixed, including a fixed self to lose. I’m not claiming Gabriel means that, and I don’t know whether the two are the same. But the distance between the dread in the song and the openness in the teaching is a good place to sit. The song’s insistence that something stays untouched when everything falls apart would sound familiar to anyone who has sat long enough to notice the part of themselves that isn’t what’s collapsing.

Who is the witness?

The ending doesn’t belong to the person at the wall. It belongs to someone watching them get through. In my reply to The Atlantic on meditation’s dark side, Riding the Ox Backward, I argued that the hardest passages of practice are survivable only with someone standing nearby: a teacher, and a community that notices when someone goes missing. The Ox-Herding pictures end with the practitioner walking back into the marketplace, which is what the song asks of its person: rejoin the world. The most hopeful thing in the song may not be the person who makes it through. It may be the one who’s there to see it.

Over the wall, through it, or facing it?

The artwork suggests going over: the chairs spill across the top. The lyric says through. Zazen says neither: you sit, and the wall stays where it is. I’m not sure those are as different as they sound. Hope, if it arrives, tends to arrive while you’re sitting there, not as a plan for getting over.

Gabriel released the dark mix first, with the bright one to follow. That’s not a bad order for a life, or for a sitting.

If thoughts of death are weighing on you in a way that frightens you, you don’t have to carry that alone. In the US, you can call or text 988 at any hour.