This Mirror Weighs a Ton: Silence, Suffering, and the Only Way Through
Updated: 5 days ago
I’m a music fan, not a critic. But when a song touches on spirituality, enlightenment, or Buddhism, I can’t leave it alone, like Peter Gabriel’s “Four Kinds of Horses,” which I wrote about in Four Kinds of Horses: From the Buddha to Peter Gabriel.
When I heard Interpol’s new title track, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, the title stopped me before the music did. I know what a mirror like that weighs.
My brother died by suicide.
There was no hiding from it and no way around it. No drug or drink was going to make that pain go away. The gravity of it all weighed me down, but I had to sit with it and face it as if I were looking at myself in a mirror.
It’s what I tell my students, too. The way is not around; it's through.
What is “This Mirror Weighs a Ton” about?
The album came out in late August. The band's singer, Paul Banks, has described it as a record of striving and reflection: a reach for elation, enlightenment, and clarity, alongside a lot of honest stock-taking (NME interview). Beyond that, I can only tell you what the title track did to me.
Banks brings the sentiment home to me when he sings, "The hardness, the feeling
To turn into silence."
It doesn’t climb toward anything. It loops: a habitual reassurance that everything’s fine, a fall into a hole with a self-insult tucked in like a reflex, a phone that rings and rings. Its refrain warns that if hard feeling dissolves into silence, we won’t make it, and then it insists on survival anyway. It never resolves.
Is silence transcendence or numbness?
That refrain is the line I can’t stop turning over. Read plainly, it’s about staying alive: don’t numb yourself out of existence. Considered through practice, “not surviving” is the self dissolving, and the silence is what’s left when it does. That’s transcendence. I think the song keeps both readings alive on purpose, because from the outside they look identical.
When a student asks me about the quiet or enlightenment in meditation or inner work, I tell them to seek neither. Chase either as an exit, and it becomes numbness. Chase it as a prize, and it becomes one more thing to grab and collect. Only by being open can the truth arrive.
Is it a mirror or a mirage?
That’s why I distrust the shortcut. Sometimes enlightenment gets tangled up with altered states, and some people see a mind-altering substance as a way to skip ahead to self-awareness, even to the dharma. I understand the appeal. I think it’s a mirage.
So there are two silences. One is what’s left when you mute the feeling. The other is what’s left when the feeling has moved through you. From the outside, they look the same. The difference is the road.
The first was never on offer for me. Nothing I could buy was going to reach that pain, so the only thing left was to sit in it. A mirror weighs a ton when what it shows you is real. You can look away, or you can look.
The more you look away or try to stop your illusions, the more they seem to multiply. Spiritual practices like meditation, Zazen, chanting, or prayer offer our illusions a chance to appear not so we can smother them, but so that we can objectively observe them. Like looking in a mirror. Once we see them for what they truly are, then they weigh a whole lot less.
Where the song ends
The song ends the way it began, alone and unresolved. You could hear that as defeat. I hear honesty. Anxiety, silence, and the unknown aren’t places you graduate from, and they aren’t exits. They’re terrain, and you can walk them. Through is the only way forward I know.
I’ve written about walking it before, in Embracing Misery, where Sisyphus goes back down the mountain awake.
So is the silence transcendence or numbness? Maybe the difference isn’t what the silence is. It’s whether you went through it or around it.
If you’re carrying a loss like this, or you’re in that dark place yourself, you don’t have to sit with it alone. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at any hour.
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