MUSIC BOX NO. 8
blue notes, the lady of shalott, and five recent favorites.
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. — James Baldwin, Another Country
ONE. LATE OCTOBER BY BRIAN ENO AND HAROLD BUDD.
Morning comes on quiet and cold. It’s 7:03 a.m.— the sky is just beginning to lighten, shifting into a new shade of blue and starting to sculpt the darkness into distinct shapes, houses and trees and telephone poles. I know the pattern. I’ve got about half an hour until sunrise, give or take, and the world won’t really start moving until the sun is fully up. That’s two more hours of silence. Two more hours to settle into life.
Dawn may be approaching, but it’s still dark out. My lucky stars are still sitting low on the horizon. There’s birdsong coming through the open window despite it being October, barely making itself heard over the sound of the bath running. I’ve never heard morning birdsong in October before. It’s good to know that they’re there; it bolsters my heart. When I rest my arms on the windowsill and lean my head outside, trying to spot where the song is coming from, there’s a faint breeze carrying that autumn-specific campfire smell. No birds in sight. The darkness is too thick for that. I haven’t turned on any lights— there’s a prayer candle for the Virgin Mary that’s been lit, but the wick is so small and so deep within the glass that you can’t really see by it. All it does is make her throat glow. She could be a dragon or a hummingbird or an advertisement for cold medicine. It’s not enough.
I’m alone. My father is on a business trip and my mother is God knows where, scattered to the wind like a dandelion. The house was mine for the night. The bath is mine for the morning. I stand at the bathroom window in my nightgown, watching gooseflesh ripple through my skin in the cold air and picking at the peeling paint on the sill. I might be high. I don’t remember if I actually took something or just didn’t sleep, but it doesn’t really matter because the effect is the same. I’m hungry and bleeding and I’m running myself a bath because water fixes everything and I could use a little fixing right now. Funnily enough, I feel pretty like this— half asleep, bare faced, wreathed in the smell of phosphorus from struck matches. It’s a religious sort of feeling, like a clean towel or a virgin sacrifice. I’m not making much sense. Maybe I really am stoned.
The water is hot and slick. The silence in the wake of the tap shutting off is almost deafening. I’ve been too tall to fully stretch out in the tub since I was twelve, so I bend my knees and slide down, trying to submerge my chest and shoulders. It doesn’t really work, but it’s enough to fight off the chill. I raise a hand above the water and watch the drops run rivers down my arm. They’re diamonds in the dark. Beyond it, the candy-apple green tile on the wall is so soft it looks like it’s glowing. When I was little, I had an irrational fear that if I leaned on a wall, it would go soft and swallow me whole. I think I could suffocate in that color green and be perfectly happy.
My Walkman sits on the edge of the tub. What a shade of yellow! Everything looks like candy to me right now. And I finally recorded side B of that Brian Eno ambient tape, so I put my headphones in, turn the volume low so I can still hear the birds, and hit play.
The second collaborative effort by Harold Budd and Brian Eno, who are both considered the godfathers of ambient, The Pearl was released in 1984 and is generally regarded as one of the landmark works of the genre. It is uniquely aquatic. Gentle pianos, nature recordings, and electronic textures decorate the landscape— the feeling that comes to mind is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, watching the waves move over you and listening to the world go by. This is only expounded by the opening track, Late October. The cries of a seagull begin the song and pop up throughout it. A slow piano riff is supported and softly rocked along by a layer of quiet, glittery synth. Ascensions to the higher-pitched part of the keyboard crystallize and then fade; we return to the oceanic sway. Although the seagulls immutably make me think of a beach, I’ve heard some people say that Late October reminds them of watching leaves fall or the slow progression of the colder seasons, and I can hear that, too.
Part of the reason I’m so drawn to ambient music is because of the variety of potential interpretations or sensations it can cause in a listener. There is no omnipresent narrative or protagonist. You listen to the story of the song— the composition, the production, which notes sit where— and you can either create a narrative around that, like my beach or some people’s falling leaves, or you can just let it fade into the background and replace the silence. Ambient also tends to support and collaborate with the sounds of your environment, creating a conversation between the song and your surroundings. When I move one of my arms, the lapping of water against the side of the tub adds another layer of texture to Late October instead of disturbing or taking something away from it. So does the whir of my Walkman working. So does the fuzz and grain of the cassette itself. I surrender myself to the experience. I surrender myself to the sound.
7:26 a.m. and it’s ego death in the bathtub. The water is starting to go cold. I feel like I’m dissolving into myself, fizzing out like a soda exploding in reverse. Everything shines. Everything sparkles. Everything actually is candy, because if I can put it in my mouth, then it’s edible. It might kill me or make me sick, but it’s still edible. It takes me another couple of minutes to remind myself that I didn’t actually take anything— no cough syrup, no marijuana, no psychedelics. I’m not stoned. I’m just like this. I’m really just like this. And I laugh and laugh and laugh and, when the sun comes up and the first rays of soft light come sweeping over the neighborhood, illuminating the reds and golds of the trees, I’m still laughing to myself. The tape ends. I flip it over and keep laughing.
TWO. SOLITUDE BY BILLIE HOLIDAY.
So I finally get that appointment with a psychiatrist and am prescribed Cymbalta for my troubles, which spends the first few days making me feel nauseous and shaky before settling down into placidity. As a result, my mother— who refuses to believe that any of my issues might be chronic— talks to a medium and is promptly convinced that I’m sick because I summoned an entity, a demon or spirit or something, to prevent me from going to in-person high school. My misguided angel. My parasite baby. Meetings with the medium are added to my weekly repertoire. Back on the medical side of things, I now have to bring swimsuits to doctor’s appointments because they put me in a giant metal tub, fill it with water, and then administer shock therapy once I’ve dried off.
It’s not too bad. I feel a bit like an experiment gone wrong, a new Frankenstein to be pulled apart and stitched together and then ditched, but it’s not too bad. I’m laughing. It doesn’t count as traumatic or violative if I’m laughing, I’ve decided. And I walk home from my appointment because I can’t bear to be in a car and I look around at the streets I pass through and I start to get the sense that even though my legs are moving, they’re only moving in a dream and I’m not actually going anywhere. I’m walking in one place. Strangers drift by. Houses and trees approach and then recede. I walk past a church and I end up vomiting into the dumpster in their parking lot because nobody is around to see it and shock therapy fucks me over. I’m free, though. I’m free as a bird until I see another church, at which point I feel something that I can only describe as the sorrow of chastisement creating perfection, the kind of purification that atonement and regret brings.
I walk on the main roads because I don’t have enough space in my head to remember which streets are shortcuts and which streets are dead ends. Dandelions grow wild in untouched front yards; beautiful creatures, yellow and white both, sway in the breeze like dancers. Decrepit motor homes line the sidewalks. Broken glass and fast food wrappers line the gutters. The houses have thick wood or corrugated metal for fences, security cameras aimed at anyone who has the audacity to get too close. A war is happening between both sides of the sidewalk, the people outside versus the people inside— there’s a Leonard Cohen song about a similar war, but I can’t remember which one. I can’t remember anything. I’m probably going to vomit again. I just hope I make it home before that happens.
Twenty minutes in, I encounter a half-shredded armchair that’s been left on the curb with a sign reading FREE taped on the back and promptly collapse into it. It’s a nice day, you know. The sun comes and goes and then comes again. I’ve got my eyes closed and my face tilted up, catching whatever heat I can. Someone driving by calls me a junkie slut but I ignore them. I’m free. Clouds drag their heavy bodies across the sky— light goes, light comes, light goes— I’m free. I’m trapped in this city because I can’t drive or get a job and my head isn’t functioning right and sometimes the doctors just make me worse, a thousand cages that only I can see, but I’m free and I love it here. I really do. The trees are so beautiful and the air is shockingly clear and I’ve put too much time into this place to hate it. I can see my ghosts, echoes of past selves, leaving footsteps for me to follow in. And I do.
This is my hometown. I was born here, raised here; I skinned my knees on these streets and rode these buses and drank soda from these gas stations. I can tell you about the ice cream and the classmates I didn’t like and all the times I thought I was going to drop dead where I stood, just because I was alive in the world and could hardly bear the beauty, but I won’t. I could tell you about getting followed home by strange men, about trying to walk and read library books at the same time, about slipping on ice during a rare snow day, the playground gossip and the urban idylls and the chores, the successes and traumas. I could write you an entire life, except that I can’t. It’s my solitude and my blue note and you can’t have it. And if you already do have it, because God knows how much of myself I’ve given up, then I guess we’ll both just have to live with it.
There’s no way for me to talk about Billie Holiday without getting maudlin. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of her is her pain— the pain of her childhood, the pain of being locked in a room with a dead body at age 9, the pain of being surrounded by abusive men, the pain of her addictions and subsequent racially-motivated persecution by the United States legal system, the pain of her death and the surrounding circumstances. The second thing that comes to mind is a description of a flamenco singer from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red; “she had the throat full of needles you need.” A throat full of needles! I think about that phrase whenever I hear jazz or blues singers, crooning their pain out through the despairing love song standards of the era. If someone asked me to describe Holiday’s voice to them, that would be the first thing I would say, closely followed by smoky and instrumental, like the soloist of a horn section. And what else is there? She walks the line between coy and wavering sadness with the sort of excellency that you just can’t teach. She was a pop music genius. She changed the world. Her pain and her throat full of needles and her brass, gardenias in her hair and dogs at her feet. God bless the Lady Day.
Solitude, a Duke Ellington jazz standard written for Holiday, was released in 1952 and then re-released on her eponymous 1956 album. Backed by piano, electric guitar, a very quiet hi-hat rhythm, and a horn, she weaves herself in and out of melody, dueting the horn riffs with a tangible wistfulness. It’s perfect to listen to on the days when sentimentality is dragging you by the ankles. Think of the threat of rain, a chill in the air you’re barely avoiding, daydreaming out the window; there’s that element of coyness I mentioned earlier, but by the time she hits the final lines— dear Lord above, send back… my love— it’s so fragile that it’s almost frightening. She’s alone and waiting for someone to come home, and they never will, and she knows it. We all know it. Still, it’s not enough.
In my own chair, I wait for the feeling— nausea or exhaustion or ecstasy— to pass so I can start walking again. I don’t know what it is. I like to be by myself and sometimes I regret that. I miss the world I used to move through, but it’s gone forever and I’m not going to waste my energy on making impossible wishes. Surely I’ll be rid of the feeling by the time I reach the house. Past experience has told me that these moods, these blue notes, are fleeting and largely confined to the moments of beauty I have while alone. I always get like this. And it’s kind of funny, because there are so many places that are more beautiful and don’t touch my heart at all— it’s here, sitting in this disgusting rotting armchair that smells like sex and looking at the loose trash and the nodding heads of the weeds, that I’m hearing this blue note. I am haunted by this blue note. I am haunted by this city and the blood I’ve given to it, the amount of DNA I’ve left on the sidewalks and in the sewers. I am haunted by the fact that I just vomited next to a church because I can literally still taste the bile. There’s that reverie. There’s that beauty. And there, in the gutter, is that freedom I’ve been reaching for. If only I could get myself to grab it. If only someone could send it back over to me.
THREE. SPECTRAL BRIDE BY GILES COREY.
The first time I went on a Night Walk was when I was six— we were camping in the forest during a full moon and, because I still believed in magic enough to bet on it, I wanted to see a unicorn. I wanted to be saved or to know I was pure of heart or to get a sign from the universe that I was good. And I knew it wouldn’t happen, but I wanted it badly enough that I convinced myself that maybe it could, so I packed a white dress and slipped into the woods as soon as everyone was asleep. I couldn’t tell you how much ground I covered or how long I was out there. The moon was bright. The woods were still dark. It was summer, so it wasn’t terribly cold, but my sundress wasn’t nearly enough to keep me warm. I didn’t wear shoes because I didn’t have any white ones and I thought it would ruin my chances; I got poison oak all over my feet as a result, even though I stuck to the small dirt paths that wove between the pines. The sky started to lighten. Still no unicorn. I slunk back into the tent with itchy feet and my tail between my legs.
Although I didn’t find that unicorn, Night Walks became a regular thing, even back at home in the city. Once the lights turned off, I drifted away into the streets. It never occurred to me to be afraid of the world when I was a child— I felt that everything that could hurt me, really hurt me, was already inside my house, and things like strangers or darkness or divine wrath all seemed very small in comparison. I didn’t have to talk to anyone or obey a whim that wasn’t my own. I rarely encountered other people. The dark was my friend. Besides, I had a knife. It was the only way that I could spend time with the world alone, and it still is, and I still walk at night. And I still have a knife.
It’s pouring rain tonight. I go out into the dark dressed for a funeral— black skirt, black sweater, black coat, black rain boots. Headphones in. All the people are sequestered inside their homes. I am the ghost that haunts my neighborhood; I am the rain, I am the wet dark, I am what they lock their doors to keep out. I am playing pretend. Water falls into the perfect geometry of the storm drains, so constant that it looks frozen in time. Isosceles triangles for roofs. Leaves gather on branches in Fibonacci numbers. I keep looking at the world and seeing coordinates that lead nowhere, measurements and angles, solutions that never come. I have this fantasy that the universe is just a big equation that’ll tell you everything about anything, and the only reason it hasn’t been solved yet is because there are too many potential factors— the placement of a candlestick, the direction and speed the wind is moving in, the amount of liquid in a cup on the other side of the world— and it’s almost impossible to account for all the correct inputs. It’s the mathematical, non-superstitious way to tell the future and the past and all things in between. It’s everything. It’s so heavy it’s pressing me to death.
Not that it matters. I don’t need to know my future because I am my future. I’ve got my blue note and my moldering soul and the weight of the world and that’s all I need. That’s all.
After being arrested for witchcraft in April of 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead and was sentenced to peine forte et dure, a form of torture consisting of having heavy stones placed on top of the defendant until they either entered a plea or died. Stones began to be placed on September 17th; he died on the 19th without pleading, allowing his farm to be passed into the hands of his sons instead of the government. Each time he was asked to plead, he instead replied more weight. His tongue was pressed out of his mouth and had to be pushed back in by the Sheriff. He didn’t cry or moan. He didn’t confess to witchcraft. The only thing he did was ask for more stones to be placed, and they were, and he was slowly crushed to death without complaint. He was 81 years old at the time.
This isn’t that Giles Corey, though— this is Have A Nice Life member Dan Barrett’s side project, created after a suicide attempt and named in Corey’s honor because “[Corey] made them murder him [and he] made it ugly”.1 Taking inspiration from folk and country as well as the shoegaze-esque gloom of his usual territory, his self-titled 2011 debut is mostly acoustic and incredibly spacious. It sounds like he’s playing without microphones from inside a giant metal box. Barrett’s melancholic lyrics turn it into a tell-tale heart of an album, beating at you from under the floorboards. Everything echoes, everything hums, and we’re all going to die because love can’t save us from Hell.
Spectral Bride is a love song. Yes, it’s depressing (or so I’ve been told without fully believing it). Yes, it’s about hoping you become a ghost after you kill yourself so you can remain with your loved ones. Yes, the harmonies sound like they’re being screamed from the back of a room, and they’re so weightlessly dense that every layer feels like a heavy stone. But it is a love song. Not only because it’s about love, but because there’s an inkling of hope in it— hope for the future, hope that death will bring the end of suffering, hope that the narrator will be saved. Becoming a ghost is presented as a sort of win-win situation, a dream of a life without the suffering that being alive entails. And it does entail suffering. That’s part of why I like being alive so much, you know. Even the pain is ecstatic. And with all my quirks, my distance and my asymptomatic depression and my serene suspicion that I’m probably doomed, I also hope I can be a ghost. I don’t want to leave here. I don’t want to die in the first place, but if I have to die, I don’t want to leave because I love this place. Because I love being here. Because I love the rain and the night time and the ability to walk, the release, the suffering.
One block, two blocks, three blocks, four. Don’t step on the cracks. Five blocks. Five is a lucky number; this is a good sign. Cars are parked and the world is silent. Angles singing in a choir. I dream a dream of floating down the street, carried by the wind and the water, delivered to my next location by the universe. Deliver me from evil. Deliver me home. Mathematics keep striking me like lightning— everything can be turned into an equation or graphed or solved. I think about sound waves, the irregular sine functions that the rain creates. A drop falls into a puddle and another sine wave, this one smoother, radiates outward. Six blocks. Seven blocks. I’ll be home soon. I’m so far removed from other people that I might as well be a ghost. But I’m here. I’m still here.
FOUR. CRUEL BY TORI AMOS.
The other benefit to the night is freedom, and with that comes sensuality. If nobody can see me, then I’m free; if I’m free, then I can move unencumbered, swinging my hips or dancing or just existing the way that it feels the most natural for me to exist. Stretches of bare leg flash when I walk. I pull my hair back and scrape it to the side to keep my neck cold. My hands cast little spells of movement in time to the music. I am operating in a space without judgement, and that means I only do exactly what pleases me— nothing more, nothing less. And many things please me. I like to be alive in this world and I like to be awake in the darkness, alone and beautiful. Phosphorescent. Resplendent. A pearl of a girl in hand-me-down clothes and a late night bathroom haircut.
The same life, the same night, within the same hour as being a spectral bride. It’s still dark and pouring rain, plastering my hair to my skin and numbing my fingers. I catch my reflection in a dark window and see that my eyes are black holes in my face. I’m terribly happy. I feel like one of the monsters painted by Bolesław Biegas, killing a man with my soul flung out to the sky because all celebrations of life have to have an awareness of death. This, right now, is a celebration. The streetlight on this block died a while ago. When a car drives by, I know I could have been killed if I was in the road. They wouldn’t have been able to see me. They would have crushed my body into little bits and I know it and I get even happier. Everywhere I go, I see equal opportunities for pleasure and death, and I’m holding both of them in my hands at all times. I cross the dark road and laugh. Try to get me now, fucker.
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death and I fear no evil because I’m the meanest son of a bitch out here. And I can be very mean. When I was a teenager, I used to make the boys who were crushing on me humiliate themselves for my amusement. They had the option to back out, but they never did; God only knows why. They ate expired food and licked floors and I laughed at them and they fucking liked it. It was a competition— show me how badly you can suffer, how wretched you can be. Who can hurt the worst for me? They played this little game to make me smile and, in return, I promised that if they made themselves sick, I would be there to hold their hair back and comfort them. This is my sex. Shall I list the rest of my sins, now? The bruises I gave, the bloody noses, the faked orgasms, the snide teenaged comments, the time I tried to bite through a throat and got sent to the counselor’s office? Shall we compete to see who’s worse? I welcome it. Debate me. Fight me. Just know that I’ll win— I always win. Even when you think I lose, I still win.
The 1998 album From the Choirgirl Hotel was one of Tori Amos’ first ventures into full band arrangements. Her usual piano ballads shifted to a multi-genre symphony, melding elements of trip hop and electronica with art rock and her signature elaborate lyrics. Cruel is a perfect example of that. It’s sensual, it’s hypnotic, it’s mean— the bassline throbs behind Amos as she snarls and spits her way through the verses. Well, look how good you are at suffering. No one has suffered more than you. No one’s pain compares to yours. Don’t you deserve everyone’s pity? Shouldn’t everyone be bowing down in the face of your hurt? You’re so special. Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite the Wound Man? Fuck you.
Sometimes I wonder if those boys knew that I was never going to date them or fuck them or even talk to them outside of school, that their antics and competitiveness would never go anywhere. I remember replying to someone asking for my number by saying that I didn’t have a phone and then walking out of the room with my hips swaying and my phone clearly displayed in my back pocket. Surely they knew I was just messing around. Surely they knew it was a game. And yet they still needed to martyr themselves for me, even with the knowledge that they were chasing a nonexistent reward. They needed to prove themselves. They needed to demonstrate their prowess in idiocy and their pain tolerance and, most of all, they needed to win against the other boys. Maybe they didn’t know, though. Maybe I was just a bitch who was looking for entertainment during class. But, at the end of the day— even with my cruelty and my suggestions of recklessness and how often they got in trouble— they still did it.
Oh, well. Even if they could have had me, they couldn’t have handled me. Now, on the sidewalk in the rain, half of me is sensual and half of me is dead. I think I miss it. I think I miss my own capacity for cruelty. There’s been something dark that’s been bubbling up inside me and it hasn’t had a true outlet for years. I’m not worried about it, though— I still have a body, I still have an imagination, I still have ways to let it out. I have plans. In the dark of the street, staring into the rain, I am enacting my plans.
I walk until I reach the nearby school, hop the fence, and keep to the shadows until I reach the playground. Security cameras don’t concern me— I know where all of them are. Sitting on top of the shitty plastic slide, I press a finger into my mouth. This is routine. I used to do this as a child, when I was still figuring out where all the holes in my body were and why they were there. Anatomy textbooks weren’t enough. I wanted to feel it. If you follow your soft palate and go just past your uvula, crooking your finger up through your orthopharynx, you can enter your own nasopharynx. You have to teach yourself not to panic so you don’t gag or cough. It’s as tight and wet as any other hole or wound— you wouldn’t believe how it feels to have something inside your face, the sensation of your pharyngeal constrictors and palatal muscles moving around you. The rain is sharp on my face. My throat, in comparison, feels blindingly hot. This is good. This is better.
My sensuality, my joy, my threats of violence. Sex and death and magic and cruelty. There’s a chance that I could accidentally choke to death with my hand in my pharynx like this, but that only makes it more fun. Don’t respect me or revere me or pedestalize me for it. Crush my body into little bits, hit me with a car— I’m horrible. I am uniquely bad and I’m having lots of fun. I win. You lose and I win. Let’s stay in the dark. Let’s stay in the dark forever.
FIVE. HEAVY WATER/I’D RATHER BE SLEEPING BY GROUPER.
The west side of the house faces no streetlights, and although it’s impossible for it to truly be dark here— there’s too much light pollution for that, even if nothing is shining directly on us— the gloom in the bathroom still makes you disappear into the shadows once the sun goes down. It’s 2:18 a.m., Monday morning. I am once again in the bath. This time, though, I’m invisible. Invincible. Nobody can see me and that means I’m free. My room is clean and my meds have been taken and my absent parents love me for what I can do for them because I’m a good girl. I’m the unstoppable force and the immovable object. I am normal because I like the rain and lemon-flavored sweets and dreamy music. Across the room, sitting on the edge of the sink, the Virgin’s throat is glowing again. Dios te salve, María. Slowly, I lift a leg out of the water and hold it in the air, pointing and flexing my foot until my ankle painfully snaps. It only takes a moment for the hurt to settle and then disappear completely. Everything is like this.
I guess I’m thinking about love. I tend to oscillate on the subject, going back and forth between telling myself that I’m incapable of love and that I’m overflowing with it. Right now, I’m landing on overflowing. There’s so much love in me that I could drown myself in it— love for humanity, love for the world, love for the act of living. This is how I’ve survived isolation. My love is my love, mine own love, pouring out of me into nothingness with no expectation of ever being returned. I love the isolation because I love the blue notes. I love ugliness because I can’t help it. I love everything just because I can. There’s an image in my head of my heart as an empty birdcage— I promise it isn’t as sad as it sounds. I have deliberately left the door open. I am releasing the birds. They’ll never come back once they’re gone and that’s perfectly okay. Imagine me with my hands cupped, removing endless amounts of birds from the cage; there’s so many of them, songbirds and seagulls and crows, that I have to keep taking them out because there’s no room otherwise. And they’re all trying to kill each other. My love is trying to kill itself constantly, but that’s okay because I love the love, too. How could I not? Like me, it’s all just trying to fly home.
I dunk my head under the water and open my eyes. Everything around me is so warm. The ceiling shifts above me in shimmering charcoal, still rippling from the movement of me going under. Little bits of my hair float into my vision— my hair is finally long enough to float into my vision. A perfect spot of dim yellow glitters in the bottom left corner. Hello, Mary. Thank you, Mary. I imagine her resplendent in her blue robe, beating the bad shadows away from me with her bare hands and leaving the good ones behind so I can rest my eyes. The shadows feel like love. The water feels like love. I run a hand over a breast just to feel the weight of flesh and the weight feels like love. Here come the birds again. One trillion beating wings descend upon and rip away from me. It doesn’t feel like losing something because I’m giving it freely. It’s mine and I can do whatever I want. I’m wild and I haven’t found a way to get hurt so it’s easy for me to totally open myself up, to give up the birds, to release that love. Only through being wild can I be lifted up and taken away.
Resurfacing, I take a breath and go back under, back to the soft place. My kneecaps are cold. If only I could sleep under the warm ocean, fully submerged. If only I had wings of my own. These feelings are never going to leave and that’s okay because I love them. Nothing leaves me— things go, but they never leave. Wild wild wild in mine own love. I am taken away.
The second track on Grouper’s critically acclaimed fifth studio album, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008), Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping was listed as number 67 on NPR’s 2018 list of best songs by female and nonbinary artists, referred to as the anthem for Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shallot.23 I can’t help but agree. Chanting a deathsong, the song’s narrator plunges into a dreamlike love that threatens to drown them. The general interpretation seems to be that the narrator wants to sleep at the bottom of the ocean out of fear, trying to escape the enormity of the love; personally, I’ve always thought that the tidal waves and the sleeping are actually a statement of commitment. The narrator is surrendering themself to the drowning. They accept their fate of overwhelming love. Backed solely by an acoustic guitar and very faint synth, Grouper uses harmonies and reverb to create the ethereal haze of Heavy Water. The simplicity only adds to the mystique. It makes me think of velvet. It makes me think of the bathroom in grayscale, warping through a layer of bathwater.
It’s strange to have enough faith to leave yourself open like that, to let yourself be borne away on the current, joyless and fearless. Draw near and fear not. Through my layer of water— I’ve drawn another breath and gone under again, desperate for the way the sound of the world becomes muffled— the mirror above the sink looks cracked. I love the broken mirror. I love the unshattered glass. I think of Elaine of Astolat and her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot, her loneliness and her curse and her death. Yes, there are the 19th century associations with purity in death and feminine passivity, but it goes beyond that. She felt a love so strong she was willing to die for it, to let herself go and give herself up to the river. There’s a sense of liberation in that. I see echoes of the birds in Elaine. I see echoes of the wild.
And here I am waiting underwater, Mary sputtering in the corner. It’s beginning to rain. It’s always raining, this time of year; it comes like clockwork. I can see my own cycle. I can’t get free without love and I can’t love without freedom, and underwater I stay, half sick of shadows. All the birds in my heart. All that cage. All that wild. I finally saw the medium my mother is making me go to and she told me I have an unusually broad perspective of humanity and an abundance of kindness. It’s strange to be called kind— I don’t know if I actually believed her, no matter how much she could theoretically intuit about me through the video call, but I chalked it up to my birds. I used to move in labyrinths but now I move in birds, and I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense to you because it makes sense to me, and that’s enough. I’m an old hand at that sort of thing. Don’t love me back and don’t understand me and lose all your faith in me. I am immutable in my change and I am always trapped in a dream and I love you. I am the least interesting thing about me and I love you. I’ve got so many birds that I don’t need yours. I love you.
My hands drift in slow motion through the water, carried and dragged down by the pressure. They sit in the photic zone without needing to be kept there. I shift my body, reaching towards my feet. My index finger hooks around the stopper. I love you. I’m pulling the plug.
BONUS TRACK. ALL FLOWERS IN TIME BEND TOWARD THE SUN BY JEFF BUCKLEY AND ELIZABETH FRASER.
It takes me five minutes to get my coat and boots on. It’s early enough to still be dark when I slip out of the house, locking the door behind me and disappearing into the last dregs of the night. The sky is clear. Forty-five minutes until sunrise. I’m on a mission. There is something that must be done.
The convenience store at the top of the hill is how every convenience store is, unique from and identical to the others all at once. The lights are aggressively fluorescent. Everything smells like it’s been disinfected without really being cleaned. Brightly colored non-perishables line the aisles, flashing neon plastic into nothingness. The red light of the security camera blinks in my peripheral as I make my way across the store to the refrigerated section, and I watch myself on the monitor, a pixelated blob, as I fade in and out of different squares. I take the last bottle of root beer. The attendant is doing something on his phone, steadily avoiding eye contact. We don’t say anything to each other while I pay for my drink.
When I leave the store, the sky is starting to lighten. I’ve been here before. We’ve been here before. Every psychic my mother throws at me talks to me about Ouroboros— things that repeat, cycles that continue, deviations that still keep the pattern intact. I try not to stake too much belief in signs or omens, but sometimes things just line up. Things are always lining up for me. There’s a thick cloud formation to the west. An airplane passes overhead. This happened yesterday and yesterday happened last week, because the air smells like a campfire and the world looks like candy and we’ve been here before. I’ve said these words before. When a car passes me on the street, hidden by darkness, I’m already expecting it. Sinking into a dream doesn’t catch me by surprise. I am crossing the overpass and making my way into the bowels of the forest. I am trying to listen to the trees. They’re saying something, but I don’t know what it is. I can’t translate it. This is the tail of the snake. Now we move through the head, into the throat and behind the soft palate. Then we do it again.
The lake is, of course, beautiful. Everything is beautiful, but the lake is especially so. Birds cut a V through the sky. There’s a fog coming off the water, dragging itself through the reeds and over the dock that I’m sitting on. The trees growing from the banks are dressed in their autumn regalia. I don’t remember exactly what happened to bring me here, but I’m not disturbed by it— I meant to come here and the end is right, so I suppose the means don’t matter. I have enough self faith that nothing can touch me. I will always end up exactly where I’m supposed to. The world will resolve itself. All meaning will be revealed in due time. What’s that called? Pronoia? I don’t care. I smooth a hand over the boards of the dock; the wood is soft and cold to the touch. Facing east with my headphones in, I take a sip of my root beer and lie in wait. The dark is fading. It’s almost here.
Written and recorded during Elizabeth Fraser and Jeff Buckley’s brief romance, All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun is an unfinished rough demo that was never intended to be heard by anyone but them. The song was leaked after Buckley tragically drowned in 1997— Fraser, who is still alive, reportedly hated this.4 To be honest, it’s easy to understand why. Flowers is not only one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard, but also intensely intimate. Many elements are clearly planned, but much of the vocals come off as improvised, with Fraser laughing in the beginning and both artists quietly murmuring to each other toward the end. They overlap and intertwine, weaving in and out of each other; it’s an incredible thing to hear, especially from two vocalists who are so formidable. Fraser’s voice, which has been described as the “voice of God”, practically sounds like its exploding out of her mouth with happiness. I can’t tell if it’s a blessing or a curse that Flowers has never been cleaned up and officially released— a bit of good production could’ve taken it to another level, but so much of what makes it amazing is in the informality of it. It’s a Devil’s bargain.
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to define what makes a love song A Love Song. Somehow, I always just end up here, at Flowers. It’s the rawness. It’s the little hints of darkness. It’s the hope. It’s the lyricism— most of which align with Fraser’s semi-unintelligible style or are just so opaque that they can avoid interpretation, but the parts that stand out can’t help but strike a chord. All flowers in time bend towards the sun. I know you say there’s no one for you, but here is one. And while it can absolutely be interpreted as being about a relationship, it can also apply to almost any situation where patience is needed, which is almost every situation. There is always a path. There is always an option. You, too, will move into the light one day.
Yes, I have a thing about darkness— that much is obvious at this point. I also have a thing about lights, mainly that I hate them. If possible, I will avoid any electrical light, using daylight or candles until I absolutely have to turn on a lamp. This is how I’ve always been. Thankfully, that doesn’t kill the metaphor, because even when I think that none of the choices available to me are possible, there is a way. I am a night-blooming flower. I flourish away from other plants, allowed agency and the dignity of risk; I thrive in places where other people have their eyes closed. Slowly, I am discovering ways of living and places to be that don’t force me into abiding by a system that loves brightness. The doctors say I’m getting better. My therapist says she’s noticed that I’ve gained a sort of clarity and lucidity. Things are changing, shifting in a good direction. Yes, the snake keeps eating its tail, but circumstances can be shifted. The skin will molt and reveal new patterns. The body can extend and lengthen. There are cycles to everything— this does not mean we are doomed to them.
Somewhere to my left, a goose cries out, breaking the silence. I’ve been sitting still for long enough that my extremities are starting to go numb. Warm tones are gradually beginning to work their way into the sky, turning little streaks of cloud a sort of peachy pink color— they reflect in the surface of the water, a perfect symmetry. I stick my hands under my knees to try and warm them. It doesn’t work. Then, without pretension or grandeur, the sun finally peeks over the hills on the other side of the lake. I can feel the light hit me. I know how it’s all going to end and I don’t care. The campfire smell. The candy-world. The church parking lots and the rainy nights and the muscles in my throat and the bathtubs. All that, and here I am, bent towards the sun. Here is my way out. Here is my hope. Here is the one.