MUSIC BOX NO. 9
translation versus transformation, angel radio, and five more favorite poems.
ONE. WALKER BY RYUICHI SAKAMOTO || IGNATYEVO FOREST BY ARSENY TARKOVSKY.
The last leaves' embers in total immolation Rise into the sky; this whole forest Seethes with irritation, just as we did That last year we lived together. The path you take's reflected in our tear-filled eyes, As bushes are reflected in the murky flood-lands. Don't be difficult, don't touch, don't threaten, Don't offend the forest silence by the Volga. You can hear the old life breathing: Clumps of mushrooms growing in damp grass - Though gnawed to the very core by slugs, They still inflame the skin. All our past is like a threat - Look, I'm coming, watch, I'll kill you! The sky shivers and holds a maple, like a rose, - May it burn still stronger - right into your eyes.
— Arseny Tarkovsky (trans. Virginia Rounding)
My first venture into Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography1 was two years ago, with Mirror (1975). I still struggle to describe exactly what I felt while watching it. It was hypnotic— it was the memory of a remembered childhood, with a mother’s turmoil taking form as a levitating body, the insecurity of adolescence fixating on a girl’s bleeding lip, and a dying narrator who repeated all the mistakes of his father. Mirror fades in and out of dream sequences with a deliberate logic, moving through time in a solemn sort of free association. Slow-motion wind dragged across grayscale trees. Houses flooded from the seams. You could walk through a forest and end up thirty years in the past. At the end of the film, I was floating, scraping my knees on the certainty that the idea of time moving linearly is a joke.
Next was Solaris (1972), which might be one of Tarkovsky’s worst films, but I couldn’t even bring myself to truly dislike it because I was so entranced by the textures. The interior of the space station often felt like it was placeless; the liminality of it was only furthered by the softness of the clothing worn by Natalya Bondarchuk, who plays the resurrected wife of the protagonist. Stalker (1979) followed soon after, furthering the themes of human desire and memory that were only briefly touched on in Solaris. It’s certainly the most narrative-based of his films (at least out of the ones I’ve seen), but that doesn’t negate the dream-logic that the characters operate by. The Zone looks like something out of my own dreams. I felt seen without feeling exposed, comfortably hidden under layers of symbolism and allegory. Finally, Nostalgia (1983) is the one I watched most recently. That one felt a bit like it burned me alive, in all honesty— the idea of a poetic action, like carrying a candle across a pool to save the world, turned my heart bright. I saw that immolation and felt it on me. The power of the film, of course, is that you gain the ability to recognize that as the blessing that it is.
It’s funny, you know, because I can literally track my presentation of self through my timeline of watching Tarkovsky’s films. Mirror was when I decided that I was going to really try to grow my hair out, even if that meant I was just going to have it braided back all the time. Solaris was when I started using scarves as shawls. With Stalker came a fondness for long slip dresses and a slow progression out of wearing much makeup. Finally, Nostalgia brought me taller boots and a renewed passion for growing my hair out, because I swear I could get it that wild and beautiful in enough time. And these things were always inside me, but seeing them wander through the fog and look out over the fields reaffirmed them for me. Yes, it’s in you, it’s here, and this is the world you’re reaching for. This is a vision of who you can be. Tarkovsky gave me a place that no other artist could— permission to be myself, maybe, in all my misty, oneiric glory.
Of course, the films I hold so dear wouldn’t exist in the same way without Arseny Tarkovsky. He was a poet, a translator, and a general artistic inspiration for his son, Andrei. His poems feature prominently throughout Andrei’s filmography, most frequently in both voiceovers and monologues in Mirror and Stalker, and there are a variety of thematic similarities between his work and Andrei’s. That being said, most of Arseny’s poems are pretty hit-or-miss. There are absolutely better poets out there. Maybe some of it is getting lost in translation, inventive phrasing in Russian being diluted into English cliches, but I get the impression that he might have just written with an overreliance on the tropes of the time. When he does pull it off, though, it’s lovely— some of that is probably due to hearing it be read aloud in Andrei’s films, but the point remains.
I haven’t quite decided how I feel about Ignatyevo Forest. It certainly isn’t a piece I would tape to my wall, if you know what I mean, but that doesn’t eliminate the feeling of importance I get. To me, it feels less like an independent work and more like an arrow pointing back towards Andrei’s work. I can see the lines between them. This is only furthered by the fact that Ignatyevo Forest is supposedly centered around Arseny’s relationship with Andrei’s mother, Maria. The forest noiselessly boils itself— the relationship between the narrator and the subject also boils. Both the surroundings and the people inside them are subject to a sort of slow, inflammatory violence that is seemingly ancient and untouchable. The poem ends with a spiteful flourish. I’ve seen that spite in Andrei’s characters, too. It all points back to itself.
I rewatched Mirror on New Year’s Day because I felt like I needed to. It wasn’t the way I remembered but it didn’t need to be. I was expecting it to evolve, the way that all dreams do. Last time I saw it, I was drawn in by the way it floated— this time, I watched Margarita Terekhova’s performance and felt myself attach to her. The spite made its reappearance in the dual role of the protagonist’s mother and ex-wife. The arrow locked into place. For the following few days, the only music I wanted to listen to was Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2017 album async, which was conceived as the soundtrack to a nonexistent Tarkovsky film. I particularly fixated on walker, a four-minute piece of very polite dissonance overlaid with the sound of footsteps. The drone of it could’ve been insects or an act of God. It is a song that lies firmly in the realm of the outdoors. Maybe it’s walking itself through a forest. Maybe that forest is in total immolation. Maybe, just maybe, it’s walking along the path of the arrow, fluidly moving in and out of time. If anyone could see that arrow, it would be Sakamoto.
Dreams of mist and shawls and long, wild hair fill my head. That’s not unusual. I fall asleep to the sound of someone coming closer to me and know that it’ll never really come home.
TWO. PINK RABBITS BY THE NATIONAL || WHITE NIGHT BY ANNA AKHMATOVA.
I haven't locked the door, Nor lit the candles, You don't know, don't care, That tired I haven't the strength To decide to go to bed. Seeing the fields fade in The sunset murk of pine-needles, And to know all is lost, That life is a cursed hell: I've got drunk On your voice in the doorway. I was sure you'd come back.
— Anna Akhmatova (trans. D.M. Thomas)
When I think of things my own father has said, the first things that come to mind are skills— this is how you make an electric chair, this is how you make napalm, this is how you cook a pork chop, this is how you really fuck up someone’s car. The second thing that comes to mind is something he said to me when I was seventeen, while we were watching television. I don’t remember the exact context. I think a character had done something stupid in the name of love, and I had scoffed at them, because in what world was that a good idea? And he looked at me and told me that he really hopes someone shatters my heart one day. That’s the word he used. He said shatter. I didn’t have anything to say to that so I shrugged and we carried on. But I think about it sometimes.
Of course, the first time I listened to Pink Rabbits was a few days later, because life likes to line itself up in such a way that you can’t avoid certain ideas. It was the second song by the National that I had really heard— Rylan was the first, because an ex put it on a playlist of songs that reminded them of me— and also the first time in a long time that I found myself obsessed with a song. It was the only thing I listened to for days. I liked the miserable purr of Matt Berninger’s voice. I liked that he was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park. I made myself a Pink Rabbit (tequila, strawberry milk, and Kahlua, as the story goes2) and it was so fucking disgusting that I could only drink half of it because I kept gagging, and if some of the gagging was because the song was shattering my heart, then that’s between me and the glass.
When I saw the National in 2023, it was because of Pink Rabbits, which was still the only song of theirs I knew. I can’t emphasize enough how out-of-character that is for me. I’m not much of a concert person in the first place (sorry), so spending 80 dollars I don’t have just to see a band whose discography I don’t know isn’t something that ever happens. And obviously they didn’t play it. Of course not. It’s a non-single off an album that had just turned ten years old. I went with my best friend (who also only knew and cared about Pink Rabbits) and we spent the entire set hoping it would happen, but knowing it wasn’t going to. Berninger, glowing under spotlights in a two-piece suit, paced across the stage like a well-dressed caged tiger and crooned out the lyrics to songs I adore now but barely paid attention to then. He would stop and reach out across the audience as if he was trying to take flight, flinging his hands out like he was scooping up pieces of his heart and giving them to the audience. I was scared he might fall. He reached for the crowd and the crowd reached back and they never, ever touched each other. Everything in that park was untouchable.
Now, years later, I’m sitting on the porch listening to Pink Rabbits and trying to find a poetic language that scratches the itch in my head. I want heartbreak, I want brevity, I want despair and an eternal world and a bit of hope in the mix— I suppose I want to be shattered. Shattering is good. Shattering is how you avoid corrosive, unchanging stillness. Shattering is what turns tar into a sea, into something you can swim out of. I tried poems from the last couple of decades but they weren’t right. I tried older poems, the Romantics and the Transcendentalists and the Confessionalists, but they didn’t fit either. The list drags on forever. Nothing was touching me.
Anna Akhmatova’s poetry does, though, depending on the translation. For all that I love Nabokov’s novels, his opinions on translating— that the translator should rigidly cohere to the original text— tend to fall flat when it comes to sensation-based texts like poetry. The instrument changes with the language. You have to play it in a different way.
Is the D.M. Thomas translation faithful to the original text? No, not really. I would say not at all, but it does retain the imagery— the unlocked door, the unlit candles, the pines, an intoxicating voice, life being a cursed hell— albeit not always in the right place. The second stanza in Thomas’ translation begins with the end of the original first stanza, ends with beginning of the original third stanza, and takes the voice-drunk bit from the last two lines of the second stanza and uses them as the central lines of the third stanza instead. It mentions a doorway that simply doesn’t exist. The subject of the poem now not only doesn’t know, but also doesn’t care. It doesn’t rhyme, which isn’t that important to me personally, but it’s worth mentioning because the original does. Twilight gloom becomes sunset murk. Exclamations become colons. The voice is the subject’s voice, instead of just like the subject’s voice. So, no, it’s not faithful, but that doesn’t matter. You should have figured out by now that all is lost, including translations.
It’s here because I like it. It’s a transformation, not a translation, and I like what it transformed into. It scratches the itch in my head. There’s despair, but not the wailing or fall-to-the-floor kind— just the slow, methodical pacing of someone watching the sun go down, waiting for something that might never happen. An exhausted caged tiger. A brain trying to get itself unrattled. A television version of a person with a broken heart. Or, perhaps more aptly, something shattered— someone in a rainstorm or an evergreen forest, quietly picking up the pieces and ignoring the cuts on their hands from the sharp edges. Someone told them it would be painless and that was a lie. It’s dark. The sound has kicked out. You don’t know, can’t see that I’ve fallen apart. Think of me and come back. Come home. Please. And it shatters me, too.
THREE. IT SERVE YOU RIGHT TO SUFFER BY JOHN LEE HOOKER || ON THE SUICIDE OF THE REFUGEE W.B. BY BERTOLT BRECHT.
I am told that you raised your hand against yourself Anticipating the butcher. After eight years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier You passed, they say, a passable one. Empires collapse. Gang leaders are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples Can no longer be seen under all those armaments. So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right Are weak. All this was plain to you When you destroyed a torturable body.
— Bertolt Brecht
I woke up with a hole in my head. That’s not a metaphor or an exaggeration— when I woke up a few days ago, there was a hole in the middle of my forehead, right under my hairline. It’s about the size of a matchstick tip and almost perfectly round. I don’t remember where or why or how I managed to get it; all I know is that it took me half an hour to get the blood off my pillowcase. It serves as two reminders in one tidy hole— firstly, that I am not exempt from external tides that might touch me and drag me to places without my say-so, and secondly, that I am very, very fragile. So fragile. We all are. And (thirdly) yes, I might have tried to brain myself with a pen or something while I was sleepwalking, which means that my subconscious is not always my friend and can’t be fully trusted, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is that destruction is easy, especially if it’s a body being destroyed and even more so if the body is your body. You can even do it without meaning to. Bruised knees from kneeling, broken skin from hangnails, sour liver from drinking, yellow fingers from nicotine, scars from pierced skin, rotting teeth and hunger and neglected health. You can go for the head, too— isolation, degradation, denial, all the little things you can destroy yourself with from the inside out. It’s so easy. Especially because, in many peoples’ cases, those in power benefit from your destruction and deliberately keep systems in place to make your destruction easier than your wellbeing. Misery makes money and money makes power. It’s a difficult cycle to break.
In September of 1940, renowned Jewish Marxist and literary critic Walter Benjamin chose suicide instead of letting himself be delivered back into the hands of Nazi Germany. He and a group of other refugees were fleeing Europe through the Iberian Peninsula when they were caught by a group of Spanish guards, who intended to send them back to Nazi-occupied France. Benjamin killed himself, which reportedly disturbed the guards so deeply that they let the rest of the group cross into Portugal. We still don’t know exactly where his body was lain to rest. Upon hearing of the death of his friend, playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote On the Suicide…, an elegy that sits between fury and understanding. I don’t think I know anyone in today’s world who doesn’t understand that combination of emotions. It’s never easy to see someone you love choose self-destruction, even when you understand their reasoning. Brecht mourns the time Benjamin could have had if he stayed alive and tried to find another way out, if he had chosen something that was at least survivable; simultaneously, he mourns the knowledge that the world had forced Benjamin’s hand, and in the present situation, he couldn’t have held out for the future.
I don’t know why On the Suicide… makes me think of John Lee Hooker. The blues in general, really, but especially Hooker, who might be the bluest bluesman out there. It’s something in his voice, a certain type of resignation to the black dog that seems to be right behind him. I don’t think I’ve heard a song of his where he doesn’t seem at least mildly depressed. It Serve You Right to Suffer is, of course, a perfect example of that— there’s a version called It Serves Me Right to Suffer where it’s more evident, as he switches from second person to first, but I prefer the hypnotic quiet of the original. The eponymous 1966 album was released on the jazz label Impulse!, who provided jazz musicians as a backing band. The result is a slow groove that feels like smoking alone in a room or watching a train come down the tracks you’re tied to. It’s a funeral march to your own damn coffin, and it’s your fault. You did it to yourself. You can’t live on. It serves you right to be alone.
Now it’s 85 years after the death of Walter Benjamin and here I am, destroying my torturable body because I have nothing better to do. I mean, the act of living kind of inherently involves destroying yourself. No one makes it through unscathed. Yes, I picked up smoking again— herbals, not tobacco, because the motion is enough to take the edge off without me reigniting my faded nicotine addiction. No, the future doesn’t lie in darkness, but it does seem to be pretty dim right now. It’s been slowly getting brighter as time goes by. I tell myself that I can be content with that, in the event that I don’t live long enough to see it make its way from less dark to truly bright. I’d like to. Even if it’s a bad time to be alive, it’s always a worse time to be dead. The hole in my head is healing, after all. And obviously I’m sticking around, if only out of curiosity. I know that it’s unlikely my hand will ever be forced the way that Benjamin’s was. I guess the least I can do is watch it unfold, even amidst the suffering and destruction. I suppose I’ll be spending the rest of my life doing just that.
Oh well. It’s worth it.
FOUR. JENNY BY SLEATER-KINNEY || WE ARE GOING TO THROTTLE EACH OTHER BY ANNA ŚWIRSZCZYŃSKA.
I am going to walk, walk in the greenwoods, up the mountains till there drains out of me through my heels my agony. I am going to sing, sing with my whole belly till there spurts through my throat from my guts my agony. I am going to make love, love with animals till out of disgust I throw up my agony. We are going to throttle each other me and my bloody fate till one of us drops dead.
— trans. Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan
Let’s talk a bit more about watching a train come down the tracks you’re tied to, because briefly mentioning it wasn’t enough. The first thing you notice is the sound. I don’t exactly live near train tracks, but I still hear the whistles sometimes, cutting through miles of air to reach me. The squeak of the wheels and pneumatic huffing aren’t exactly quiet, either— when you’re directly in the line of fire, they get even louder, like a tornado coming to take you away to Oz. The second thing is the feeling. Maybe that’s less obvious. I suppose it depends on how straight and flat the tracks you’re tied to are, because if the train is in clear view for miles, then obviously you’ll see it before the metal and wood under you start to vibrate. But the vibration starts earlier than you’d think. It’s a nasty little tickle that rattles your bones. The third thing you notice is the train itself. Maybe this is when it rounds the bend or crests the hill. Either way, you watch it get bigger and louder and stronger until it’s right in your face, and then: crunch. That’s the sound of your bones snapping under heavy machinery.
Literally speaking, I’ve only almost been hit by a train, because there was a moment when I was little where a cousin barely pulled me off the tracks in time. Figuratively speaking, though, I’ve absolutely been hit by a train, and that motherfucker’s name is Fate or Destiny or Premonition or something like that. I try not to mention it much because these things tend to get you labeled as crazy, but I’ve heard my train coming for ages. I’ve heard it since I was nine years old. I watched it get closer with the sort of dread-calm you get when you’ve accepted that something very bad is about to happen, and when it hit me at age seventeen, I didn’t even flinch or close my eyes. I had already come to terms with it. Don’t knock grieving the future until you try it, I guess. I can’t even be mad about it because I’m pretty sure I chose the train— I stepped onto those tracks of my own volition. It doesn’t matter that the tracks were the only piece of ground that weren’t made of lava. I still chose it. Now I’m post-impact, forever getting my bloodless carcass dragged forward by the relentless machine of time. I would say more about it but my jaw got ripped off and my throat is full of gravel.
So what’s it like being a rail suicide, you might be wondering, to which the answer is: not much, how about you? I think I haunt places instead of occupying them. If you tried to touch me, there’s a solid chance your hand would pass straight through my body. I’m okay with it. Really, I am. I saw that coming, too. And at the end of the day, it’s still a type of destiny, isn’t it? It’s nice to have been chosen by something. It decided on me, appeared to me, and then I stood there and married it. I am the girl. I am the ghost. I am the wife. I am the one.
I am the girl, I am the ghost, I am the wife, I am the one is also the litany that functions as the chorus for Jenny, the closing track off of Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 album Dig Me Out. If death by train was a song, I imagine it would sound pretty similar. There’s constant distortion in the background, fizzing up and down in time with the guitars. Corin Tucker snarls her way through the verses. God only knows exactly what the words mean, but with the way she delivers them, I can’t imagine it’s anything nice— defiant, at the very least. It builds for almost two minutes until the bridge slams into you. Didn’t we almost have it? And yeah, I almost did. I almost found a way off the tracks. By the time Tucker starts howling didn’t you want it? over and over again, you’ve fully surrendered to the sound. Because I did want it. I promise I wanted it.
I thought of Jenny in the moments before the train hit me. I was also thinking of the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska, who seems firmly and quietly defiant in every poem of hers that I’ve read. “Violent feelings / are good, so I have heard, for your health,” she says in her poem I Am Panting. I know I believe her. I believe her like I believe that I managed to get hit by a train. And how’s that for a violent feeling? So, standing in the face of my fate, I thought about getting into a fight with it and winning. Maybe that’s a stupid idea, but it’s the one I had. I knew that we were going to end the day with our hands wrapped around each others’ throats and that only one of us was going to be leaving alive. I moved like an animal. I threw any suffering I had out the window and got into position. I refused to let the agony inside me. Fate can kill me, but I still succeed if I don’t let it hurt me. This is how I win.
Ask me again what it’s like being a rail suicide and this time I’ll be honest. It sucked and I don’t like it and if it really was my fault then I fucked up in a major way. I would have been scared if I hadn’t cut my ability to feel fear out of my body like a tumor. But there was a moment there where, in my teenage idiocy, I stared down that train and knew it was going to hit me and said: I fucking dare you to try. That little defiance felt good in a way I can’t possibly communicate— it felt good because it meant that I managed to win. I died but I was the winner. It’s good enough for me. Next time, fate will be the dead body. I’ll wait until then.
FIVE. COCOON BY BJÖRK || POEM FOR MY LOVE BY JUNE JORDAN.
How do we come to be here next to each other in the night Where are the stars that show us to our love inevitable Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh the black men waiting on the corner for a womanly mirage I am amazed by peace It is this possibility of you asleep and breathing in the quiet air
— June Jordan
Here’s the thing. I can do songs about sex, or, more accurately, I can do songs about fucking. I can do songs about sexuality, which is obviously different from sex. I can do love songs, provided that they’ve got a sense of mortality and aren’t too saccharine or cliched. I have zero issue with songs that get down and dirty with it. That’s easy. That’s simple. Yes, maybe there’s love and tenderness in there, but the main event is the fucking and I can do that with no problem. With that in mind, maybe you can understand why I was so adverse— and baffled by my own aversion— to Cocoon. It’s objectively a good song. It seems right up my alley on paper, because I love the textures of Vespertine (2001), I love good production, and I love Björk’s sense of lyricism and rhythm. So why was Cocoon, out of all the songs in the world, so difficult for me to listen to?
Well, I once insulted a boy while he jerked off in exchange for cigarettes and then immediately evaded the question when he asked me how I was doing, if that gives you an idea. Sex is easy. Love is easy, as long as I’m alone. Intimacy— something that automatically requires another party to be with you, if not literally in the room— is a fucking nightmare. Yeah, yeah. Avoidant attachment style, Cluster A personality disorder, blah blah blah. I know. I’m actually very aware of it pretty much any time I interact with someone whose company I enjoy, because how can you not get weirded out by a willingness to say I love you coexisting with a complete inability to admit to a crush? Does liking someone suddenly mean more than loving them? What the fuck is your problem, dude? (See listed reasons above.)
But I digress. Cocoon is, at its core, an almost unbearably intimate song. Even when you’re not listening to the lyrics— which involve having sex, cuddling, having more sex, falling asleep with someone still inside you, and then waking up and having even more sex— the production has the vocals mixed so intensely close that it sounds like Björk is speaking to you from inside your brain. There’s also an incredibly poetic description of semen that only Björk could successfully use in a song. (I’m being crass, really, but it’s true. My apologies). It is a sweet and deeply erotic love poem. The lyrics are erotic. The production is erotic. In turn, the eroticism is the closeness. The point of the song is the beauty and intimacy found in companionship and mutual pleasure, not the sex. The sex is only relevant because of the bliss of proximity. I guess it’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t fully connect with someone who is uncomfortable with that proximity, isn’t it?
What I can connect with, though, is June Jordan’s Poem for My Love. If it’s easier for me because the subject of the poem is asleep and therefore can’t witness the narrator reveling in their proximity, that’s nobody’s business but my own. Besides, watching people sleep and thinking about the beauty of the universe is like my bread and butter, in a way. When I was a kid, I would stay up later than everyone else at sleepovers just so I could see their faces and hear their breathing as they entered a state of existence where they were entirely unguarded. I don’t care if that’s weird. It was bewitching to see the people I spent my days with suddenly shed their makeup and consciousness like dead skin. It was vulnerable. And I liked that because as long as I was awake, I could negotiate the terms of my own vulnerability, making it so I didn’t have to be vulnerable in return.
Aside from all my anecdotal rambling, it’s also a beautiful poem, the same way that Cocoon is a beautiful song. Neither of them rhyme— the emphasis is on the rhythm instead, the way your mouth moves when you say the words. How do we come to be here next to each other in the night? Who would have known? Because that degree of closeness, of intimacy, is something to be marveled at. It’s a wonder. Two bodies, dragged across time and space, have been eroded in such a way that they fit together beautifully. In the words of Björk: gorgeousness.
I guess the goal here is to get to a place within myself where I can feel that wonder without ruining it by wanting to shrivel up and die the entire time. I like to collect lovely experiences; I would like to collect this particular lovely experience, too. It’s obvious I’m not there. I haven’t been dragged far enough across time and space yet. That’s okay, though. Half the joy is in the waiting. Besides, that just means that it’ll come when I’m not expecting it, at which point I’ll be able to say— wow, who would have known? And the entire world will glow in front of me, yelling I knew I knew I knew. Because, you know, it’s easy to feel loved by the world when you’re in love. Or so I’ve heard. Or so I will know. Don’t worry about it. It’s coming back for me.
BONUS TRACK. SCORE FOR I… DREAMING (1988), COMPOSED BY STEPHEN FOSTER AND ARRANGED BY JOEL HEARTLING || HESITATE TO CALL BY LOUISE GLÜCK.
Lived to see you throwing Me aside. That fought Like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see That all flushed down The refuse. Done? It lives in me. You live in me. Malignant. Love, you ever want me, don't.
— Louise Glück
Technically, this isn’t a song. But do you want to know a secret? Come here. Come close to me. Let me wrap my hand around the back of your neck so I can whisper it in your ear. Okay. Are you ready? Here it is: I don’t fucking care.
I’ve watched over a hundred movies this month, thanks to the powers of YouTube and unemployment. Most of them have been short films directed by Stan Brakhage. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I know Brakhage was one of the most influential figures of experimental film. Maybe it’s because his style, his half-faded clips of memories and his Rorschach-like paintings, resonates with me. Maybe it’s because his filmography is so expansive that there’s always somewhere to go next. I ping-ponged from dead birds to blooming supernovas to home videos to autopsy footage, always finding something new to dig into— the sex, the death, the natural world, the idea of God. I like his light, or at least his ideas on light. I think he sees brightness the way I do, as a secular being instead of something that just interacts with other somethings, a type of fabric visiting from the sky. It feels good to me. I fall asleep to his flashes of trees and watercolor blossoms.
I… Dreaming (1988) is a standout work in the Brakhage filmography, slightly deviating from his usual technical formula. The camera angles are fixed, the cuts are longer, the color palate is consistently a thick, sweltering green, and his signature scratched-on lettering is used sparingly. In another deviation from routine, most Brakhage films are silent; I… Dreaming is decidedly not. To make it even better, the soundtrack isn’t something like the mouth noises in The Way to Shadow Garden (1954) or a jarring and poorly done modernist piece like in “…” Reel Five (1998)— it’s six minutes of chopped up choral pieces, and it’s beautiful, and I’m kind of obsessed with it. It’s like flicking through a radio filled with sad angels. I, dreaming— nothing— I sigh— a kiss— night loving— static, piano, live air. The voices crest and fall and cut themselves off. My heart— nothing— all while Brakhage scratches THE DARK DARK VOID into the film. Lured by dreaming, they say together. The screen is green. The light is thin. There is no dialogue, just the angels and the scratch-writing and the house. The light gets thicker and then thinner again. Brakhage’s shadow puts its face in its hands.
It’s about loneliness. It’s also about the absence. STARLIGHT IN SILENCE LIKE A TEAR, writes Brakhage. FRIGHT VISIONS COLD UNHALLOWED TRUE. There had been a consistent focal point to his work for almost thirty years by then. We, as an audience, watched that focal point become the ultimate symbol of love, give birth twice, clip the wings of chickens, raise five children, and perform various odds and ends throughout his films. Her name was Jane Wodening. They married in 1957, separated in 1986, and officially divorced a year later. From the outside, it seems to have been mutual. Thankfully, I… Dreaming doesn’t seek to punish Wodening for her absence— it almost seems to be an emotional exorcism for Brakhage, an exploration of the un-Jane. When she is gone, what do I have left? A fragmentary existence. An oppressive room. A lumbering, middle-aged body, suddenly so old-seeming in comparison to the endless energy of the grandchildren. Thirty years of sharing a home and an artistic dream has flickered to an end. What grows in its wake? MY HEART MY HEART MY HEART, writes Brakhage. WAITING WAITING LONGING SICK SORE SAD WAITING. In 1988, this was the shape of the un-Jane.
On the other side of fragmentary absences, we have Louise Glück. Hesitate to Call is also a bit of a stylistic deviation, but in the opposite direction of I… Dreaming— where I… Dreaming is more conventional and narrative-focused than Brakhage’s work usually is, Hesitate to Call is one of Glück’s more experimental pieces. It’s disjointed in a way that I’ve never seen from her before. Of course, this only works in favor of the piece, as the sensation of loss being described is a disjointed one. I love you, I miss you, don’t call me, how could you? We fucked and shared a bed and now it’s all gone but you’re still here. The un-you is still here. I love you. Don’t fucking talk to me. Tonally, it’s more aggressive than I… Dreaming, but the way it jolts remind me of the angels. Night loving— pleasures— my heart— pleasures— on the— slumber, they sing. The piano trills. The voices become more indistinct, harder to make out. The angels saw you sleep. From the— from the— from the— fill the void.
I am not bereft. I am not shattered. There are people that I miss, but that’s due to distance and not separation. I am past the hour of lead. Now, I just live in its shadow. Stories don’t prepare you for living past it, you know, because stories end and life does not. And you can fight against the drone of time like netted fish, but it’ll just make you tired. You’re fighting the unfightable. I do it anyway. Might as well, right? Might as well do something with my time while I’m waiting for the light to move and the shadow to pass. So I still hear the angels in my head when I’m walking alone at night. They come from the streetlights and the sky and the concrete. Feeling— heart — a soothing— go to the— next dream, they say. Go— without love—
And so I do.
Tarkovsky’s entire filmography is available here, on the Internet Archive.