Orpheus Beach

Every time I think of you, I'm conscious somewhere that I deepen my curse. Of course having a heart and having some memory of love, or whatever this wretched affliction is, is better than none. But ask me honestly if I would like to keep this heart, bruised everytime it is reminded of its denial, and of course I will scream back No. Ask me if these years and years of your face coming to my mind when the spirit is at its most vulnerable are something I cherish and I will weep in reply. After all, this is the only life I have, and what happened, happened. Forever supposing on how things could have turned out might have seemed tragically romantic for a year or two. But now I've had it with all that. I'd gladly give it all away, but I doubt anyone would actually want to take it. That leaves patiently and methodically erasing these memories and feelings all by myself. All this requires is convincing the curse that it wants to be lifted.

If these posts were like Dylan songs, even the most rabid Dylanologist would find it hard to recall the prior reference to the Cure's "Friday I'm In Love". I suppose that's something to be proud of, but onto the matter at hand. Locked away with this song, which I've heard properly maybe one or two times, improperly only a few more, is some peculiar emotion and fragment of memory. I can remember sitting by myself in a hotel room, staying all alone for the first time, and finding myself oddly upset by the cheerfulness of the song. Lord knows why; being the Cure, you always get a sense that things can take a gloomy turn any minute, so it isn't a supreme declaration of happiness or anything. But there was something in the melody and tone of the song that triggered the feeling. Its simplicity, its wishfulness, and (in my reading) the sense that no matter how many times you find yourself standing with your head on the door, eventually it all works out and you find some new reason to live which makes the rest of life seem worthwhile.

When I write nowadays about yearning for the past, I do so remembering full well moments like these. If you asked me if I was happy and fulfilled then, well, evidently not. So I think my revisionist reflection considers how much better off things were, even if I didn't realize it. Thinking back to those days now, I wish to tell myself: please don't cry over this. This is only the first act. Today, strolling through an airport once again, when I heard the song playing in the background I did not know how to respond. After all, here I am after so many years, with these same thoughts and feelings. Does it ever end? It's a sobering reminder that things don't always just work out and right themselves. More depressingly, it's a reminder that perhaps the finale has yet to reveal itself.

Why be coy? I've expressed frustration at a recent tendency to star gaze and think of summers past. But I've mostly copped out from giving any concrete explanation for why this has come about. It is true that it is rather non-specific, but I'll be darned if I can't make some educated guesses: I find myself physically distanced from the only people who have any semblance of a decent understanding of me. Through a combination of ill luck and shockingly poor decisions, I've found myself increasily unwilling to let down my guard to anyone I meet nowadays. It's no surprise that I feel emotionally stranded, and I naturally fear that it will always be so. Moving forward requires opening up, and maybe also understanding why exactly I feel these mythical people from my past should lament my absence. Doesn't look like I have too much to offer them as of today.

1) Cockney Rebel, "Sweet Dreams/Psychomodo". Sitting in a hospital bed and discovering Dylan may have pushed Harley towards a surrealistic lyrical style, but he evidently paid close attention to the importance of intonation in the message. I think it's what saves the songs, which can otherwise be too obtuse, unlike Dylan. No one else comes to mind immediately as having forged such an idiosyncratic style of delivery (not to mention voice), one which can convey emotions that would be completely lost on paper.

I once expected I would grow up and learn to look at life in the right way, and leave behind silly philosophizing about the meaning of it all. Instead I seem to have grown up and learnt the art of determining the one best moment from the past 20 whatever years that serves as perfect contrast to the one I'm experiencing now, and curse everything that brought me to something that feels awfully close to a meaningless pursuit. This would make for a fine living, I think, spending every moment thinking not about how to get forward but how things were so much clearer and better in a time when I didn't have to make any decisions.

1) The Blackeyed Susans, "Every Gentle Soul". We all know McComb has his preferred subject matter, but it rarely disappoints. Because, at least to my reckoning, his lyrics rarely ring false, and convince you he lived through the anguish and felt it very deeply. The desperate statement, almost a plea, from the narrator here counts amongst his best lines on the subject. At the right moment, it can seriously shake one's constitution. The only remedy is to keep listening and wait for "Memories" to come on.

2) The Go-Betweens, "Boundary Rider". At times during the final album, McLennan gives the impression that he managed to compress all the mystery and beauty in the art of lyric writing that he picked up over the years and double its potency. I don't quite know the literal story being told here (if any), but I very much understand "the sky so deep that you can't find your sleep". As he clearly got better with age to the point of virtually floating above us anyway, one can construct comforting stories about the end that the album suggests. When all else fails, there is still the trove of melody and lyric that helps keep us walking through our tears.

3) The Triffids, "Spanish Blue". Evidence of the songwriter's softer side, in case it gets lost amongst the passion of his more definitive work, and a quaint piece of history in their development. But I don't think it's just the hopeless devotee in me that sees traces of the lyrical talent here. Summer days walking around the city, watching people strewn about the sidewalks after a busy night, and I can't help but bring some of the words to mind. And the opening lines, well, they summarize not only my current stance to distant lands, but also serve as a calling to one day return and get back to what is really important.

I was walking through the bookstore, discounted purchases in hand, marvelling at the reality that it was actually closing, that my future trips to the city could no longer involve a quiet stroll through the towers of books and music. It's terribly egocentric to say this, but I find it apt that my own decline and dismantling should be mirrored so clearly in the world around me. There was something extremely upsetting about seeing the store in the state it was, the odd book lying tossed on the floor, the once carefully arranged shelves split asunder as the stock was being disposed of, and of course the people. Had any of them so much as whispered a word to me I probably would've started shaking them in fury. I disliked the matter-of-factness their faces suggested, the indifference to what was happening here. I wanted so badly to see some external acknowledgement that this was not right, that the future this was portending is not a place we should be moving towards, but, I saw nothing. I began to wonder if it was right of me to even be there in these end-times. I can't say that I've ever been unhappier purchasing books.

But why are memories of earlier (and invariably happier, through some strange logic) times so important to me, and why do I always pull them to the surface? I surely can't be afraid that I will forget them; that would require a major upheaval in my internal aesthetics. Sometimes I think my use of these objects is a burden of expectation that I place even though full well knowing that no future can relieve it. What do I expect but for these things to eventually give way and move on? And of course I'm well aware of this, but it doesn't seem to matter. There is always this sense of a future hovering unthreateningly in the horizon, while the past is spread out as far as the heart desires, ready to be revisited at any moment one chooses. I suppose I get reminded by otherwise inconsequential events that this is dangerously incorrect. No matter how much I'd like to think otherwise, wheels are turning, clocks are ticking, and what matters is drifting out of reach.

1) The Go-Betweens, "The Wrong Road". There probably isn't a better way to express a fundamental, if non-specific, sense of despair and gloom than repeatedly drawing from that state to conjure up telling couplets and images. Which is what I think happens here, because even if there isn't a single story (that I can tell), there's certainly a message underlying the many quotable lines in this one. The ending clinches it, with the exasperated admission of defeat when he realizes that no matter which way he expresses the feeling, its truth and implications are unchanged. The song may alleviate the burden for a while, but it cannot erase the condition itself.

Even in the early stages of the vague, hazy sense of gloom that characterized a certain period of my college days (perhaps unsurprisingly, the one coinciding with my most prolific period of writing), I remember having a sense that the affliction was temporary. I could almost imagine looking back on that period five, ten years in the future, and writing it off as some form of insanity that one must go through. Of course, I couldn't project perfectly in the future, else I would have been able to use those insights to cure myself then and there, but there was at least a belief that things would look up. And it is true that that particular brand of nihilism has all but been dispatched with, and that pondering weighty matters on the meaning of everything leave me largely unharmed nowadays. But I sometimes think that whatever unhappiness that has accompanied a certain study decision is really not that different from what ailed me back then, being somewhat unspecific yet very pervasive. And given that it manages to affect me in all my glorious maturity, it's of a far deeper, more unsettling nature.

It probably sounds trite, but you can't discount the element that time plays in these mental battles. In earlier times, there was at least the sense that some full life was out there waiting to be met, no matter how miserable a prospect it seemed at the time. Having tasted some of this future and having studied my reaction to it understandably downs my hope quite a bit. Realize that I had once thought myself cured of all this drama, and had forged an idiosyncratic path to something resembling good standing. But the time since then has been unkind, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that I have declined physically, intellectually, and worst of all morally. I look back with sadness at the person I used to be, and while I used to feel disgust at what I have become, it is now just a numbness and state of disbelief. "Started out Oliver / Ended up Fagin."

Why the sudden resurrection of my past troubles? Because of a bookshop, actually. One thing that struck me today is I can scarcely remember the times when I felt impossible joy due to some piece of perceived beauty, invariably an album or a book. As these were during formative years, et cetera, it is naive to wish for similarly passionate reactions today. But nowadays, the passion doesn't arrive not because things don't move me; it's because I seem to avoid the arts altogether. The very act of reading or listening to music used to be comforting, as it invited me into a familiar, known space that provided hope. While I wince at contemplating the possibility, it must be said: my inability to set aside time for these things nowadays seems to be partly borne out of a wish to spare those hopeful things the sullying contents of my psyche. There is something magical in them, no doubting, but I do very much doubt that they will escape unharmed by the malaise that I've got cookin' inside. Better that they sit quietly, waiting for the day that the clouds part and things seem more hopeful.

Or maybe that's just tripe, and I ought to actively seek to do away with such adolescent theories about the interaction between art and the mind. I did mention that the bookstore got me thinking about these unpleasant matters, but this was only after I got a taste of the forgotten pleasure of reading. I take this as a cause for some hope. Of course, it isn't as if this will make things all better - it didn't back in the day - but good God do I need more sources of positivity in my life. I don't think that can hurt when trying to find a way out of this dark.

Writing all this down has definite mental (if zero artistic) value. I am reminded of the fact that no matter how cringe-inducing my earlier writings were, they at least solidified my concerns at the time, and helped shoulder the burden a little. Perhaps silence is the worst weapon for this battle.

I'd like to think that even if one disagrees with the conclusions of Carr's The Shallows, one can agree that it does a good job of laying out the argument for the negative effects of technology and the internet without coming across as being just another tirade of a curmudgeon or luddite. Me, I'm at least one, probably both those things, so I often worry that my shared distrust of the internet is a product of something fundamentally irrational. But Carr manages to take many of my concerns and really get to why they should worry the society at large.

What's sad is that he seems to have relatively few supporters in his own generation; mine is of course beyond hope, and the one after will most likely bring about our ultimate destruction. It's remarkable how quickly society seems to have totally embraced the internet, rightfully praising its conveniences but too quickly dismissing what it loses when compared to technologies past. (I can almost picture the book being nonchalantly sunk in my lifetime, for example.) Being of the generation that came of mental maturity at the same time the internet did, it's hard to say whether the seeds for this societal shift were already in place. Maybe it's a convenient myth that people used to care about deep reading and all that in generations past. The internet may just be allowing people to indulge in frivolities that they used to indulge in through other forms. Who knows, maybe I was on the fringes starting from childhood...