i know i knocked the table over

on la dispute and the music you love at 14

like many people, i kept a diary when i was in my early teens. i don’t presume it had anything profound to say of me. and anyway it’s probably long gone by now, all my carefully-transcribed lyrics and passing thoughts of an inconsequential morning in 2014 lost to the softening rot that loose sheets of paper take on after too many touches. ‘diary’ is also a bit of a tenuous term here, seeing as it wasn’t even a notebook with solid walls to keep me in. it was a paperclipped stack of torn-out sheets of foolscap paper mostly covered in smudgy bouts of penciled lyrics from bands who could muster up the rage and pain i felt i couldn’t, interspersed with my own passing thoughts. either way, no matter how much i tried to slip quietly into the margins i was all over the place. it’s probably for this complete lack of security that my parents eventually found and read it, leading me to throw the whole thing in the garbage almost immediately, convinced that i had nothing to say to anyone again, not even myself. i didn’t write a word for 2 years after.

coming back to writing after that was like pulling teeth. is like pulling teeth. i can’t say it’s gotten easier, but the truth is i probably still don’t write enough. i started putting down words again at 16, but they were only of the extremes; either the very good or very bad days. that notebook i still have, bulging at its seams in my bedside drawer. i used to collect everything – napkins, brochures, postcards, leaves – my obsessive cataloguing of life through objects only really to take up space so i’d be able to put down less of myself, boiling entire days down to the exclaimed: ‘I WISH I WASN’T SO TERRIBLE AT EVERYTHING!’. i didn’t have to explain myself, i could just say these things, i was all alone after all and in my terrible seclusion reason hardly figured. reading it back now is startling. i remember so strongly being so ashamed of how much of myself i was, but now i look at the words and see hardly anything at all. there are moments, of course, but mostly it is dark and cold and i find myself frightened by my own capacity for self-imposed cruelty. reading these terrible beliefs unfold is like watching a car crash in slow motion, and seeing them form and fester made me want so badly to throw myself in the way, shouting ‘NO, DON’T’, but of course everyone knows the first rule of time travel is that you cannot intervene.

a broken jar by la dispute

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La Dispute was one of the bands that carried me through that time, and with whom, for that reason, i’d never had the healthiest relationship with. i listened to them a lot when i was 14- 15, and then basically imposed a cordon sanitaire in which i refused to touch their music with a ten-foot pole. this has really only changed in the past year, in light of making friends who’ve somehow defused the bomb that didn’t go off inside me 10 years ago. this, however, also effectively means that there is now debris of my 14-year-old self floating just under the surface of the veil which had, in all its seductive illusions, convinced me that time stretches forward and out. which it doesn’t. time is a vertiginous spiral, and i know for certain that every single self i have ever been is stacked up inside me, all the way down. it’s just a matter of who i’m walking in step with that particular day. like reading the diary of my 16 year old self, listening to these songs i loved at 14 enfolds me into a time and place that is simultaneously then and now. i am “two particles [that] can coordinate their properties across space and time and behave like a single system”¹. in this way, i remain myself.

martin gore, from an interview in the new york times (https://archive.ph/gXbWr).

why it scares me by la dispute

so maybe it’s appropriate that i’ve found myself coming back to this band now, when i’m most entrenched in the miscellaneous debris of myself.  what sets La Dispute apart from the other bands in my lexicon is that – at least on Wildlife (2011) – they function in an intensely archival mode. it’s with a thematic rigour that nearly every song on Wildlife makes reference to writing, or to the forms of literature. on a Departure, the opening song on the album, the speaker confesses that he’s ‘Not sure why I’m even writing this / But I guess it feels right / It sort of feels like I have to, like an exorcism / i guess that makes me sound crazy, but that’s alright’. there’s already so much shame stacked up in these lines, at the very notion of merely taking up space on a page, and yet the simultaneous recognition of the necessity of it, so intense it feels like an ‘exorcism’, the outpouring of darkness which must, against all odds, leave the body and form the work. in this promise to himself, then, the rest of the album sees the speaker trying to write it all down, all of the old pains that do and don’t belong to him but reside in his body anyway (e.g the story read out from a journal in ‘I See Everything’). i imagine the album as the quintessential image of a messy writer’s desk, overflowing with papers and fragments and failures, all of which are frantic attempts to make it cohere, to make sense of the fact that ‘I guess I figured that it hurt for a reason / I guess that’s why I’ve always turned to writing it down’’ (a Letter). though this may appear to be a form of madness, all of it seems to desperately collapse towards narrative, rather than away from it. madness, in its truest form, has no shape. Wildlife is the desperate attempt to introduce structure, even if that is only a nightmarish mythology of the self, such that the punishment of sadness might finally cohere. the songs on this record are the desperate sifting through stacks of paperwork, if only so it might finally be possible to say (with nothing short of utmost clarity and conviction): i am the worst, and i deserve this.

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and maybe it’s silly to admit, but i was genuinely terrified to see La Dispute live because that’s what i remember of them. i remember being 14 and listening to the whole album on youtube, replaying the ending of King Park out of context over and over again, already seeking atonement for some nebulous sin. like i was never a bad person that i remember of, but somewhere along the line i did something wrong. and sooner or later i will forget what it was i did and just be punished for it.² but that’s also the structure of shame, this self-policing that it commands, and the eventual rejection of the intolerable parts of the self that are so earnestly sad in a way that’s both totally trivial and yet completely consuming. but that’s what shame lets you do, it allows you to believe so strongly that your sadness that will never be pierced by another human being (“because shame and loneliness are almost one”³), and i know i’ve said before that this is an incredibly damaging belief, but i don’t think i’d found a way around it until i went to that show. it is such a mercy to find out your sadness is not unique.

jordan dreyer commented on this at the show (unfortunately i do not have video so you will have to trust my memory and word), that the tightness of the venue had created a special atmosphere, and how amazing it was that all of us were here. and looking around, i knew for a fact that everyone in the room had a history with the band (given that there’s not been new music until very very recently), and that so this being here was also a testament to the triumph of surviving oneself. in this, the things that used to be sacraments of sadness (‘Can i still get into Heaven if i kill myself?’) were transmuted into the collective, almost giddingly, a wondrous disbelief at the luck we all had in just being there.

i’ll tell you what i told him - that was the best show of my life.

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as always, thank you for reading, and giving this your time. see you when i see you.

1. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

2. these r lines from Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man is Hard to Find.

3. Loneliness by Fanny Howe. https://poets.org/poem/loneliness-0