on repeat #02: elliott smith, jeff buckley, have a nice life

everyone buckle up for god's silence saturday

lately i’ve been oscillating wildly between thinking of god as either a warm devouring mouth, or pure void, the kind of silence you only hear in space. while my thinking too much about god has never been a good thing, i do enjoy the sense of stability these categorisations have lent me. when i wake up in the morning, do i feel the body-warm walls of the womb-mouth pressing in to enfold me, or is it more of a Hole day? to be entirely truthful, nine times out of ten it’s just The Hole, but sometimes, if i open up¹ enough, there is the sensation of something else. ‘Where do I find selfless love?’² is the question asked repeatedly by a film i watched recently, and while i’d argue that both these conceptualisations have led me closer to selflessness in the whole form-is-emptiness-emptiness-is-form way, only the former brings me closer to love. it’s very difficult to love the world when you feel like you’re down at the bottom of a well, begging for someone up above to pull your rope, and eternally met with no answer. in this arrogance, i haven’t been doing a very good job of loving lately.

in the more tangible scheme of things, it’s been disarming to see how much my listening (and, for that matter, watching) patterns have also adopted the contours of silence. my end-of-year seasonal playlist starts off raucous and angry, and then all of a sudden, words start slipping out of the songs. dynamics fall away. i take to the sounds of tunnels, the atonal drone of a note played on an organ. i need the music to be like gauze, if only to pad me against the piercing hostility of the outside world which i find harder and harder to tolerate the more time i spend in it. every day is an attempt at recalibration without end, and i would be lying if i didn’t tell you i wonder how much more of it i can take before i split open like an overripe peach, rotted in the centre. all things considered, that might not necessarily be bad, but someone still has to clean up the mess, and i don’t have it in me right now.

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1. Bled White, Elliott Smith

   — XO, 1998.

   so as i try to prevent myself from going out and lying down in the middle of road, this is what i listen to. this is my one-foot-in-front-of-the-other song, when all i need is to blur into the momentum and fling myself out of the house before i sink down and never move again. this works, mainly because elliott smith is the artist i associate most with walking. i think his reputation, especially online (from what i’ve seen) has to do with surrendering to misery in one’s own bed, but i find that his work often has such momentum it’s impossible to keep your own body still. this is by no means dancing music, of course, but it does make me want to take myself somewhere else, and when i feel like this any glimmer of desire is a good thing.

while i haven’t done a thorough musical analysis on his other songs and so cannot draw comparisons, it is incredibly interesting for me to tell you that the reason i feel all of the above (momentum, desire) in relation to this song is because its upsetting lyrics are rendered in the notoriously upbeat and idyll key of G major. with its scale mostly uninterrupted by sharps in its key signature, G major is a key that proceeds whole and round in its ascension. it’s also notably different in mood from a G minor key, like the one in glenn gould’s recording of bach’s prelude no. 16 in g minor bwv 885 as used in the film Shame (2011). for me, both Shame and smith’s work on this song are fundamentally concerned with the same thing - that is, the momentum involved in bringing your body towards that which will harm you. in Shame, this song is used to score a scene where the main character goes on a night run whilst in the throes of a mental torment brought about by his sex addiction, which is compounded by the sudden arrival and re-enmeshment with his troubled sister. it’s incredibly upsetting, and the melody and mood of the notes are disconcerting enough to scratch at the cold picture of composure that the character tries to uphold. in smith’s song, something similar is at work, where the momentum/time signature of the song and its musical mood are an attempt to lull you into the movement involved to get you where you want to hurt.

the lyrics then only add to this effect, as they too describe the steady rhythm of life: ‘so I wait for the F-train’, for instance, where you can stand at the edge of a platform or sit on a bench swinging your legs all the while pretending that everything is still upright because you have somewhere you need to go. to some extent, this is also the momentum of addiction - or, to use Roger Ebert’s phrase in his review of Crash (1996)³, the ‘critical velocity’ of addition - in which the world around you is softened to a blur, mercifully, so your mind can finally narrow itself with single-minded purpose onto your objective.

the title, ‘Bled White’, and the idea of narrowing one’s focus also reminded me of sylvia plath’s poem, ‘Contusion’:

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.
The rest of the body is all washed-out,
The color of pearl.

In a pit of a rock
The sea sucks obsessively,
One hollow the whole sea's pivot.

The size of a fly,
The doom mark
Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.

plath’s poem is almost overwhelming with its evocations of rhythm and movement. from the dull body that is notably ‘flooded’ with colour only at the nexus of hurt to the sea ‘suck[ing] obsessively’, the ‘doom mark’ ‘crawl[ing] down the wall’ and the eventual shutting, sliding, and sheeting which closes the poem, there is no moment of tranquil stillness to be found, despite the corpse-pallor of the body which it references. a friend of mind once remarked that the poem reminded her of a drowned, bloated body caressed by the unceasing regularity of the waves, in which there is no interiority to be grasped, only the animatedness that the sea gives it. in the same way that what animates this song is the promise of overcoming being ‘not fucked, not quite’. whatever keeps you moving, i guess.

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2. So Real, Jeff Buckley

   — Grace, 1994.

possibly one of the most uneasy of buckley’s songs that i’ve come across, this one stuck out to me when i was doing one of my sunday morning listens of Grace. usually, i’m more of a Lover, You Should’ve Come Over type of girl*, or even a Forget Her if i’m feeling a little less despondent. those two are more typical of what i’ve come to associate with jeff buckley - velvet smooth vocals, an undertone of hot pain, and an acoustic guitar through it all. the introduction to So Real is then a rude interruption to this smoothness, as the metallic edge of its guitars threatens the tranquil sadness created by the preceding track (Lilac Wine). in fact, when i was planning for this, i realised the reason i found So Real as menacing as i do - it wouldn’t be out of place with Death Cab’s I Will Possess Your Heart - is that it reminds me entirely of Slint’s Good Morning, Captain. for all intents and purposes, that song is nothing short of a ghost story. one might think of Cathy, knocking at the window, begging to be let in out of the cold. or Jeff Buckley, now, in a low moan: ‘Love, let me sleep tonight on your couch.’

the rest of the song then builds on this ghostly uneasiness, especially as it focuses on the restless wandering that manifests in a night walk lit only by the moon which ‘got full like a plate’, its vast white emptiness unmarked by sustenance. as the narrator then falls asleep ‘at the gate’, the song descends further into nightmarish visions as the music dips in and out of a frantic crescendo before finally resuming its menacing jangle as buckle returns, ghostly, to intone: ‘I love you / But I’m afraid to love you’.

the song then ends on the repeated claim, ‘That was so real’, something superstitious and frightened beneath it all, the way bad dreams stay with you for days sometimes.

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3. Deathconsciousness (2008), Have A Nice Life.

i can’t pick one song off this album because it would be like asking me to choose my favourite child, so i simply have to stick the whole thing here. do i wholeheartedly believe this is one of the best albums ever made? absolutely. can i only listen to it in one particular state of mind, and for no more than maybe one month out of the year lest i risk falling into an inescapable depression ooze? also yes.

this album encapsulates perfectly the idea of ‘gauze’ that i began this newsletter with, because it’s frankly what i put on when i can’t bear anything else. while i love the two songs i’ve written about thus far, the state of mind i’m currently in is much more soothed by the immense sonic architecture of this album. my favourite tracks are always in flux (i have had phases of Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000 and Who Would Leave Their Son Out in the Sun) but for now Bloodhail and The Big Gloom have captured me entirely. There Is No Food also reminds me of, for some reason, the sunday afternoons i used to spend with my father watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone. something about dying in space, the pressure of that, and the hole-feeling. if you haven’t heard this album, i do strongly recommend listening through at least once.

on a related note: the band’s side project, Giles Corey is also fantastic - but one that i listen to much less, if only because it genuinely distresses me. however, i do recommend also reading this review⁴ of one of their live shows, not only because the writing is fantastic, but also because it encapsulates why i return repeatedly to these projects i.e the feeling of being pressed down under the weight of something bigger than me, and being able to just give in. here are my favourite bits:

Giles Corey died on the third day. A landowner and father of five children – among them, a daughter named Deliverance – he refused to plead before the jurors for the charge of witchcraft. He was pressed, a technique of torture obsolete by the turn of the eighteenth century, but rather than confessing or agreeing to a trial, he laid there naked beneath the planks while the sheriff added stones, splintering his ribcage against his organs. The court gave him three chances to save himself but he made only one request. His last words: “More weight.”

This is the kind of music you can expose yourself to as an act of masochism. It’s the kind of music you listen to when you want more weight.

He stayed there screaming with them, “I wanna feel like I feel when I’m asleep,” the room shouted. And then just, “I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel! I wanna feel!” More weight.

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4. Motion Picture Soundtrack, Radiohead.

   — Kid A, 2000.

did you think i was going to let you go without talking about radiohead’s most beautiful song. i dont actually think i can quantify what i feel about it, because it’s one that i feel for much more viscerally than i did with True Love Waits. which, obviously is a beautiful song, but is more clear-cut with its being steeped in sadness. Motion Picture Soundtrack is, like its title suggests, cinematic, but so expansive and shimmering in its harp instrumental that it’s impossible to think it could only hold one feeling. the closest i can come to describing it is like looking up at the sky in the dead of night while you’re standing in a field, far away from everyone you’ve ever known and loved. and only in that pure loneliness - and not necessarily solitude, i’m talking about the sense of being alone, as ‘a sparrow on a hill-top’ to use St. Teresa of Avila’s words - can you become closer to something else. some people call that god.

lyrically, it’s simple. scenes of misery conjured via emptied bottles of red wine and sleeping pills, and dry eyes from watching far too many sad films. it’s a beautiful if not romanticised tableau of misery, but it’s the end of the song that i love most. a repeated refrain that is also a promise: ‘I will see you in the next life.’

and maybe it’s because i’ve been having a category 10 return to buddhism moment that’s been lying latent since i was a child, but i’ve found myself so reassured by the notion of a next life, even if it means continuing the cycle of samsara and being that much further away from enlightenment. i was raised to believe in these things; the idea of a karmic debt from your past life, carried over into this one, into the next one, over and over until you learn. the same people enter your lives, over and over, until you learn. for my parents, who believe, that’s something to atone for and escape. for me? i just like the idea that i might see the people i love in this life again. that no life is long enough for me to love you, and so i will see you in the next one. whatever form you take. whatever form i take.

i’ll end on this, which is from an archived radiohead site that no longer exists, but is a copy of Death is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland:

“death is nothing at all. i have only slipped away into the next room. i am i, and you are you. whatever we were to each other, that we still are. call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way you always used to. put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. play, smile, think of me, pray for me. let my name be ever the household word that it always was, let it be spoken without effort, no trace of a shadow on it. life means all that it ever meant. it is the same as it ever was. there is unbroken continuity. why should i be out of mind because i am out of sight? i am waiting for you, somewhere very near. just around the corner. all is well.”

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as always, let me know if you’ve been reading/watching/listening to anything interesting <3 sending love,

1. From Lapvona, by Ottessa Moshfegh. 'If you don’t let God into your heart, you’ll die,’ Ina said. ‘That’s what kills people. Not time or disease. Now, open up.’

2. The Colour of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1969.

3. oh im sorry did you think you would read this substack and not see a mention of crash 1996. not on my watch. anyway read his full review if you like, i obviously think the move is 5/5 forever but there are some truly amazing articulations here. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/crash-1997

4. https://www.stereogum.com/2220693/giles-corey-have-a-nice-life-bowery-ballroom/reviews/concert-review/