Quoth The Popinjay

It doesn’t take a particularly attentive reader to realise that depression is very near to this blog’s and its author’s heart. It’s there as a watermark on every page, a presence looming ghost-like at the fringe of every experience and the imprimatur of large swathes of what is uttered in witness of that experience. Even when in abeyance, I wear some mark of it in both words and deed, which is something I’ve made my peace with - such a mark speaks less of damnation than it does of a theme, one amongst many, that is destined to play out in the course of my life. Depression isn’t the desperate end game to which one’s life has been committed, but rather a facet, one part of the whole that helps determine the shape and depth that a life takes through its living, but only has bearing on that shape and depth in concert with many other facets of one’s life. Its presence is stubborn and often deflating, but it is not the Rosetta Stone or summa of experience that, in your worst moments, you can very often imagine it to be.

When one can attain the distance required to consider depression within the broader shape and depth that our lives take, this goes some way to achieving what Freud called “the work of mourning”. Freud’s work on mourning is important and insightful, particularly in respect to the link via family resemblance he sees in mourning to the condition of melancholia, where one mourns and mourns without working through the loss experienced. Melancholia emerges as a downing of tools in the face of loss, letting loss, absence and abandonment become the envelope in which experience is carried out: it casts a pall over the entirety of experience, rather than being the component part that one’s work can make of mourning. Anyone who has endured depression understands this: the closed-loop of thoughts and feelings; the way it saturates your being with unresolvable problems and fixations; the consuming anxieties and anger that Freud saw as being directed back inward, their passage out into the world closed up and looped back in on the self. Depression is a legacy, an inheritance from a past that cannot be adapted to the present and therefore persists, unable to be sloughed or worked off. It is a history with no language to articulate the present, and so surrenders the dynamism and opportunity of the present to the monolithic language signed by the dead hand of the past.


The heavy, stifling legacy of melancholia and depression and its contrast with the hard but transformative work of mourning is something that Jason Molina has given a particular frisson to over the course of his career. Beginning with Songs: Ohia, Molina has built his style upon spiky, fraught folk songs with hypnotic, repeated chord progressions churning, rising and falling (and often surging, erupting and crashing within the very same song, in semblance to the erratic mood shifts characteristic of depression), creating a tight loop around which his cracked tenor spiralled from the dreadful depths to the soaring, soul-scouring heights of his tremulous upper range. On songs like ‘The Black Crow’, ‘Being in Love’, ‘Back on Top’, ‘Coxcomb Red’ (all on the desperate, magnificent Lioness), ‘Ring the Bell’ or the harrowing suite of Impala, Molina snares his voice and gnarled, portentous lyrics (at times owing much to Ted Hughes’ dark, diabolical evocations of the natural world) in the closed loop of songs which absorb Molina’s lyrical despair and grievances and repeat and recycle them. These songs riff on their dark tone until the accumulated weight of the songs’ suffering and Molina’s highest and most lonesome howl batter the listener. If these songs attest to the horrible weight of the past, then the urgency of that voice, the blue-collar and rural evocations of the lyrics beat savagely against the limits of that past, trying to escape it, to fashion melancholia into mourning (which admittedly doesn’t sound like the greatest trade-up, but as Freud would argue, it would be a start).

Up through Didn’t It Rain (mockingly and knowingly sharing its name with Mahalia Jackson’s glorious, soulful, life-affirming gospel song) Molina crafted a compelling and true account of depression and the desperate (and rarely successful) attempt to beat through its limits, set in stark, haunted, minimalist arrangements of a piece with the black-as-pitch states of mind he was articulating. On his last album as Songs: Ohia, his magnum opus, Magnolia Electric Co, Molina broadened the palette of his recording to encompass a full Crazy Horse-style band to flesh out his signature songwriting style. As much as the songs are given richness, drive and even occasional groove (such as the relentless opener ‘Farewell Transmission’), Molina still writes in loops, a swirling, inescapable vortex of sound clawing and gnawing at Molina’s road-weary travellers trying to outrun depression’s grip, fixed by “midnight with a dead moon in its jaws” - time locked and looped at the ruinous witching hour, spurring Molina’s cast of characters to run just that bit harder.

But those weary travellers, haunted and hounded as they are by their stubborn past, are voiced with a new resolve to match the more strident surroundings on Magnolia Electric Co, “busy trying to make the change” as ‘I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost’ has it. In finding this resolve, Molina’s cast finally undertake the work of mourning in the face of the depression that charges after them through the night. Images of power stations, the forge and coalface recur throughout, with Molina “working in the cold grey rock” and “working in the hot mill steam”, while John Henry brings his hammer down harder and harder on ‘John Henry Split My Heart’ so as to effect the breakthrough. Never before, and never since has Molina felt close the cracking the bonds of depression, of surmounting its “static and distance” and working his demons through, of entering the language of mourning through which he can touch upon the present.

On album closer ‘Hold On Magnolia’, he seems close to grace. Where Molina’s songs looped in tight, claustrophobic fashion in the past, ‘Hold On Magnolia’ is elegant and stately, the song of a man finishing the album of his life in the grandest, most sweeping way possible. Ascending through a languid, building countrified chord progression, the song comes across almost as a benediction, affirming endurance (“hold on to that great highway moon”, inverting the malign moon of ‘Farewell Transmission’) and friendship, a stubbornness in the face of depression that continues to strive to be something more than just a sufferer as the lights flicker back on after the solsticial black out of the opening track. Of the doubts that plagued Molina throughout his previous work, of the vice of the seemingly-insurmountable past, he at long last believes he has “worked it out with all of them”. There is a mournfulness here (the ringing station bell, the lonesome whistle and the “last light I see before the dark finally gets a hold of me” - indeed you could as easily read the song as resignation), but it is Freudian ‘mourning’, the sadness in service of something else, the hard work and heavy lifting required make sense of loss and sadness and to incorporate it into a language that speaks to one’s ability to negotiate the present. “It’s almost time” Molina repeats at the song’s rolling, never-wants-to-finish conclusion, submitting to the climbing and chiming arrangement, away from all the darkness that went before.

In some of my darker days I would rise early in the morning and try to run the depression out of me. The closed loops of the past would constrict beneath the ever tighter loops of breathing and the rhythm of my stride as I made my way around the park in the early winter light. Making a full 6km loop of that park without stopping was my goal each time, and as I ran gasping, thinking how easy it would be to stop and submit to the inertia of my condition, it was Songs: Ohia’s ‘Blue Chicago Moon’ that I would run through my head (I can’t train with headphones for some reason):

If the blues are your hunter, then you will come face to face

With that darkness and desolation, and the endless,

endless,

endless,

endless,

endless,

endless depression.

But you are not helpless: I’ll help you to try,

Try to beat it.

I’d sing it to myself over and over again, picking up a little each time, until I’d gone through the 6km and the endorphin rush would hit me. Like so many of Molina’s songs, ‘Blue Chicago Moon’ had become part of the fabric of my life and my struggle with depression, one that Molina’s work was invaluable in helping me come to terms with, and to haul myself out of, the worst parts of the condition.

As such, it was with great sadness that I read last year of Molina’s struggles with depression, substance abuse, medical problems and their associated costs which had hindered his songwriting and stopped him performing. As part of his recovery he had taken to working on a farm in West Virginia, tending chickens and goats. The hard, hard work through which he can haul himself up and give himself his voice again - a voice that has affected so many of us for the better.

Wherever Jason Molina is right now, I hope his work and strength are pulling him out of the grip of depression’s awful closed loop, to get back to the grace of “Hold On Magnolia”. I also hope he knows just how much he and his music have meant to so many of us - “I’ll help you to try, try to beat it”.

On the matter of delicious ironies, few attain the heights of the blithering, blathering, raving reaction to the Arcade Fire’s success in achieving its best album Grammy this year for The Suburbs. An album that is in no small way about the fragmentation of culture and music within suburbia, and the tribal allegiances and subsequent belligerence that this provokes unified a set of tastemakers distinctly out of kilter with the indie world the Arcade Fire inhabits … only to cue mass indignation and rabid toolbaggery from fans of Emimen, Lady Gaga and even Arcade Fire fans themselves as documented on the hoot-a-minute-hootenanny that is the Who Is Arcade Fire tumblr.

Thus is the world of a universal commentariat firing off pensees via Twitter, plugged into a 24-hour loop of frenzied, opinionated, self-regarding, exponentially spiralling rage via the Internet (which, in the spirit of appreciating ironies, this author fully admits to enjoying). We champion the explosion of digital media for democratising information and legitimising voices that have no presence within the old flat earth mainstream media, and rightly so. However, what was meant to be an instrument to facilitate the exchange of information and to build communal bonds so as to bring greater coherence to how we come together as a public has, by and large, mostly degenerated into a scorched ether of incessant flaming and ubiquitous trolling. While various faddish idiocies and celebrity sex tapes are the most obvious cases of how the online world has disseminated information via the process of ‘going viral’, perhaps the most profound viral development has been the spread of Richard Hofstadter’s ‘Paranoid Style’.

For Hofstadter the paranoid ethos arises from a “confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargaining or compromise”, something exacerbated when “the representatives of a particular social interest - perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands - are shut out of the political process.” As such, “having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”

Through suburbia, and the wish-fulfilment of the web, with its capacity to indulge confirmation-bias at every click and elevate truthiness to the height of epistemological sophistication, paranoia sprouts irresistibly, running roughshod over cultural dialogue and steering the communitarian ethos that is supposed to underpin the suburbs far off track. With how we live and how we encounter one another fragmented by ‘sprawl’, the sense of a coherent, shared notion of ourselves as constituting a ‘public’ has diminished even further than the erosion Richard Sennett observed in The Fall of Public Man. If the way we conducted ourselves as a public historically provided a theatre for conveying our good faith with respect to matters of public concern through codes of dress, speech and manners, then the sprawl, and the retreat of public discourse into ones and zeroes has undermined that good faith through instituting a sense of the private self as sovereign. Enclosed in a world of its own anxieties, likes, desires and prejudices, entrenched and validated through an online environment which insulates one from having to acknowledge contending claims to truth and authority, the “empty rooms” Win Butler and Regine Chassagne sing of throughout The Suburbs breed an endemic assumption of bad faith and the the “sinister and malicious” will spoken of by Hofstadter, such that public spiritedness is fatally eroded.

Such assumptions of bad faith, where every motive is second-guessed, give paranoia, as described by Hofstadter, a chance to take hold and become the prevailing cultural attitude. If paranoia is literally “the mind alongside” (para-, beside + nous, mind), then its relationship to assumption of bad faith is telling: paranoia, as fostered in a fragmented, distrusting media landscape, identifies within all difference a malign intelligence intent on thwarting the good and true. Where a sense of comfort, well-being or freedom hits up against a natural limit, this is not because we are inclined to treat those concepts as absolutes before maturity asks that we adjust them, but rather because there is a vast conspiracy set in motion to deny and persecute us. And when vast conspiracies born of an apocalyptic malign intelligence pulling the strings of people and institutions everywhere are in motion, it funnily enough calls for exceptional, heroic efforts, not ordinarily countenanced in a society with a pretence to civility to be enacted: the paranoid are almost always found to be engaging in special pleading, and almost always there is a hint of violence and authoritarianism found behind that pleading.

It is against this backdrop that The Suburbs unfolds, with its images of bucolic, unhurried childhoods contrasted with a desperate adulthood laboured under the spectre of debt, isolation and impending financial, spiritual and just plain old good-fashioned literal armageddon. The suburbs, as a concept, represent an uneasy truce, a social contract realised in a bland, whitebread world of strip-malls and sprawling bungalows and cul-de-sacs, holding together seething passions cultivated in private, the grudges festering in the paranoid mindset. In Win Butler’s world there are intense human connections to be forged here, but they are often realised in the shadow of tribalism and defiance, a youthful rebellion at once sweet and silly as on ‘Ready to Start’ and ‘Rococo’. At the same time that it cultivates friendship and connection, such tribalism and defiance also fractures and alienates. ‘City With No Children’ and ‘We Used to Wait’ undercut the cult of self-realisation and self-gratification to observe just how our sympathies are narrowed and how our ability to connect with others is impoverished by the sprawling, angry world we’ve built for ourselves. Butler’s characters all thirst for a rootedness which is difficult to come by, and one which goes deeper than the “walls that they built in the 70s”; they desire a rootedness built on the good faith gestures through which a public, that thing by which we look out for one another and encourage our better selves to come to the fore, comes into being.

This attains even greater pitch where Butler vaguely and ominously refers to a raging “suburban war” throughout. The impending financial meltdown of Neon Bible has come to pass, with Butler’s waifs and naifs bearing the brunt of the fallout, while banks, the media and politicians are “afraid to pay the cost of what we lost” as “Half Light II” would have it. Afraid to pay the cost, they socialise the damage through fomenting paranoid fantasies of how the waifs and naifs comprising some vague “inner-city elite” have created the crisis to the suburbs, dividing and conquering when a level-headed assessment of the situation would find that the jig is most certainly up. The special pleading of the paranoid mindset finds an audience and its undercurrent of violence and hostility is unleashed.

As such, the waifs and naifs are cast out from the suburban social contract, soldiers of fortune zigzagging east and west in an attempt to find a foothold in a maelstrom of bad faith. Some cling desperately to nostalgia for the suburban friendships of youth when the “music divide[d] us into tribes”. Others, such as the “you” of many of Butler’s songs, a long lost friend and devil on the shoulder who always counselled a belligerent stance in the face of the coming cataclysm, choose to inhabit the ‘war’ more unhesitatingly. It’s a cold realisation of this state of affairs when Butler sings “you choose your side, I’ll choose my side”, a tart resignation of just how human beings who brought so much good to each others’ lives have been able to drift, and then assume hostility to each other.

“My old friends, they don’t know me now” laments Butler’s protagonist on ‘Suburban War’, trying to move beyond that hostility and the years of bad faith that have made a young adult desperate for connection and closeness remote from everyone that mattered to him. This extends even as far as searching, with an ache that cuts to the bone as it is sung by Butler, for their old confidants in every passing car as the universe is blasted further and further apart by the social and cultural upheavals that have taken hold of the cast of the album.

And yet, in spite of all of this, Butler’s vision remains a hopeful one: the bucolic and unhurried childhood invoked throughout the album recurs again and again as a contrasting motif, a vision of how our lives might be different. “If I could have it, all the time we wasted, I would only waste it again … I would love to waste it again with you,” sings Butler on ‘The Suburbs (Continued)’ by way of signing off, indicating that it is the good faith gestures of childhood and the capacity for children and adolescents to look after one another that will renew the lives that are lived at such desperate pitch throughout the album - we can’t build or fight for a better, radically altered world, at least not without horrific collateral damage, but we can keep the ways of being together that foster happiness alive, such that they endure no matter what upheavals the universe throws at us. The images of childhood, friendship and family throughout the album are perhaps a reiteration of Voltaire’s conclusion to the catastrophes of Candide whereby one is urged to “tend your own garden”, not as a retreat from the world, but as a way of inviting it in, of a world not understood through grand, overarching ideologies, theories, conspiracies and other paranoid zaniness, but through simple, human gestures, the things that show us some beauty beyond the damage we do, the things that constitute us as a public that is brought together through kindness and good faith. In that search through every passing car lies an attempt at restoring relationships that have been ground down in the atomisation, sprawl and dilapidation of the suburbs, an attempt to restore the spirit that exceeds the ugly morphology and the even uglier ideology that grew out of the suburbs.

Who is Arcade Fire? Just some indie band who urged us all to live and appreciate in this world while we still have it, rather than rant on in our insulated, tribal, bile-steeped, cliquey universes. And for that they should be universally applauded.

At some point in 2009/2010 the cult of Mad Men tipped into the mainstream. Daily rags in the English-speaking world, professing to be mad for Mad Men began splashing fashion spreads across their pages and extolling the virtues of ‘timeless’ sixties elegance and style. While it’s certainly true that the world portrayed by Mad Men is an eminently better dressed one than that which we currently encounter going about our business, mixed up in the gushing over the show’s (gorgeous) style was a nostalgic undertow. Mad Men seduces in part by harkening back to a more stylish, mannered time, one which exudes a certain poise and confidence that many would lament that we’ve lost.

Of course, nowhere in any of this coverage has it ever really occurred to anyone in the mainstream press that Mad Men constantly undercut its glamorous vision of the way we were with a sharp satirical edge. The satire is often overlooked in part because getting under the surface of the not-too-distant past and laying the limitations that lay at the core of the prevailing ethos of the times bare sells precious little copy. Also because whenever anyone mentions the word satire these days it is expected one is referring to a laugh-a-minute comedy, which, though Mad Men has a finely observed and wryly witty sense of humour, the show is not. But as a show, Mad Men asks us to look at the hypocrisies and folly that attends to the glamorous zeitgeist of fashionable and powerful 1960s New York, even if it does so gently, with some weighty and considered characterisation lending sympathy and insight to the satirical edge. What’s more, is that it satirises that world from a position that doesn’t assume the inherent superiority of the present. Attitudes to race and gender are still thorny issues, and are areas in which we may be going backwards on in certain respects (I’ve heard some argue that Mad Men shows us how terrific a world it would be if we all just got our chauvinist pig on, which shows how much attention some have been paying, and perhaps just how seductive the narrow prism of glamour spoken of above has been). But the shock at the sheer vile-ness of some of the behaviour depicted on Mad Men is deliberate: we’re not necessarily any great shakes, but we’ve come some way from that.

All of which is probably the more pertinent point of Mad Men: historically, how has this period of upheaval, in which the power of voices such as the real Don Drapers were intensified and came to saturate many of our lives to ever greater degrees, and where the power of the voices who fell outside of that privileged caste began to gain a presence and momentum, shaped our present moment? Don’s most compelling insight (and he has an array, even if he spends a lot of the time cracking too-glib maxims like a latter-day la Rochefaucauld) is that the world of advertising offers a distinct insight, quite removed from its caricature as the nefarious machinations of ‘the System’. Advertising deals with wants and desires, which, though not as acute as needs, are more value and meaning-laden. So yes, while food, warmth and shelter are more immediate, essential needs for us as generic human organisms trying to survive, it is what we desire once those needs are satisfied, what model car, what lipstick, what briefcase, what camera (as narrow as those things are in conveying meaning), that goes to the heart of who we are as distinct individuals. If what we desire tries to fulfil a deficit of meaning, then those desires become the fulcrum for invention, the creation of a persona, of the actor which we are called upon to thrust upon the stage of history. Don knows this instinctively: Dick Whitman is fated to have history pass him by as yet another okie who worked or fought themselves into misery or an early grave trying to satisfy the essential needs of life, until he realises his opportunity to surpass those needs and tap into his desires to create a new world for himself.

As the Mad Men crew repeatedly point out, it’s a world beset with its own problems: the adolescent Don Juanism and drinking, the Master of the Universe arrogance and stone-cold bastardry. But as Don Draper what we see is someone involved at least at some level, with creating their history, whereas Dick Whitman was condemned to be shaped and spat out by history. When Don counsels Peggy in the scene below, telling her that her pregnancy and the resultant child “never happened” he is telling Peggy that she is not the sum of the accidents that may befall her: they are incidental to Peggy the writer and businesswoman, the girl who pitched “like a man” and demanded to be treated as one. Like Dick Whitman, she can slough off what others may regard as fate. She can reinvent and burnish the image, gloss the narrative such that her fate is, to Don’s mind, never sealed. Good Catholic girl that she is, this resonates with Peggy: Don is her confessor, and his iconic world offers absolution, offers an insight into the self and how they relate to the world.

“It will shock you how much it never happened,” Don says by way of emphasis, and it is the “how much” that is instructive here. It is always a matter of degree to which we can separate ourselves from our past. It is never absolute, as Don’s anxieties over someone knowing of his past and the occasional flickers of Peggy’s guilt attest. The past may not be determinate in an absolute sense, but, much like the trajectory of a missile at the time of launch, it settles some important aspects of how we will live our lives which one can never escape entirely. But whereas the WASP grandees of the Mad Men universe and the Western elite it represents inflate this to something of cosmological and deeply moral significance, the ‘timeless’ order of things, Don and Peggy see this merely as circumstance. Immutable as some of those circumstances may be, the desire to move beyond them and to redeem them through ones acts represent a dynamic terrain, one which Don and Peggy are able to tap. The past is something we fashion in order to step more fully into the present, that point in which we own history, as Don’s little treatise on non-linear history in The Carousel beautifully demonstrates.

If the elite that Don and Peggy have insinuated themselves among have historically projected themselves, and built their fortune, fame, dignity and moral authority on being the elect, then its the paucity of that edifice that Mad Men exposes. While the Sterlings and Campbells of the world move about confident of their position as the moral centre of gravity of the American Way, what has accorded them that confidence is a very measly and momentary happenstance upon which an entire way of life and entire code of manners and honour has been hung. What Don and Peggy see (and what Campbell has thus far come ever more to be aware of) is just how flimsy that is. If one discrete historical event, such as a birth to a wealthy family can carry such weight, then how much weight may the accumulated events one has enacted in one’s life carry? What Mad Men suggests is that it will shock us just how little what we accept as permanent can be shunted aside. Those things which may have happened once, do not happen for all time, and it is a realisation that can, for better and worse, shock us into making something quite different happen.

Quite beyond the allure of fine dresses and suits, what really seduces and shocks in Mad Men is that one powerful idea that what may strike us as timeless is a convenient, if at times beautiful myth - what is regarded as timeless is no longer happening, but how we act and shape our lives right now is, such that all those timeless things, with their veneer of grace and dignity, may as well have never happened at all. Mad Men presents us with a history we can admire and wistfully long for. But if we dig under the surface it presents us with something altogether more important and unsettling; the idea that the history with the most weight and force is that we are living right now, such that what was may as well have never been anything more than something to return to in a dream.

“Philosophy,” writes the English philosopher Simon Critchley, “begins in disappointment”. Like any good student and proponent of Continental philosophy, death and discord are, for Critchley, constitutive, even in their denial. When we philosophise, according to Critchley and the tradition in which he positions himself, we hew ourselves to knowledge, and the narratives we create about what it is to be human from that knowledge, in order to come to terms with the grim reality of death and discord that each human being has to face.

As far as First Philosophy goes, it’s a disappointing proposition: to have the pinnacle of human endeavour reduced to a coping mechanism amid incessant doom and gloom is sobering at best. Yet it’s hard (as long as one gives any credence to the methods of Continental philosophy, which very many don’t) to argue with Critchley’s blunt proposition. Dying in a universe devoid of any greater metaphysical significance, and just what the disappointment that goes along with that means for how we live our lives is one hell of a question to have to grapple with, such that it spurs a great deal of thought and consideration. Nor is it a proposition that falls far outside the bounds of philosophy’s history: Plato’s Symposium doesn’t say a whole lot different to Critchley in its consideration of friendship and love. As we’re not sufficient unto ourselves, love in its various guises, erotic, platonic, fraternal or familial, serves to ameliorate the awareness of our deficiencies which is such a defining component of the human condition. Philosophy, the experience of love and knowledge, begins in disappointment: the disappointment of Jesus having no particular need for us for a sunbeam and that we’re not the heroic, solitary übermensch of libertarian myth.

While space only permits a caricature, it is fair to say that Critchley’s conception of the disappointed philosopher resembles the solitary, brooding malcontent associated with Existentialism and the Continental tradition (I say caricature here because Critchley has elsewhere written very well about humour and is quite the dry humorist himself). While he makes a good case for disappointment as the constitutive ground of philosophy, what’s missing is the friend as conceived by Plato and Aristotle, without whom there is no philosophy. For while disappointment is the condition by which we come to realise the need for love and knowledge, it is the friend, he or she to which we are drawn by virtue of our disappointment, through which we come to philosophise, as it is the friend through whom we realise love and knowledge themselves.

Even still, this remains an unsatisfactory formulation. Firstly, because it instrumentalises friendship: it gears friendship towards a (selfish) end and regards friendship as subject to a very simple, clear intention on behalf of the participants; it makes friendship a tactical, calculated manoeuvre. Secondly, because it grounds the friend negatively: it makes of our friends crutches for our existential despair. In reality friendship transcends easily defined ends and far exceeds the role of existential balm. While the condition of disappointment gives the experience of friendship its particular potency, disappointment is not the compelling factor in friendship. The friend, in and of themselves, as an actualisation of human passions and sympathies, as the crystallisation of human joy and suffering through the minor languages unique to friends, is the compelling thing.

To illustrate this via a language more imbued with joy and suffering than technical philosophy can hope to be, I’d like to turn to Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s ‘I See a Darkness’. While Will Oldham would probably bridle at being placed in the category of philosopher, ‘I See a Darkness’ is a symposium nonetheless, sinking down to the bottom of a glass to find just how to express his dread, disappointment, fear, trembling and, in spite of all of that, love, as totemic of his and his buddy’s experience: “many times we’ve been out drinking, and many times we’ve shared our thoughts/ but did you ever seem to notice the kind of thought’s I got?” As much as Oldham professes a “love for everyone I know”, and though he categorically rules out succumbing to despair (“you know I have a drive to live, I won’t let go”), there’s a “dreadful end position … blacking in my mind”, as he admits to seeing the non-specific darkness of the song and the album of the same name.

Other than the mention of hitting the drink (something that gained more power when Johnny Cash interpreted the song - when talk of a midnight symposium of despair comes from one who had waded through the trial and torment of addiction, it gives such a line even more gravity), the darkness Oldham sings of draws its sting from the content of his back catalogue and the Appalachian folk stylings that he has built that back catalogue around. Up until I See a Darkness Oldham had harnessed the old folk style to give an eerie, uncanny and creepy accent to his tales of sex and death. Old tropes of yearnin’, cheatin’, leavin’ and a-killin’ were twisted into a coarser modern tongue with its more candid grasp of sexuality and mortality, replete with Oldham’s willingness to mine subjects such as incest (‘Riding’, ‘We All, Us Three Will Ride’) and making the role of passion in crimes of passion more explicit than we are perhaps comfortable knowing (‘Tonight’s Decision (And Hereafter)’, ‘Death to Everyone’). The effect is to make that coarse language of sex and death less a modern corruption of the finer sensibilities held in the past as demonstrating a continuity between the horror, cruelty and darkness that humans have always been capable of and the present. The darkness of Oldham’s songs lies in the resonance of those uncanny scenes of primordial brutality and carnal savagery.

On this particular front-porch singalong (something the clip below brings out more strongly than the recorded version. Might I also mention just how sublime the version below is …) Oldham reaches down into that imagery to beseech (and beseech he does - the intensity of the question of “do you know how much I love you?” in the second chorus is extraordinary), the friend to stand shoulder to shoulder with him and face down the darkness. There’s something of the confessor to the friend in Oldham’s vision, insofar as he is privy to the language of sin in the hope of effecting salvation. However, to be Oldham’s confessor would be to subject friendship to the instrumental demands that undermine the sincerity of friendship mentioned above. While Oldham expresses his hope that “somehow you will save me from this darkness”, the sense is not so much that the friend will absolve him as it is that his presence and his witnessing of Oldham’s experience, his joy and darkness, will give weight and definition to Oldham and the friend himself. For Oldham, the reciprocal act of bearing witness to the other’s life helps embed the darkness and disappointment in a language that can encompass those experiences in a philosophy, if you will, that brings “peace”. In knowing that one’s fears and hopes are witnessed, recognised and spoken of seriously, one doesn’t escape the darkness, but comes to a philosophy that sustains by making the love and knowledge necessary to endure this world a concrete presence in one’s life. It is our salvation not through absolution, but through the strength it gives us not to admit defeat, to remain the best unbeaten brother amid the darkness and disappointment.

As envisioned through the dark, dark glass of Oldham’s songwriting, friendship emerges as an event through which we break from the disappointment and insufficiency that is our lot as solitary creatures. If, to simplify Alain Badiou, our understanding of our existence, our being, represents an inventory of what is, a great big set of information which we use to negotiate our way around those things and through the disappointment that is inherent to these things as they are, then the event emerges when the component parts of that inventory become communicable to one another in languages that exceed the mere “what is” of being. Poetry, music, history, the scientific or mathematical breakthrough: when done properly these do not just tell us what is, do not just admit of the disappointment and darkness which is concomitant to our being; they communicate it such that they compel us to reach into the ethical and moral parts of our character, to those things which are the substance of friendship, and imagine a better way to be - of how to counterbalance the darkness and disappointment with the lambent flicker of generosity, love and steadfastness that comes with true friendship, to “light it up forever and never go to sleep”. In short, to return to the truest First Philosophy and philosophise as friends.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

- William Carlos Williams, Poem XXII, Spring and All

The poetic aspect of the everyday has long been co-opted by the realm of cliche. If by poetic we speak of the radical reimagination of the world, then our present age of lives continuously reimagined in the glamorous cast of celebrity and self-mythologising, then, as miserable and unedifying as that poetry is, there is barely anything of which we can speak that hasn’t already been ‘poeticised’. Further to Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, we’ve reached the point where, for a not insignificant few among wealthy Western nations, we each have our own Ovidian metamorphosis. An Ovidian metamorphosis boiled down to a thin gruel granted, and invariably reiterating the story of Narcissus, but a metamorphosis nonetheless.

As has been intimated, this all hinges on a rather impoverished concept of poetry, understood as an aesthetic reimagining of experience. From reality TV wannabes through to overcultivated hipster eccentricities, these transformations are writ in very broad, unsubtle gestures. These metamorphoses are very forced affairs, desperately seeking validation by as big (or as rarefied) of a public as can be found. The maze of human emotions wending through the human heart that gave flight to the transformations of Ovid are diminished in this poetry, continually receding in the blare of self-promoting and self-regarding youtube clips and the ready bank of cheerleaders ready to chime in with effusive comments.

If what we can imagine ourselves to be forms the heart of our poetry, then, while so many of us can be said to be living ‘poetic’ lives, it is a poetry that will not resound for any more than the fifteen minutes that so many of those who have committed to reimagining themselves and their circumstances have clamoured for. While for the most perfectly harmless and at its best mildly amusing, there is something to be lamented here. So much depended on Williams’ red wheel barrow, but sadly, the poeticisation of the everyday has failed to encompass such aspects of the quotidian. While the ‘everyday’ is relentlessly celebrated, it is usually done so from a position where that everydayness is somehow deserving of rewards quite beyond what can be regarded as the ‘everyday’ (just think of reality TV contestants’ endless professions as to their ordinariness, which simultaneously marks them out as the elect, deserving of extraordinary attention and reward). The self, that vehicle through which the everyday is negotiated, has, Narcissus-like, come to be constitutive of the world around us. Personal transformation and achievement in turn changes the world, effects a kind of poetry where the world is refracted through peoples’ carefully cultivated and forcefully conveyed personalities.

A more profound poetry is that of Williams’ red wheelbarrow, in which the self is refracted through the objects surrounding it. The object is constitutive of the subject. It effects a transformation whereby it adds greater intricacies to that maze in the human heart. As much as Matt Berninger seems to offer up an example of the boastful poetry that celebrates the transformative force of personality (“we’ll run ‘til we’re awesome, totally genius”), the National’s ‘The Geese of Beverly Road’ reaffirms the centre of poetic gravity as lying within the objects of the world and the manner in which our contemplation and interaction with them effects a more meaningful metamorphosis than the cheap and easy versions offered in abundance elsewhere. Much like the red wheelbarrow, the geese of Beverly Road serve as a poetic fulcrum, the scattered geese an image of joy that flutters in the heart as much as the geese flutter in the breeze. Poetic transformation here is less validating the self as something the world must come around to (and reward) as it is forging a closeness of the friends/couple of the song through the images of flight, the wind and the sky latent in the geese of Beverly Road, awaiting a childlike rush to scatter them and drag the emotional attachment of the song’s protagonists into something freer, more chaotic, more exhilarating.

It’s this keen eye for the poetic within the everyday, so at odds with how we have come to conceive of the poetic in the everyday, that has marked out the National as a zeitgeist band (ironically enough by being so pronouncedly against the prevailing zeitgeist of pop culture all around them). Much as Springsteen gave voice to the poetic metamorphoses and significance found in the bric-a-brac of working class life, much of the National’s work has found such poetic moments in the minutiae of the contemporary shit-kicking white-collar world. From owing “money to the money to the money I owed” which carries ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’s protagonist on a millenarian bee storm into the heart of America, to the suited picnics of ‘Fake Empire’ and ‘Gospel’, the dinner parties of ‘Slow Show’, to the streetscapes of ‘Lemonworld’ and ‘Mistaken for Strangers’, these are lives passed by with quiet desperation, or lived without the vaulting, venal ambition of the crack-brained contemporary mediascape. They instead find small, redemptive metamorphoses, finding voice for their anguish or sexuality in the glitter of the city, their tenderness in the greenery of a garden or a country-drive, the vastness of financial hardship in the abyssal endlessness of the midwestern landscape. Rather than escaping their fraught circumstances through celebration of the self and validation through public transformation, the National’s cast of workaday desk jockeys find private dignity through coming into closer touch with the objects around them. While Berninger’s “run ‘til we’re awesome/ totally genius” may show a touch of boastfulness on ‘The Geese of Beverly Road’, the ”til’ here is important - the awesomeness does not reside within their precious selves, but shimmers through at the point where they run like the wind.

“We’re the heirs to the glimmering world” sings Berninger. In a way, there’s something of an ancien regime-like weariness to this vision, it’s cocky avowal of an exclusive inheritance. But in finding a lost world within the layers of how we live our lives, and the overlooked details of what we live our lives amongst, there is perhaps something more radical at the heart of ‘The Geese of Beverly Road’ and the National’s work. In exploring the transformations available to us through the everyday, what the National uncover is not the glittering world of shiny mass-media and internet-celebrity promises, but the warm, glimmering world of all that surrounds us and remakes us moment by moment when we care to pay attention.