Fragility

“Fragile” by Tech N9ne and others is interestingly of two minds. On the one hand, the song, like its title implies, suggests emotional vulnerability. The chorus is emotive and delicate, made for lovers to whisper to each other at night and to be embarrassed about in the morning. But the tone of the verses by Tech N9ne and Kendrick Lamar is aggressive and hyper-masculine. The lyrics by both rappers are about performance and art but, seemingly defensive about categories that are often gendered feminine in the popular imagination, the words are delivered in a muscular flow meant to confront the listener. Combative and emotional, wanting to reveal a kind of precious interiority and threatened by that possibility at the same time, “Fragile” is hard to reconcile as one song. So I choose to think of it in terms of the chorus. It’s the part that speaks to me the most and not just because I’m pathetically sentimental—who am I kidding, that’s probably why. But for reals, I think it hails me mainly because it reminds me of discovering for the first time exactly how fragile I could be. “I never thought I’d be so fragile,” sings a woman in this song and it struck me as the motherfucking truth when I heard it.

When I was 12 I fell into feelings with this girl called Janet. Who knows if she was cute or smart or pleasant, it was a long time ago and all I remember are the feelings. We hung out in the yard of our middle school in a small group, and I was so full of her that I never noticed that she might not dig me at all. Which was the case. I found out that she was into my friend Ramon when I saw them making out next to me in the movie theater at the Beverly Center. Ghostbusters, I’ll never forgive you. Seeing them cut me to the bone, as they say. I mean, I’m not sure what those words mean exactly but I do remember how much my stomach hurt and how dizzy I felt when I saw them kissing. Nonetheless, I kept it together. After their romance ran its natural course—a few weeks in my middle school world—I tried again to get her attention. This time it worked. She was the first girl I kissed, no shame in getting Ramon’s slobbery seconds. I even touched the front of her bra once. I was over the moon or something. A couple of weeks into our relationship, I managed to get permission to spend a whole Saturday with Janet by doing extra chores around the house. Within 5 minutes of getting to her parent’s place, Janet told me she didn’t want to “go around” (our technical term for relationships at that time and place) with me anymore. I kid you not, as soon as I felt the period in her sentence I burst into wailing. I cried instantly and inconsolably. I was beside myself in tears and snot, a real mess. It probably took her like an hour to calm me down enough to show me the door. That’s what I thought of when I heard “Fragile” for the first time. After some time had passed, I, too, was surprised to find out how fragile I could be when it came to affection and its aftermath.

And I’m not sure all of the experiences I’ve had since then have toughened me up much. Less than a year ago, I started talking again to a girl who had broken up with me before but that I had not gotten over. We started talking on the internet because as accidents would have it we had both started reading Moby Dick around the same time. First we talked about Moby Dick. Then we talked about other things. Then we talked about each other. I kept reading Moby Dick during the whole time. I’ve read it many times before, so I was in no hurry to find out what happened next and thus read it at a slow pace. As things progressed, I began to relate the book to the relationship, ending one might mean ending the other, so I slowed my reading to an even more measured pace. I still have two chapters left to read in Moby Dick but I don’t anticipate I’ll finish them anytime soon. I know how fragile I really am.

Life Stories

Life doesn’t come together, at least not in the living of it. Too many heterogeneous events, too prosaic, too repetitive, too continuous. Things that seem meaningful get buried under an undifferentiated mass of occurrences. It’s like when you move somewhere new and in the background of unfamiliar streets, buildings, and landscapes there is a different smell, a smell that comes with the place. You tell yourself: “I like this smell. I hope I remember it always.” But you don’t. The longer you live somewhere the more you lose the sense of what made it distinct. It merges into the beige of life. That’s the way important events often feel in life, deprived of their color by the mere fact of continuing to live.

And that explains the lure of biography. Biography takes the stuff of life and makes a story. It does so by framing a segment of life as significant. This is not to say that biography selects only the most meaningful events or that it ignores the mundane because it does not make for compelling stories. In fact, nineteenth and twentieth-century literature has taught us that the opposite is true, that the banal and boring are perhaps the only things worth narrating in the prose of modernity. Biography, by selecting, declares the section of life narrated as meaningful. That span of life symbolizes a problem to be resolved by the story. Biography does what life cannot, delimit. It places a starting point and an endpoint on a segment of the incessant continuum of life. Of course life itself starts and stops, but its ending provides something much larger than narrative closure.

By biography I mean more than the kind of formal biographies and autobiographies one finds in book stores. I don’t just mean books about the lives of important people or people that assume that by telling us about their lives they are important. Nor do I mean only novels that are written as if they were biographies, whose organic structures are borrowed from the organicity that we project onto biographies, that they depict the real lives of people. Biography as I’m using the term here means every story we tell about ourselves in writing or in everyday speech. It includes every anecdote that features us as hero or victim. All the stories that we tell about ourselves aim to draw some conclusion by putting a line through life that says “here this began and here it ended.”

So when One Direction sing “The story of my life/I take her home/I drive all night to keep her warm/And time is frozen” they seek to forestall the feeling of aimlessness generated by the pooling of days. In these words life is not a thing whose very magnitude makes it undecipherable or even worse unknowable. Instead life is a story and as a story it at least has a plot if not a purpose. The figure of time as frozen illustrates perfectly the need behind this sentiment: to have life stop long it enough for us to understand it. That this desire is rendered in a bittersweet tone is not significant to the wish-fulfillment that it reveals. It doesn’t matter that life pauses for us to recognize that what we get may not be what we want. All that matters is that it pauses.

A Little Free Association

Some people get sad with the rain. Some people need the sun to keep from lugubrious meditations. But spring days bring me to tears. Warmth, the smell of flowers whose names I don’t know, blue skies scribbled by clouds, a breeze. I can’t stand it. It fills me with love and sadness. It makes me want to get drunk and stare at water. I have always lived relatively near the Pacific. In spring you can sense the sea. In the breeze you feel the movement of the waves as they rumble on the beach. Not as a metaphor. As a physical thing. The planet in its turning. Dust from the other side of the world. The breath of things moving everywhere. The full, round light of spring, filtered through leaves, dropping at a slight angle. And the sky. If only the rest of life could be so blue.  Everything else by comparison is ashes. No, not ashes, because those are also beautiful and delicate. Against blue skies and grey ashes everything we have made seems like something human-made. This is not a dismissal of human achievements. It is only an acknowledgement that we ourselves are the product of world-making and thus our achievements are second-order phenomena.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye argues that spring in literature is connected to comedy. The mythos of spring, as he calls it, culminates in a wedding through which a society torn by falsehoods is brought back together. Conflicts are resolved in such a way as to reintegrate all the participants of the struggle. The antagonist—a false groom, a meddling parent, a social pariah—is vanquished but allowed to reenter society. Continuity is prized over vengeance, community over all else. Frye is right, of course. Many, if not all, of our stories are connected to the grand rhythms of planet. In the yearly cycle of rebirth, maturity, decay, and death are written the smaller cycles of life, love, and self. But while the seasons may structure our narratives, this does not suggest that we experience them in the manner in which we write them.

In one of their earliest and best songs, Modest Mouse sing: “Just the smell of the summer can make me fall in love.” Here feeling and experience are connected to each other, bypassing narrative. The immediate sensory experience of a warm summer day can transport you by itself into a set of expectations and associations that we call love. This happens in a pre-linguistic way. We perhaps bring it into consciousness by describing it to ourselves in words but its operations occur at a level in which language is secondary, if not completely unnecessary. To describe this in a song is fascinating because the emotions generated by music so often oscillate between the linguistic and the pre-linguistic. We listen and feel music and sometimes that feeling is connected to the meaning of words in a song and sometimes it is only connected to the sound of those words.

Recently I was sitting in a bar with a bright-eyed girl. It was late on a Sunday night, the place surprisingly full and lively. Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” started playing on the jukebox. We burst into laughter at the contrast between the mournfulness of the song and the trivial lightness of the scene. “The last time we saw you, you looked so much older/Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder,” sang Cohen, and while the musicality of the song contributes to its maudlin character, it’s the words themselves that bum you the fuck out. In contradistinction, the refrain of Beyoncé’s recent “Drunk in Love” conveys its emotional content through the musical sound of its lyrics. Indeed, I don’t really know what Beyoncé says when her voice rises over and over in the chorus. The meaning of the words is of no consequence because it is the lyrical elevation of her voice that testifies to the song’s depiction of love. In that refrain, she doesn’t tell us what love is, instead, the sound of her voice reminds us what love feels like.

When You’re the Worst

In the summer of 1997 I was dating a woman so volatile that she destroyed my apartment after I asked her to leave. I came home to find clothes thrown everywhere, furniture turned over, and dishes broken in anger, the outlines of drinking glasses etched perfectly into the wall where she had smashed them.

                                                                                          

By then I had met someone else. A few weeks earlier, this other girl and I had gone on a picnic. We spread a blanket near a reservoir in the west hills. We ate a salad that she had not washed well and for a while we pretended we did not notice the grit. Eventually we laughed at all the sand between our teeth. We talked about work—my permanent job and her summer job. We talked about her going back to school in a couple of weeks. We looked at the shiny water and the sun going down. She knew about the other girl, so we acted as if it was not a date. The water turned gold then darkened as we kept talking. I always felt somewhat ridiculous around her. She was very tall and towered over me. She was smart and was working on a Japanese degree at university. She came from a comfortable suburban family. I worked 40 hours a week at a grocery store and had taken some classes at community college. I drank at a bar with old time drunks, young people who would soon be dead, and people that killed themselves over gambling debts. She and I were different kinds of people, let’s say. As we were packing up I told her that in the little time I had gotten to know her I had become fond of her. “I’m fond of you,” is what I actually said because I have always liked anachronistic, artificial language. I also told her that I was dating a maniac and that it was a good thing she was going back to school so that nothing would get overly complicated.

After she left for school we wrote letters. I sent her a mixtape that was a fairly transparent cipher. She, being cleverer, sent me poetry in languages I couldn’t read. So I broke up with the other girl and she destroyed my apartment. The new girl rode the bus 100 miles to come visit me and that’s how we started. Because of her I began to see new possibilities for myself. I finished community college and got a scholarship to her university. After a couple of years, I discovered what I wanted to do and my life finally had purpose. She remained tall and pretty and smart through it all. She loved me unconditionally, perhaps better than anyone ever has. But I changed. I wanted something else, someone better. Eventually I wanted to destroy what we had just for the sake of not having it anymore. She loved me all the way to the end, until I made sure there was nothing left of us.

It is many years later. She has a family with someone else. One time I ran into her in yet another grocery store, I was with my daughter and she was with her son and she was as kind and gentle as always. I don’t know how she remembers the relationship we had.  But I know how I feel about it. When Jhene Aiko sings “You ain’t shit/And you weren’t special/Til I made you so,” I know exactly what she means.

The Prettiest of Views

It’s hard to explain why Anna Kendrick’s “When I’m Gone (Cups)” has been on the radio for such a long time. It must have something to do with nostalgia. It sounds like a song that you might have learned at camp, where you sang it with friends while also learning the “cup game” that came along with it. The repetitiveness of the lyrics and their elemental quality suggest a song easily learned and earnestly sung.  This is a song that some adolescent girls will sing together even if they don’t really like it and some adolescent boys will love with all their hearts even if they pretend to hate it. As an adult, it reminds you obliquely of how you viewed adulthood from the perspective of a teenager.

But the structure of the song also hints at some version of the American past that feels both colorful and safe. “I’ve got my ticket for the long war round/Two bottle whiskey for the way,” she sings. And that seems right: just enough whiskey to stay pleasantly buzzed on a long train ride but not enough to get crazy, enough whiskey to pretend that you are like the hobo from the “Big Rock Candy Mountains” and the little streams of alcohol of hobo dreaming are right there in your bottle. A pretended past, a bright past, a past without the fear of homelessness, of deprivation, of hunger, and the need to escape that reality with drunken delirium. That is, this song constitutes a simulacrum of the past as it is represented in a fantasy like O Brother Were Art Thou?, a movie that features the song “Big Rock Candy Mountains” and could have featured “When I’m Gone.” A simulacrum that in our society of images becomes confused with reality so that many people experience a film like O Brother Were Art Thou? as if it were the real representation of a past more organic and comforting than the present. Indeed, that past seems more that way in that movie but not because that is nature of the past but because it is represented as such.

Perhaps the deepest type of nostalgia in “When I’m Gone” is felt in its view of nature. In the second verse Kendrick sings that her ride has “the prettiest of views/It’s got mountains; it’s got rivers/ It’s got sights to give you shivers.” The description places you inside the railroad car with her. You view a landscape distanced from you by the glass on the picture window. The choice of common nouns (mountains, rivers) renders those features in ideal terms, so that in picturing her words you provide perfectly idealized mental visions of them. This is not nature but the pastoral, a composed and picturesque rendering of the natural world. This prettiest of views reveals both our desire for communion with nature and the fundamental break, figured in this song as a glass partition, between the human world and the natural world in the Western imagination. Lukács says that the more Western people see the natural world as their true and necessary home, the more alienated they feel from the social world they have constructed. This is not to say that we are actually separate from the natural world from which we emerged and on which we depend. We are indeed earth animals and despite the vivid imaginations of popular culture that portray us as living on other planets this is the only planet anyone reading this will ever live on. Nonetheless, it appears to me that the distinction between a humanity that stands elevated over a natural world that serves it primarily as matter is one of the oldest structures of our worldview. We may appreciate its beauty, understand that it alone can satisfy all of our material necessities, nostalgically long to feel it as our only true home, but just the same it will remain separated from us by the very thinking that recognizes it as something essentially different from who we are.