Time Offering Clarity

A couple weeks ago I went rooting through my old closet at my parents' house, looking for my photos (yes, printed photographs) from a trip to the Southwest which Mike, Reid, Brandon and I took in 2002. I was vaguely despondent when my search failed - and not for the first time - for I have lost so many such mementos of the past - especially from the period between 2000 and 2005. During those years I struggled with persistent depression and the associated medications. It was also during that time I learned, slowly, to reconcile my inner world to the outer world. Having effectively been an only child (my brothers are 12 and 14 years older than me), that process was not easy, because my inner world was, by that time, both well-developed, and completely detached from reality. I was fixated on notions I wished not only to understand, but to know completely - enormous, opaque notions like identity, meaning, and transcendence. Further, I was deluded into believing that the bridge between my inner and outer worlds - not so different, I might add, from the bridge between childhood into adulthood - existed in the form of a soul mate from the outer world, who would understand me, profoundly and completely, and pull me towards her, into that outer world. Worse, I spent much of that period believing I knew who that person was - someone I had already lost forever. I was thereby left to wander a world that was, in a sense, post-apocalyptic, though the wasteland into which I had been banished was internal, not external.

I had forgotten those notions, having inadvertently re-written my early 20's in my memory over time as a stage when I was universally depressed, living solely in my room, searching for answers. But something wonderful happened yesterday - I found a CD-R on which I had backed up a tremendous amount of material I had written and compiled (especially photos) during those years, including a daily journal running from 2001 to mid-2004. It confirmed for me that my narrative, if at all correct, was a reduction of something much more complex. That's what happens with the past, of course - but, it was wonderful to see so much fuller a picture, once again, and to be better reminded of what my life during that period was actually like.

So many things happened to me during that time, and I went through so many shorter, more subtle and nuanced phases. But, one thing was confirmed - I spent much of that time obsessed with the particular concepts I noted above - especially the notion of meaning, and the role that other people, and especially the elusive 'soul mate' had to play in the process. Yes, in three years' worth of journaling, I used that term many too many times.

Particular periods stand out. I spent the fall of 2003, especially, fixated on people - the people I knew, and who I wanted to know and how to find them - and in people, I found powerful reflections of myself which I had long failed to see. I think this time was a flickering candle in the darkness, when I began to bring the two parts of myself together.

That November, I moved into a house with my friends, soon after which a series of changes occurred in me - as if an inevitable result of that event. That spring, I completely stopped drinking, started exercising, committed to learning to play guitar, met many new people and made many new friends. That May, I started dating someone I would stay with for three years. In the context of the prior years - brief, low-quality relationships, like small islands within an ocean of solitude - it was interesting to read my journal entries because it was obvious that finding someone was not the random occurrence that I had always believed it to have been.

Of course, finding her in particular was a random occurrence, but the idea that I found someone was not random - it is clear that I merely had first to change myself and my habits to become a person that would find someone. The person I had been those prior years and the person I became that spring were both strongly predisposed to find exactly the sort of people I did during those respective periods of time. It is so obvious, reading the progression in the writing, and blessed now with the distance provided by time, which grants me some amount of objectivity, and clarity.

Before that spring, I was insular, withdrawn, and without motivation. And just to give one example of how my thinking was backwards, I had often thought of drinking as a social means to the end of finding someone - a way to be in the suspected right places at the suspected right times. I couldn't have been more wrong. It was when I stopped drinking that my interaction with girls - and especially the sort of girls that I would want to know - increased. The progression in the journal is clear as day. Not only was I talking to more people, but it was more meaningful - our interactions were not trite, superficial, or forgotten. Suddenly that February, the entries start to refer to hanging out with new people, sharing better experiences with new and old friends, and being told that particular people wanted to see me. And, although it could just be confabulation, I remembered most of the interactions and events referred to, and I slowly recalled feeling so much better about myself than I had - perhaps ever - even acknowledging that fact to myself.

It is remarkable how many of those people I had either forgotten, or forgotten that the particular events of that period of time occurred with. It is a sobering reminder for me, because for a long time I was obsessed with the idea that I would not, could not forget people and the times we had shared - I believed that remembering was one of the most important functions of friendship, because I believed that a great deal of the profundity of life lay in relationships and that memories were the base currency of life itself. (this final point is tricky, because in a certain sort of way, I think this same "base currency" is still implicit underneath many of my thoughts and decisions, though I no longer think of or acknowledge it explicitly in my thoughts)

Oh, and there's more good news: among the pictures on the CD-R were some scanned photos of the trip I was searching for - much better than nothing, at least! With all the photos I found - both from this trip and other occasions - I plan to create a new Facebook Album: "Look How Skinny We Used To Be"

A Dozen Trips

Lately I have been thinking of travel in a rather philosophical light. Specifically, I have been trying to better appreciate all the intangible and indirect benefits of travel. See, when I plan to travel today, I spitball the potential value by considering things like the opportunity cost of not working, the cost of the trip, the opportunity to do unique things, and overall quality of time I expect to spend. The "error term", around such an estimate, however, is large, and I wish to find what accounts for it.

When I say I've been thinking of travel lately, what I really mean is that I have been thinking about those best trips - the ones that brought me the most joy, and the ones that have left a lasting impression - and attempted to understand why they were so great. It has been one of the most enjoyable and satisfying mental exercises I have put myself through in a long time. And, despite having thought about them plenty, I think it would be valuable to write it all down somewhere where I can come back to it, as a way to review a little more objectively.

When I think of the best trips I have ever taken, I think of these (listed chronologically):

1) New Mexico / Grand Canyon - ~1988. My parents and I drove to Farmington, New Mexico, to see my aunt, then on to Mesa Verde, Four Corners, The Painted Desert, and the Grand Canyon. It was the latter that, I suspect, was most responsible for the deep affection for the Southwest that I have felt ever since. My grandmother had driven out separately and was camping on the south rim, and the anticipation and excitement of meeting her there, the days spent exploring and the evenings and nights spent around the campground, meeting people, sleeping in her camper van, were formative experiences in my conception of the adventure that travel could possess.

I took other trips with my parents - mostly to Colorado. Those were good, too, but none could match that trip to the Grand Canyon. For years afterwards, my grandmother's coffee table books on the desert and the National Parks were beacons reminding me of that trip, always associating her with those feelings.

2) Steubenville, Ohio - ~1997. As part of a high school church "youth group", I went to Steubenville, Ohio, two summers in a row, for the Catholic Youth Conference at Franciscan University. My first real friendship with a girl tumultuously orbited both trips. The first trip contained so many remarkable memories - staying awake all night on the bus, nights sleeping in the gym, so many new friends, so many genuine people. You can disagree with any religion - and I have scarcely participated in any since - but I found something very special in the earnest friendships I made there - I haven't experienced anything like it since, and I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

3) South Dakota / Colorado - 1998. The summer before our senior year I tagged along with Tony's family on vacation. We made friends with two girls at our campground in the Black Hills, climbing rocks and sitting around campfires. But, that was only a warm-up to the minivan full of college girls who offered us candy (an innuendo if ever there was an innuendo, when I was still too oblivious to know one) outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Better yet were the horseback riding, hiking, and meteor showers encountered in the middle of nowhere. Great friendships are built on collections of important moments, and an outsized quantity of Tony and I's came from that trip, and the similar one we took the following year.

4) Colorado / New Mexico - 2002. My friend Reid and I had been talking about visiting colleges in Colorado for practically the entire year I had known him. With scarce premeditation, we finished up our Thursday-night bowling league and drove west in his Miata through the night, arriving in Greeley at sunrise. We wandered the UNC campus before moving on to Fort Collins and Boulder. It was the latter that left me dreaming of a different life than the one I had been leading. That night we wandered the campus and the neighborhoods of a town that I have felt drawn to ever since. The next morning we drove to his grandparents' house in Albuquerque - because, why not? I wished that day never to lose that spirit of spontaneity for travel. Every trip I've taken since carries some wish for surprise and adventure that I've always associated with that trip.

5) Oklahoma City - 2006. Somehow I feel like I am forced to pick between this trip and the trip to Costa Rica, which occurred around the same time. Well, Costa Rica probably had more firsts, and more memorable moments in total, but measured by excitement-per-minute, our long-weekend trip in a rented minivan to Oklahoma City to visit my friend Tony over Super Bowl weekend would be hard to top by any other trip I've ever taken, with the possible exception of Stockholm (see below). Oklahoma City was a "guys weekend" before we were old enough to need to call it anything so lame. We shouted obscenities, walked in front of traffic, head butted, poured pitchers on people, and got kicked out of bars - in the first twenty-four hours. We buried passed-out friends under piles of furniture, cracked beers in bed at night, cracked beers in the shower, cracked beers in bed in the morning, and tried to drive to Austin in the middle of the night. But I also remember sitting on Tony's roof one cool, late morning with a Corona and a lime, head still swimming from the night before as I stared out over the endless suburban tracts, conjuring the band Real Estate from my own wistfulness and ennui, years before they had even formed.

6) Utah - 2008. I couldn't improve upon what I recently wrote about this trip.

7) Helsinki #1 - 2009. It kills me that I feel compelled to choose between this and our trip to Estonia the following weekend. Though Estonia was more exotic, and varied, Helsinki was the prototype for all the exchange student excursions to come, where push came to shove and we saw the best and worst of each other, and created our most indelible memories. The tapas restaurant in the alley before a night out in the club; fifteen people crammed into our ultra-modern hotel room passing bottles of cheap vodka; snowball fights, "dead-whale face," and the trip to Suomenlinna, the eighteenth-century sea fort in the bay. The Scandinavian Winter nights seemed endless, as did the low, gray clouds. And, I can't help but confess that when I look at the pictures from that trip - the pictures of me and my friends, I can read things on their faces that I didn't see then - that I was, likely, too naive, or thick-skinned, to notice.

8) Stockholm - 2009. My friends Krista and Jillian had already gone to Stockholm another weekend, but as Tassilo and I planned our trip, they conspired to return with us. Experience has taught me again and again that the group dynamic is everything on a trip. This trip was wild - the tone of spectacle was set early by our friend Daryl's participation in the magic act at the evening show on the ferry. It was the night of a dozen profound drunken conversations. In Stockholm we visited our favorite professor for an evening of drink, revelry, and faux-sophistication. Back at the hostel, we met fellow American and Australian travelers from Copenhagen, drank Jaegermeister, after which I got very lost - and almost kidnapped - returning from one of Stockholm's most high-profile clubs. But, for some reason, it is the memory of my friend Krista - alternately boisterous and sentimental - that I remember, and being alongside my friends with whom I could laugh so easily, always kind to me as they were, always close and in-the-moment. To me, that trip represents all those fleeting moments, charged with profundity and meaning, spent with friends now long-distant but never forgotten.

9) Norway - 2009. I have spent the past few years advertising southern Utah every chance I get, to anyone who will listen. And yet, when someone asks me where the most amazing place I've ever visited is, the answer comes instantly: Norway. The degree of spectacle is on another level in Norway, and it is everywhere. An inordinate number of the pictures I took there don't look real. Oslo was a peaceful urban paradise, full of incredible parks, fellow travelers, and quiet, friendly locals. Yet, the further we traveled west - Undredal, Voss, Bergen - the more otherworldly and incredible the landscape became. Preikestolen was the only fitting climax. Couchsurfing and friends-of-friends lent the places we stayed warmth and personality. I didn't know what to make of any of it as I watched the sun rise from Tassilo's car in Stockholm after an all-nighter. I still don't know, but I've never stopped wanting to return.

10) Spain / Morocco / Portugal - 2012. Barcelona was even better the second time - Montjuic and Tibidabo, islands of serenity in a city of millions. Girona, Ronda, Sintra were all remarkable - quiet towns in which I could have stayed for weeks, each. And Lisbon is a place I could live forever, eating the same ice cream bars outside the olympic park in the sun. But it was Marrakech that has stayed with me. We were terrified - hesitant to leave our room, but for the friends from the U.K. that we met at our hostel. What was oppressive, then funny, has, in hindsight, become profound - it was Merry and I clinging to each other, relying on each other when we had nobody else to rely on. It seems so powerful to me now because it was so automatic, and because it worked. I know we will always be able to rely on each other.

11) Colorado - 2013. Engagement ring secretly in tow, I committed myself to proposing before we arrived back home. I was first seriously tempted to ask a whopping hour outside of Omaha, driving west, with the sun rising behind us. Nevertheless, I waited until our first night in the Lost Creek backcountry, where I asked Merry at sunset amid an especially remote section of wilderness. Off we went to tremendous weather and a fantastic campsite at Eleven Mile State Park, followed by a cabin in the woods, serene and lovely. If vacations seldom deliver the peace and serenity that I imagine, then this one is the exception to the rule. It also taught me that meaning, like inspiration, is something you can only set the stage for, then step back and wait patiently.

12) Germany / Luxembourg / Austria - 2014. When my friend Tony got stationed in Germany for two years, it became a foregone conclusion a trip was forthcoming. When Merry and I got engaged and set a wedding date, the viable dates for that trip narrowed considerably. I booked a flight to Stuttgart on short notice. When I landed, we didn't so much as stop back at his house before the road trip commenced - Liechtenstein was abandoned during the day - good, we were tired - and wild at night - good, we were ready! Better yet was to reunite with old friends - Tassilo in Munich, then Nath in Vienna. It was the latter city, which I had wanted to visit since I had first seen Before Sunset, which left the strongest impression on me. A late, late night at the club with Nath and plenty of new friends saw us off, back to Stuttgart on scarce sleep (and me on none - when Tony crashed, I sang Pulp's "Bar Italia" to myself as I beelined for the city-center Starbucks). I swore I would never fly to Europe for a single week, but I don't regret making this exception.

Burial and Art as Experience

Will Bevan – the artist known as Burial – appreciates omission, the same way as so many great writers. His songs give you enough to wonder, but not enough to know – and this forces you, as the listener, to fill in the gaps. This strategy is one of the most potent weapons an artist can wield, and he does it well. His best songs insist an idea but offer inconclusive evidence. They can be sort of infinite, in their own way.

When I listened to Burial’s most recent EP – Rival Dealer – I was floored. I knew I was listening to the same artist – you can hear it in the songs’ composition, timbre, and mood – yet, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. And, well, I could wax poetic about the songs themselves – the impression they left on me, et cetera, but that would not be the point. Importantly, it occurred to me that Rival Dealer may contain much less for someone who had not heard Burial’s previous work. Yes, it seems to me that the EP is, to a significant degree, a sort of riff on the expectation of what Burial is – meaning, if I am right, that the music may fail to speak to someone who has not listened to him previously and thus has not constructed those expectations.

There is a theory in the world of art that states that a work should stand for itself, and should not be colored, or distorted, by things outside the work, such as the artist. We should judge an artist’s works, therefore, without regard to the fact that we may not agree with the artist as a person, say. This principle appeals to me in a very fundamental way; however, I could not immediately reconcile it against my experience of Burial, and my belief that his new music is better when taken in the context of his old music. Surely the experience of his prior work should not color my experience of his new work, right?

I think the way to reconcile the two comes from Brian Eno, who has offered that what we call ‘art’ is best understood not as the thing itself, but as the interaction between the thing and the experiencer. This, he says, solves a bunch of problems encountered in the theory of art. It certainly, in my mind, solves the problem I described, because the idea of Rival Dealer will be different to someone who has heard Untrue and Kindred than it will be to someone whose nearest point of reference is, say, Skrillex. Note, for what it is worth, that this doesn’t require that you jettison your preconception of the artist as a person – though, I honestly think that doing so is just a good idea, and doesn’t require some strict rule to justify it.

So, what of Burial, and Rival Dealer? Burial songs often seem to me like the impressions of people adrift in the nighttime in an unknown city. They are intense and yet elegant. Many of them work in clubs, and yet they are all better than any club. They also seem hallucinatory – not in the cheap method of "fiction," but in the manner of true hallucinations, whose hallmark is that they can only be distinguished from reality slowly, through the process of coming to detect where their composition diverges from reality.

The final two songs of Rival Dealer are like the eponymous Burial protagonist remembering having stumbled through a back-alley door in the rain, into a gymnasium where a prom is occurring. No, wait: better yet, he is simply recollecting some substrata of his youth, almost certainly long gone, connected to feelings we commonly give to prom - that juvenile longing, wishfulness, incomprehension. These songs are the sum of a hundred collected memories of a certain past that you can almost, but not quite, understand – it is Will Bevan omitting just enough, again. The spoken-word portion at the conclusion of the album suggests a certain keyhole but doesn't require it. It is enough, for what it's worth, to give subsequent listens a different context, but I like to think of it as optional. I suspect it was included by him because the subject inspired him and is important to him, but it might take away more than it adds to the album.

I have had dreams that have come, I am certain, from the song Hiders. I can’t readily recall another musician that has made me dream. Will Bevan is pretty amazing, and I look forward to whatever he does next.