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.

Whispers

In March of 2008, a friend and I made the long haul from Omaha to the Grand Canyon, via Breckenridge and then Durango, arriving as a snowstorm pushed dramatically up over the canyon wall, blanketing the rim. I strained to see into the expanse as the waves of precipitation rolled past us, the sun intermittent, fighting to burn through. For scarce seconds, the inner canyon could be seen, the river a distant sliver amongst the riddle of buttes. We stayed in a room perhaps a hundred feet from the edge, and during the night I rose and tiptoed outside, across the snow that had fallen. The canyon was silent, eerie, perfect.

The next day we took the rarely-traveled 89A bypass up through Marble Canyon to Lee's Ferry, nestled along the Colorado just downstream of the towering walls at the end of Glen Canyon, before pushing on to the remote Wire Pass Trailhead on the Utah/Arizona border. It was almost warm out on the hike into Brimstone Gulch - the world's longest slot canyon - wading through shady, near-freezing waist-deep pools before reversing our way, detouring south over hills of rock, sand, and sparse brush towards The Wave, a rock formation in an area known as Coyote Buttes. We trekked cross-country, across undulating sandstone, past all manner of surreal rock formations and sandstone patterns, finally believing ourselves to have found it nestled atop a hillside. Plains stretched out to the east, dotted by cartoonishly round rock outcroppings. As the daytime waned, we negotiated a slope a bit too steep for comfort, back down a different direction and scampered down a streambed and back to the car, driving on to Kanab in the dark to find a hotel. It was St. Patrick's Day.

It was good news, bad news with the innkeeper, who informed us there were no bars in Kanab, but gave us a room next to two girls that had just checked in - probably the hotel's only other customers. We went over and introduced ourselves. They welcomed us in and shared beer they had brought and we all watched the World's Ugliest Dog competition on TV. I tried not to laugh as much as I really wished to. We chatted and got to know each other. We staged a picture of them laying in the bed with Samuel, our mannequin head, surrounded by empty beer bottles. We laughed some more. They were headed for the Grand Canyon. It was the opposite of every St. Patrick's day ever, and it was great.

I had discovered in mid-December that I was too late to reserve us permits to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon that March. It was something I had wanted to do since my grandmother had died. The place had been special to her and I wanted to understand, to feel what she had felt. We had gone, anyways, because my friend had never been there, and because I was in love with the road, and in love, already, with the west I had seen, and the idea of the Great American West, pastoral and free. There was no place too far.

I had also run into a well-traveled acquaintance at a friend's party that past fall and had found out that, in her job with the NPS, she had been stationed at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. I sent her a short email when I got the news about the permits, asking her advice for other places we might go in the area. She sent me a wonderfully long response, overflowing with suggestions for both hikes and food. She suggested the Escalante river area, Brimstone Gulch and Lee's Ferry, at the other end of the Paria river canyon. We could, she said, hike through from the one to the other, but it'd be "a marathon trip." She told us to skip Page. She called Boulder, Utah, "heaven." We were on her tour! On we drove towards Escalante.

The ranger at the interagency visitor's center convinced us not to hike the Escalante river - too muddy in the spring - instead suggesting Coyote Gulch. "Is it as scenic?" She let out a mild chuckle at the question, then gave us directions. We drove Hole in the Rock road until we were bored, until we were sick of it, further yet. We stopped at the Hurricane Wash trailhead and set Samuel in the window. We hiked the wide, sandy wash. Over miles, it closed up into a shallow canyon, occasionally slotting up. It was just the beginning. A stream eventually came in from the north, after which the river meanders started cutting into the canyon walls. The progression was inexorable. Before long there were 500-foot high ceilings of rock hanging over our heads as the river twisted back and forth, down through the sandstone, at once dramatic and serene.

It was much colder at night than we had planned for, much colder than was appropriate for our sleeping bags. I didn't sleep much. It didn't really matter. I couldn't believe what we had seen. We didn't make it down to the river - so what? There was so much - I could hardly comprehend it. It felt, even then, like I had discovered some wonderful secret, like my luck was not just excessive but conspicuous. Walking out the next day, I felt the sort of joy that overflows into grief - that bittersweetness, born of the knowledge that I had missed out on this wonderful thing for all the years of my life, until then. We finished the long slog back out the sandy wash, the sun beating down, the way out so much harder than the way in - was it really more than a trivial slope we were climbing? It felt like it. The temperature swings in the desert, where there was little humidity, were tremendous. There was a note on the car referencing Samuel. They knew he was from Iowa. But that's another story...

We drove out to the end of the road, to Hole in the Rock itself, my car negotiating what ceased to be a road, what was merely a path over the raw, slickrock terrain - severe approaches and departures, nerve-racking obstacles. It was evening when we walked from the parking area up to Hole in the Rock, our first sight of Lake Powell on this trip and my first sight of the lake in five years. It felt, at the time, like half a lifetime, as if I had last left it expecting, perhaps, that I might never see it again. No, I suspect it was having dreamt of it so many times in the intervening years which made this moment powerful. Is there a word in the English language capable of conveying the way a person or a place or a time, can  remain so unresolved, can unconsciously pull on us? Or, the way we can see something we know, and yet, having ourselves changed since then, have that thing conjure something significant of who we then were?

We departed after the sun, finding a roadside campsite not far away. You see, out upon Hole in the Rock road, everything appears flat, until you stop moving. I had never seen, or dreamed, such a landscape as this area suddenly becomes at "human scale", on foot, wandering in any direction. What was this place? All I knew was that the time I had spent walking through the sand, through the scrub, across the rock, had felt right - like I belonged there. In the night, a tremendous wind woke us, suddenly flattening the tent down against us. We lay, unmoving in our sleeping bags, for a long moment before either of us dared speak. Before and after that phantom wind, the silence of the nighttime was complete.

We drove past Calf Creek the next day, up through Boulder for lunch, back to Grand Junction, and in time, back to Denver, back to Omaha. I went back home, back to work, preoccupied, utterly infatuated by what I had seen. It was spring. I seem to remember being happy, in general, that year, and hopeful. I was confused, only, about what I wanted my future to be.

I think the trip inspired me in that regard, shook me out of my stasis. This was before I had gone part-time at work to return to school that fall, before I had gone to school in Europe that winter. I am so glad I did those things, as I would later repeat to myself endlessly, "before it was too late."

People aren't good at remembering who they were "then," whenever "then" may be. It means little, by itself, to say I drank less coffee and more beer. How did I think, and what about? It takes a lot of effort for me to reconstruct, even generally, what must have been going on in my head. I had different worries than now. I was a different person. To a large degree, it has been lost to the past, and I will never really know. And, time will only widen the gulf.

I wish I had done a better job then of recording what I was going through. It's unfortunate, because I have kept a journal or blog for most of my life since I was fifteen. The majority of those things, though, have been lost to the past - the Word document I kept in high school; the webpage I journaled on in the early 2000s, countless half-written stories that attempted to capture some moment, some feeling, some sense of who I then was.

I have gone back to Southern Utah many times, and have had many wonderful experiences there. None of them will equal that trip in 2008, though, when I witnessed the snowstorm at the Grand Canyon, and discovered southern Utah. I was inspired, and my eyes were suddenly opened, and hiking - as a means not only of exploration but a manifestation of freedom - quickly became a passion. I return to those places because I miss them, and though they bring me joy, the feeling of serendipity has gone away, as it is apt to do. Today, a whisper of it returned. I grew immediately quiet, trying to listen, trying to return to that first time.

I try, always, to remain grateful for the experiences I have had.

What I learned from The Future

Below is a post I wrote eighteen months ago and never finished. I'm heartened by my progress on the list in the second paragraph. Of all the things that are hard - really hard - in life, it is worth remembering that most of us have an innate sense of goodness, and that if we can reduce the noise of everything that would distract us from it, its expression is a very simple thing.

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As much as I liked "Me and You and Everyone We Know," I had to admit that Miranda July's following movie, "The Future," was even better, mostly for being a more focused statement, less a collection of moments. Both were great, but something about how she placed the rescued cat, and the fracturing relationship, next to each other in the movie has stayed with me. The movie has a poetic vocabulary, an ability to express thoughts and feelings through surprising, disparate elements. The feeling of regret expressed in the movie, especially, has been with me since, IS any feeling of regret that I experience, one and the same.

Speaking of that, what regrets do I have recently? Only that I have not lived my own beliefs more fully, I think - generosity to the people I love, diligent attention on things I can change for the better, summary avoidance of things I cannot change, a focus on the value of time. But, I do not think of these things as regrets so much as opportunities.

When did I become such an optimist?

What's Most Important

Over the last six months or so, I have been writing a story that is an aesthetic reaction to my first trip to Europe, where I made a close group of friends while going to another school. It was an abrupt - and in that way potent - departure from a life I had long lived in one place by a long-comfortable set of terms.

Writing this story has, more than any previous one, put the tenet of economy front-and-center for me. I feel fortunate to have written enough to appreciate - if not nearly master - why economy is important. I have so many memories from my trip to Europe, so varied and yet all precious to me, and my first inclination was, of course, to throw it all into the pot, optimizing only, perhaps, through reorganization to form a more deliberate narrative.

What's most important in a story is the aesthetic effect, and each thing that is added has the potential to act in a dilutive manner, rather than a constructive one. Most aesthetic effects are most optimally expressed quite simply. The kitchen sink approach, frankly, rarely works at the story level. And so, I had to find the shared aesthetic core of my memories, and build a story that expressed just those most important things.

It took a lot of time. I say I wrote this story over the last six months, but I had been searching (er, more like waiting patiently) for the story for at least a year prior to that. I knew this one was important, and I didn't want to rush it. I feared that if I failed to capture and do justice to the aesthetic core of my memories, that they would likely become so revised by my misaligned focus, that there would be no going back, and something I consider to be of great importance might be lost forever. The next story which I've begun working on is the same - maybe even more potent, maybe even constructed upon more fragile memories. And, I've taken even longer to find my way into it. Yes, it would seem that the higher the stakes, the longer it takes.

Despite patience, experience, and all attempts at discipline, it's still been so, so hard to keep the story set in Europe as short as it should be. I feel a constant compulsion to embellish upon what is there. Indeed, reacting to my own writing is a surprisingly reflexive process wherein just by reading my own words I often come to see not only the story, but sometimes the source material (my memories) in a totally new light. And, what's been said so often about characters is true - good characters take on a life of their own, because by knowing human behavior, the patterns we first give to our characters come to dictate their subsequent thoughts and actions.

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Something remarkable happened to me a couple days ago: I had a dream about a character from my story. Upon reflection the next day, I was reminded of the cornerstone Jungian inquiry in dream analysis: for what is the dream compensating? Remarkably, the dream told me that I was ignoring one side of that character's personality, which must certainly be there. Just as dreams regarding my waking reality often prove to be, it was indisputable that this dream about a character I had only imagined was, nevertheless, correct. I revised the story to expose this other side of the character's personality, and when I later reread it, there was no question that a problem had been solved that I had not consciously realized even existed.

There was a period of time, too, when I was writing the end of the story, when I found myself wishing I could call my character on the phone. This, I believe, was also a subconscious, compensatory function. See, there is a point in the story when the narrator should have called this character - though upon writing it, I did not even consciously conceive of the possibility - the omission was implicit. It was only when I reflected upon my wish to call them that I saw what was right there on the page - that I had, essentially, written him with that blind spot because I, myself, possessed that blind spot.

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There are few things in my life that give me the amount and variety of joys that writing gives me. I am so grateful to have found it - that I had the crazy sense to try, and that I now have the memories I do of all that it has given me.

Enough

Yesterday while expeditiously mowing the yard and no doubt thinking about my investment portfolio allocation I struck and killed a baby rabbit. There was that unmistakeable sound of trouble from under the mower deck, and when I pushed it aside to investigate I immediately spotted the soft grayish form lodged in a rut in the grass, streaked with red, pulsing with desperate, deep breaths. For all the tragedy of killing any living thing that can feel, the worse horror was to see it still alive, heaving, suffering. Such moments as what occurred inside me then transcend my capacity to express. My first, terrified compulsion was to finish the job, that no matter the difficulty I owed it to that poor creature to put it out of its misery. To kill was terrible, but to torture it, by any combination of action or inaction, would surely always stay with me. But no, I couldn't do it. I ran away like a child, which is not to denigrate my capacity to think so much as to describe the baseness of what must have happened inside of me to trigger flight.

There are two things I need to learn from this experience.

First, I should have been more mindful, and I don't just mean that I should have seen a rabbit hiding beneath the deep grass (although I probably should have). The rabbit (I am almost certain it was the same one) had earlier sprung from a bush as I mowed around it, but it had waited until the very last moment to do so - I had pushed the mower up against the trunk of the bush when the rabbit darted away, after already having mowed several strips in closer and closer proximity. I am not an authority on the behavior of rabbits, nor any animals, but I could see that it was young, could see his little body and short back legs and short ears carried close together along his back as he bounded, urgently though not quickly, down the slope towards other bushes, where I lazily assumed he would seek shelter. But I should have gathered that he was predisposed to stay still much longer than animals, in general, in proximity to the awful racket of the mower. After all, I had seen birds and mammals and reptiles alike pursue a wide berth a hundred times. But this one hadn't. If I would have noticed what was going on around me, the rabbit might still be alive.

Second, what am I supposed to do now about the dread, the regret, and the guilt that I feel? I think I now know the answer to this one, too, although it is less tangible, more subjective, more philosophical. I was reminded yesterday of the saying, "the best revenge is to live a good life." I ended up thinking a lot about what that meant, and why that was, and I became convinced that, even if it is true, it captures only one narrow aspect of a larger, and more important truth. After all, who gives a shit about revenge? (And no, my question obviously has nothing to do with rabbits.)

Seen as a problem dealing with tangential harm caused by mowing, the best I can hope to do is to avoid repeating the same occurrence in the future. But, that will not bring the rabbit back to life. What future actions can I change that may, in some way, offset the harm I have inadvertently done? I think the answer, it turns out, is all of them. All of my actions.

I create my legacy one action at a time, and each one changes the world in ways small or large, seen or unseen. And although it is difficult to disentangle the virtue of any one action, it does exist. It just takes observation and humility and patience to see it. It takes wisdom to distinguish good from bad. The simplest way to be good to the world is to act well. The simplest way to be better is to act better. The best way to honor all that is good in the world is, simply enough, to live a good life, one action at a time.

Though saying so can be interpreted as trite, even shallow, it is anything but. The words, typed and displayed on a screen, must work very hard to convey the earnestness and simplicity of the truth. It is certainly easier to type than it will be to do. I will spend the rest of my life attempting to do it, for the rabbit, but also for myself, and the people I love, and the good that is possible in the world. There is nothing trite about believing in the ability to do good, and to pursue it doggedly. I hope that is enough.

Entropy of Thought (er somethin)

I am experiencing a prolonged entropy of thought, er, somethin - my notions are growing further apart, harder to arrange into reasonable stories, or explanations, or whatever it is that notions are supposed to become. It is clear to me that my measurable writing output is declining, even as the thoughts that inspire me come more frequently. Indeed, sometimes they seem constant. All indications suggest that I will never catch up.

They come more frequently, and yet they are more distant than ever from words, and from any practice of expression of which I am capable. It is as if any practice in translating my inner language onto the metaphorical page is also strengthening my fluency in the inner language.

Writers need focus, I have heard. Maybe this is why?

I have more desire than ever to share my thoughts, and my writing, and this blog and Fifty Mile Point are my outlets - given my pathetic output, there clearly exists a disconnect. I will keep trying. And yet, I do have another outlet that has not expressed itself yet.

I am trying to organize some subset of what I have written - the subset that I suspect could be coherent (and maybe even resonant) to other human beings - into a collection of short stories. I feel I have a semblance of focus on this goal, even though all that really amounts to is finishing decent stories and deferring or forgetting the rest. I do not pretend that I am a good writer - the list of things I need to improve is a very long list - but I have something to say, and find it possible that others would read it and find something they can connect with.

Shitty writing likely detracts from any connection a story is capable of forging, but I want to try anyway. I am not so much a perfectionist as a simpleton, capable of ignoring some pieces of the puzzle.

I think it will be fun to see what year I actually finish it. Forced to guess, I would say 2017, although I have to admit now that the key variable aside from focus is drive:
1) How much time will I spend writing? (drive)
2) How well will I use that time to finish the collection? (focus)

Still, it would be depressing to muse on what might be a reasonable confidence interval.

What Everybody Needs

"When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word? Everybody needs to be understood.

And out of that comes every form of love. If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears — disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you’re talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you’ve got to talk about love… And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It’s almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it’s really coming out of our deepest physiological nature."

- Sherwin Nuland, from "The Biology of the Spirit" (found via Brainpickings)