On Clara Benin’s “Wrestle” (demo version)

I often find myself stopping for things that take me elsewhere. It could be the sight of a plane taking off from a nearby airport that will remind me of a specific childhood memory — when I used to play outside of our house and wave to the airplanes passing so high overhead thinking my father is boarded in one of them—, a name of an author that reminds me of an old love, a word, an object, a particular 7-Eleven store, and among other things that take me out of the event of my being. Most of the time, I must take a moment to catch my breath before realizing what is happening. However, the moment I had of elsewhere had already passed after I caught my breath.

I often space out, as if I believe that I am supposed to be somewhere else. But I always counter it with the thought that I am just used to the fast-paced motion of life. Days come when I feel like I woke up and I’m suddenly 22 and am currently disposed to wake up before everyone else to go to a day job. Sometimes, I hear static, but most of the time, I feel the static. As if changing habits is the same as quitting an addiction. You can feel a ghost of the past habit clinging to your body like a child tugging at the hems of your shirt exclaiming, “I wanna play!” over and over until it becomes background noise. It will beg you to entertain it. Even to the point of its own tantrum, when it resembles a wound in your mouth that you cannot stop tonguing. Eventually, you will get used to it and despondency will be your automatic response. Before you know it, you have raised a neglected child out of self-preservation.

I am listening to Clara Benin’s Wrestle over and over for the past few hours. (I left it on loop while writing the first draft of this entry.) The overdub overwhelmed me with vague memories. There are some that I have trouble remembering but can somehow see the scene in my head like a late afternoon. Just the time before the day begins to approach dusk when the rays of sunlight slant elegantly as if with the tension of gravity. I was riding a public van and I start to notice the rays of the sun from the side mirror on the driver’s side. Curious, I directly set my sight to it using my own eyes, panning my head to my left side, but I saw no line of light tracing the sun’s glow. Once again, I return to look at the side mirror. As the van accelerates, trees filter out sunshine the way water spills from the spaces between the fingers of an open palm. It was a moment of wakefulness as I continue to look at the side mirror and witnessed the slanting rays wash over the streets we just passed through like a nostalgic effort of looking back to the past. The rays are invisible but in their own reflection.

Except that it never happened. The previous reflection was all based on a fiction that was instigated by a song in its raw version. In this kind of moment when I am thrown from my own state of being into another, whenever I am being taken to elsewhere is what I always consider contact with true art. As if there are tiny pieces of divine fragments that we catch in serendipity.

The overdubbing of Clara’s voice creates the third sound in music. It is the accidental product — an oscillating echo between two sources of two identical sounds — , which is the root of harmony, creating a third but unified speaking voice, which sounds clearer but less stable due to its oscillation between two different but distinctly similar tones. However, the basis of such instability is what creates beauty in its sound. It is the reticent tone that glosses over the difference and sum of two tones. It is the blur of movement from point A to point B.

Upon hearing Clara’s voice, I sway, I split into two, only to find myself looking at me as I hear her sing in the background, “I am where I’m supposed to be” until it shifts to “I am who I’m supposed to be” as if in the span of those utterances, I am somewhere in between those phrases, reaching for both ends under a waterfall of sunlight in the midst of an island made up of trees.

The lyric video’s visuals: a train ride, connecting two points of two train stations, devoid of any form of human bodies. The lyrical narrative: starting from a dream (I had a dream we were in Newtown), into a threshold (Caught in collision. Disillusioned by time./ It was a portal to a new life.) and ending in wakefulness (I woke up I was in Redfern). The chorus is sung through a tunnel, through a passage that remains secret from the public eye. Its lyrics carry honesty in secret, as if the depths of solitude, whose words address the self, its utterance between self-assurance and personal mantra: I am who I’m supposed to be.

Rid me of this predictable body 
Teasing my eyes to settle for what I see

On Neutral Milk Hotel’s lyricism about merging of two bodies

A few weeks ago, I started to cut my own hair and it was one of the most liberating feelings in the world. As I desired, I grab a lock of hair and absentmindedly cut it with scissors. Slowly, and one by one as if with every hair removed from my head comes a certain clarity of thought, of knowingness, that I feel myself, sculpting myself out of things I feel I don’t need, molding myself according to the rhythm of my gaze, and the natural trembling of my hands, waltzing across different continents of hairs. I felt better knowing my hair stands in different lengths and waves, as if, I begin to be intimate with the little parts of myself that I often overlooked. They suddenly opened with a familiar tone of knowing, familiarizing myself to a thousand tiny parts on my head, with layers I had created on my skull, reshaping my mind, my headspace.

I started listening to Neutral Milk Hotel once again. And with a similar rush of sensibilities, Jeff Mangum’s voice washed over my body in the form of baptism. The overdub in The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1 was a blessing for the ears in a bittersweet undertone:

And this is the room one afternoon I knew I could love you
And from above you how I sank into your soul
Into that secret place where no one dares to go

All of these overarching themes of merging, often call out for the cry for love — which is not out of lust nor necessity but the inevitability of its own occurrence. Perhaps, premediated by chance such as the Two-Headed Boy, born as a consequence which is a situation that furthers freedom; that which is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit or thrownness. That we find ourselves conscious in the midst of existence. We are thrown into the world such that it just is and we are trapped in a decaying body that restricts the overall freedom of movement.

Brother, see we are one in the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place, make your smile sweet to see
Don't you take this away, I'm still wanting my face on your cheek

Two consciousness in one body which then concerns of an other/ed consciousness outside of themselves that requires further involvement in this game we call intimacy. A yearning for an inter-subjective experience that is once again, beyond one’s own control that spurs the self (despite its own contradictions and multiplicities within itself) from reaching what is beyond its own body.

But Mangum speaks of clarity in obscurity upon such that words, denied of directness were able to articulate the visceral without the petty excuse of surrealist intentions to obfuscate in meaning. The lyrics do not shroud everything in obscurity to envelop it in some sort of mysterious fashion of sublimity. Rather, it amplifies it, as if wounding the flesh, when the blood trickles down the skin, a wounding caused by attempts to attempt the impossible. Blood then, in this case of art appreciation is a ritual sacrifice for the experience of the sublime. One has to mutilate the self in order to achieve the transcendent beauty of Lacan’s objet petit a.

“Follow me through a city of frost covered angels/ I swear I have nothing to prove/ I just want to dance in your tangles/ To give me some reason to move/ But to take on the world at all angles/ Requires a strength I can’t use/ So I’ll meet you up high in your anger/ Of all that is hoping and waiting for you”

This takes me back to the idea of merging. It was the very thing that inspired me to write — that idea of union, which what I have always articulated as the desire for love; that blurring of lines between two borders, a certain type of transparency, to be naked behind the gaze of the other. I sacrifice myself only to open my body that renders me vulnerable to you, and to you only that in this openness, I am readying myself to be filled by your being. That is every time I surrender myself to the object of my desire, I am overblown by the acceptance of my role in this. That I am responsible for all of the failure of this union, of everything that will render it impossible. And I will carry all of my scars with every attempt to fulfill them. Perhaps, this is always asking for too much but nothing is too much if it’s pure devotion.

A tangent on Spinoza

This ritualistic nature of everything I see in art, especially in music is what keeps me from turning away from it. We used to chant songs to the gods to appease them when we believed that they were higher than our kings. Now we believe in neither and I must carry on that primitive idea that is part of the core center of being human: to recognize myself as a part of something bigger than myself and surrender myself to it. Spinoza was right when he wrote in the third part of the Ethics concerning The Affect:

IIIP10: An idea that excludes the existence of our body cannot be in our mind, but is contrary to it.

What destroys us is often outside of us which is why this voluntary submission into itself becomes a slow suicide while understanding the very nature of the very cause of our own death — the particular death that is we inflict on ourselves. Knowing death itself in the process of dying since it is outside of us, when we come to know the Other, it is in death that we are exposed to it.

I come into merging with death, not out of duty but out of love, with every day to affirm my intimacy with it such that in dying, I will know every inch of my being by desire, by faith with a resolute ambition of transcendence.