Notebook

Last day on the island of Korpo. Spent a remarkable evening with some of the people who live in the archipelago, and our conversations left me thinking about how I would like to live. I admired the camaraderie that pulls the island’s residents together regardless of profession, age, or interest. They know the name of every cashier, teacher, bus driver, and chef in town. These spaces feel increasingly rare in today’s cities, where we’re often siloed into career-oriented clusters by the demands of predatory capitalism.

It seems perverse that a deeper sense of community would come from living someplace remote rather than among the crowds of the city. “When you choose to live someplace isolated, you’re choosing solitude,” said an artist who moved to the island a few years ago. “When you feel lonely in the city, it’s not by choice.” For a moment, I wanted to stay on this beautiful little island where simply being present mattered to others. New York does not care if you’re there.

After the party, I walked to the end of the ferry dock and wondered what choices I would make in this new decade. The Baltic Sea was quiet, the stars were like headlights, and I craved the sound of traffic and crowds.

This season is shaped by muted Bergman films projected on the wall in the hour of the wolf. I can’t shake the first six minutes of The Silence: a bored woman lounges and sweats in a stuffy train car. Another woman coughs and moans, suffering a mysterious illness. A boy watches a violent world of military tanks, harsh sunlight, and factories speed past the window. The scene is silent except for breathing and the hum of the rails, and the whole thing feels like a blurred childhood memory.

Or the scene in Persona when an actress retreats from society as a response to the violence of the evening news and a world she no longer understands. “But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie,” she says. “You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside.”

I wonder if living on this remote island so far from home is a way of retreating from the world or better understanding it.

Ingmar Bergman: The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (1968).

White caps on the Baltic today, and the wind was like radio static in the trees. I came across moments in the forest that felt ceremonial, the ancient rites of geology operating at scales beyond my comprehension. The scene reminded me of New York City’s canyons of skyscrapers, brownstones, and steeples. Perhaps the city can be as sublime as nature. Scale. Creation.

Walking along a narrow road through the woods, a figure appeared in the distance. He was a man about my size and dressed in a black coat, black pants, black boots, and a cap. Just like me. We slowly walked towards one another, and for one mad moment, I was convinced I was walking towards myself, that I’d slipped into some terrible fable. This is the hallucinatory effect the forest has on me. As we drew closer to each other, I saw he was an elderly man with a warm smile. We nodded hello and continued our separate journeys.

We took a ship through the Finnish archipelago towards the small island of Utö in the Baltic Sea. The waves lulled me to sleep, and I woke up in tears from a vivid dream about hugging my dad. I’d found him standing in an empty cabin, telling me I could always find him there. It’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing some kind of visitation.

The ship arrived at a long concrete dock, and we stepped onto the island with the other passengers: a mother and two toddlers, an elderly couple, and several stern middle-aged men with state-of-the-art cameras and binoculars. No matter where you go, there are always middle-aged men taking things too seriously. Within moments, everyone disappeared into the narrow paths between a cluster of red clapboard houses. Suddenly, we were alone in a village without cars, people, or sound aside from the January wind and waves. The effect was like stepping into the terrain of a Camus novel, and I stared at the empty cabins along the shore, half wondering if I was still dreaming about my father.

Utö’s colossal stone lighthouse has been recording marine weather observations since 1881. There’s something profoundly reassuring about the nautical language of barometric pressure, trade winds, and shipping lanes. Why is that? Perhaps it’s the combination of physical orientation coupled with atmospheric change.

I went to a 700-year-old church on Sunday morning and the service was purely tonal because I don’t understand Finnish. It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard. Bowing my head, I remembered a line from the poet Anne Carson: “I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.” Perhaps this is enough. That, and the grandeur of a pipe organ reverberating across a vaulted stone ceiling while candles flicker in the gloom.

An artist led us across boulders covered with electric green moss and worried about the lack of snow this season, something she hadn’t seen after living on this island for thirty years. “Usually we have some snow in November, December, and certainly January.” In Finland, they call it a black winter when it doesn’t snow. Snow has psychological importance here: it reflects the light and makes the long hours of Nordic darkness less oppressive. Instead, there is only rain and mist. The town’s priest also apologized for the warm weather. “This new climate is beyond me,” he said.

Rafael Anton Irisarri – Coastal Trapped Disturbance

From Solastalgia | Room 40, 2019 | Bandcamp

Symphonic ambience that sounds like an elegy for snow fields and decaying glaciers. This album introduced me to the defining word for this new decade: solastalgia, the mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

In the Aeneid, the hero contemplates the tragedy of war. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: There are tears for things and mortal thoughts touch the mind. In the centuries that followed, the phrase lacrimae rerum escaped the lines of Virgil’s poem and took on a life of its own. It appears in sermons, symphonies, and epitaphs, and it has been etched into countless memorials and tombstones. The exact meaning of lacrimae rerum continues to inspire debate among linguists and classicists, for sometimes it is translated as “tears for things,” other times as “tears of things.” Although it’s only a matter of a single letter, the distinction between for and of is crucial—and instructive.

Weeping for something implies that each of us privately mourns the loss of the things we cherish—a person, a relationship, a dream—and that we grieve alone. The tears of things, however, suggests the world weeps with us. Are we alone in our heads with our personal sorrows, or is melancholia as pervasive as sunlight or air?

The tears of things. If I squint at this phrase a certain way, I catch a glimpse of how I might better relate to grief. Maybe the universe is sympathetic, after all. Perhaps the cosmos is aware of the absurdity of our flickering lives. Seen in this light, the devastation I felt after losing my parents is no longer an aberration, but an intrinsic element of the world, as necessary as gravity or air. There is powerful alchemy in this simple thought, even if it is fleeting. Lacrimae rerum reminds me that I am surrounded by compassion while I mourn. This may be a sentimental way of thinking that relies on the romantic notion that the wind, rain, and clouds can somehow mirror my state of mind, but it makes me feel less alone. This can be enough to carry someone through the dark forest of grief. And it might become an organizing principle as the world continues to heat up and unwind.

Reverberated Crying

From American Decay | 2015

Original song performed by Roy Orbison in 1962. This track appears on American Decay, a collection of loops and reverberations that I recorded between 2009 and 2014.

Further reading: the Aeneid; lacrimae rerum; the pathetic fallacy.

Traces of frost in the moss. Ice on the rocks. Will it finally snow? There has been no snow yet in the Finnish archipelago, which is unusual even though it’s likely the new normal. Walking through the forest, I try to forget my dumb tics and habits. I want to commune with nature but I do not know how. Some lizard-brained part of me wants to pull out my telephone and look for new headlines, new information.

Strange being someplace so remote while the familiar static of American dysfunction continues to wallpaper my day, thanks to my compulsion to check the news, refresh my feeds, and tune in to today’s two-minute hate. I’ve spent the best years of my life in thrall to the idiot logic of the internet. A sobering thought. At some point while I wasn’t paying attention, my screen became the real world. Online eclipsed offline. The internet tints every thought like a window left open in the back of the mind. Perhaps the physical world exists solely to support our digital habits now that most of us move through space either staring into screens or thinking about our virtual personas and obligations. Maybe deep down, we just want to be alone with our phones.

Social media has pushed everything to extremes, a binary choice of like or don’t like, follow or unfollow, send or delete. The way we speak about technology itself mirrors the raw logic of the addict: use or don’t use. Nobody says, “I’ll only look at Twitter on weekends.” Sometimes it feels like an ultimatum: Embrace the pixellated noise of the future without complaint or grieve for the textures of the past. And I’m stuck in the familiar stage of addiction where I know it’s not good for me, yet I do it anyway. I do my best to stare at a tree for a few minutes before returning to the ferry house to check my email.

Various Artists – Erosion 2

Decay Product | Chain Reaction, 1997 | Hardwax

Elegant reverberations from the days when techno was served in metal cases by anonymous producers with intentionally obtuse monikers such as Various Artists.

Woke from a dream in which I discovered my consciousness was powered by someone else forced to run on a treadmill. Low sun and a warm wind today. Still no snow. Massive freighters in the Baltic drift towards Russia. A man from Spain who runs the local newspaper visited our studio for an interview. He talked about the mental hygiene of living on an island, how nature helps him think better. “Because each day we want to turn on the news and get intoxicated by dramas and conflict,” he said. Intoxicated is such a good word for describing the effect of transforming the inherent messiness of democracy into manufactured dramas of us versus them.

For years I’ve nursed elaborate fantasies of living in a remote cabin or better yet a double-wide in the Mojave desert. But would isolation make me more sensible? Perhaps someday it will. After two weeks on this island, however, I’m beginning to crave the neon and heat of a city to energize my thinking—even if it will quickly leave me wanting the sobriety of silence and sky.

Walking along the empty road of a remote island in the Baltic Sea, I remember driving down Interstate 75 twenty years ago with the Detroit skyline on my left while a cassette tape filled the car with drums. I remember believing the world would make sense when I grew older. But it never did and it probably won’t. This is a painful lesson, one that finds each of us in its own way. For me, it arrived in hospital corridors, envelopes with death certificates, and an attic filled with my parents’ belongings. There is no figuring out the logic of the world.

These days I notice another childlike conviction, one that is stubbornly waiting for things to go back to normal. Although my rational mind knows otherwise, part of me wants to believe these strange days are a blip, that someday I will return to a life when I wasn’t mortified by my government or worrying about the strange weather or trying to fight the idiotic craving to stare into my telephone.

“We are choked with news and starved of history,” said the historian Will Durant in 1926. The poet Ovid mourned the loss of the days when humankind was “good and true,” fearing that “every kind of wickedness” marked his times. He wrote this in the year 8. There is no lost golden age.

Nostalgia might be another form of grief, which requires working our way towards acceptance and, if we’re lucky, a little bit of grace. I’m doing my best to accept that things will never return to “normal”, that there was never any such thing. The world is speeding up. The weather is changing. Life is only going to get weirder, coarser, and more unstable. This is unsettling, but it could also be liberating.

Basic Channel – Inversion

Inversion/Presence | Basic Channel, 1994 | Spotify | More information

Twenty-five years later, Basic Channel’s Inversion remains the most melancholy machine music I’ve ever heard. This is the sound of industrial decay twinned with a very human longing for faith. A beautiful piece of winterized nostalgia for your dashboard.

Calm water on the Baltic Sea and a low January sun at noon. For a moment I can feel the warmth on my cheek. She pulled an all-nighter last night because time does not exist here. Darkness falls before you get used to the light. If you listen closely, you can hear the thrum of the ferry engine in the walls. More news from America, none of it good. Drone strikes, tantrums, and hijacked democracy.

Meanwhile, we began organizing the three thousand responses we received from our Light the Barricades project, preparing them for a book. Here’s a small sample of these anonymous handwritten dispatches, each one a lone voice joining a chorus: I’m tired of having to be resilient. I don’t like the wall blocking Mexico because I can’t see my cousin. I feel guilty for surviving. I don’t know if I belong. I’m not setting a good example for my daughter. I keep looking for healing in the place that broke me. Sometimes I wonder what the effect will be in the long run, bearing witness to so much handwritten pain. “First let this be consolation,” she says. “Then let it be courage.” I think about the meditative practice of tonglen, of breathing in the anger and suffering of others and exhaling kindness. Perhaps, in some small way, this project can become something like that.

Leyland Kirby – Consolation

We, so tired of all the darkness in our lives | More

Here comes a heartbeat drum, thumping in the distance like a half-remembered b-side by The Ronettes or The Crystals, a vintage rhythm slowly falling to pieces while plaintive strings rise. Like a heavily sedated love song from the hit parade of a more dignified age, Leyland Kirby’s We, so tired of all the darkness in our lives is a reassuring soundtrack for these undignified times. It’s a reminder that music can harmonize with—and perhaps even momentarily sooth—the crazy thoughts we’re forced to carry these days, if only for a moment or two.