sadreads #14: the true thing

Hello! I have a few things to tell you about. The first is that I have some pieces out since I last sent this letter — one is about Finnish autofiction writer Pirkko Saisio’s new book, The Red Book of Farewells (out at LA Review of Books). This is a queer book about the awakening of an artist, and unlike anything else I’ve ever read in form and voice. The second is about Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room (in Romper). Her book is a series of memoiristic essays about caregiving, and is, in the Zambreno way, as much about being a working artist as it is about the tiny things we put up with day to day as we struggle to apply shoes to a toddler while also nursing a baby. Both books also concern motherhood because I guess that’s my shit now.

But look! Here’s a book about not motherhood! I have been trying to figure out a way to write about Geoff Rickly's Someone Who Isn’t Me since I finished it a couple of weeks ago. For some reason that has nothing to do with the book, I first went in the direction of talking about Elvis and AI, and I wrote a long thing about that which you should not ask me about because it was not good. But here, nevertheless, is the link to an Elvis video I’ve been obsessed with — I know I’m not alone, since it’s got 38 million views.

I guess what I wanted to write about with that failure of a draft was authenticity. What I love in music, what I listen for (and what I always secretly think I could do even though musically I am not very talented; one of the great tragedies of my life) — the thing I love is accessing, through the artist, the material that travels through the person via the taproot that they’ve sent down into the true thing.

Elvis had the talent and the taproot. Even in his corrupted state, sweating and talking nonsense and requiring multiple Coke cups on top of his piano, he was a luminous, virtuosic talent; his voice was downright operatic, and he let it lead, and you could see in the video how much he gave. But not everyone has the taproot, even if they have the talent. They can sing or play beautifully, soulfully even, and nothing in me moves upon hearing them. Conversely, I also do not think talent is a requirement to access the truth. What’s necessary is a kind of abandonment that becomes like an elevator shaft down into the water deposits, dark and cold, inside the bedrock of existence. To touch something elemental, the source of truth, the oblivion, the black hole. This is harder and more destructive than the wielding of pure skill. Based on the frequency with which artists struggle with various imbalances and dependencies, it often involves surrender of the self in painful, annihilating ways.

A bunch of years ago I gave myself an exercise: listen to only one album for a week straight. Play it as the soundtrack to everything. I did this twice, and one of these listening sessions resulted in a poem cycle about Lana Del Rey songs; those are still up here. The other resulted in nothing, but I still think about it a lot. I’d read about a list of “unlistenable” albums and found Kollaps by Einstürzende Neubauten on there, and I’d listened to Neubauten before in my goth teens, so of course I made it a point to find their supposedly inaccessible album and listen. (Side note: haha, an unlistenable album is now on Spotify. Oh well, this was about a decade ago, back in the old days when I had to find a rip of so-so quality on Youtube.)

Anyway, as I found out in my week-long immersion, Kollaps is far from unlistenable. Sure it’s proto-industrial, guys-hitting-the-underside-of-bridges kind of stuff; there’s lots of yelling and banging, and album contributors are credited with “noises.” But it also achieves moments of weird tenderness. The beginning of the album is aggressive, lots of cacophony. But by the middle, the album has organized; the title track is eight minutes of heartbeat-like percussion, over which a guitar chugs and a twenty-two-year-old Blixa Bargeld shouts lyrics about how we don’t have much time. I don’t speak German but I weirdly feel this song? I want to sing along whenever I hear it. I did, in fact, once sing along, when I was driving a rental car across Iowa by myself, and it was awesome. The sky was so wide, the horizon so flat, that it felt like I had 360 vision, and I sped up terribly far beyond the speed limit whenever I stopped actively monitoring how fast I was going.

The track comes nearer to a close, and Blixa yells the word “bitter” a bunch of times, and then the collapsing ends and we move to the album’s shortest, prettiest track, “Sehnsucht,” which as I understand it as a word translates to a kind of longing. We are dropped into some piano chords, and then these words, roughly translated: “Longing is the only energy.” Unlistenable, my butt — this is practically kd lang singing “Constant craving has always been”. I always wished “Constant Craving” was produced in a way that was a touch grittier and less earnest, because it’s so intense — that is truly one of my favorite lyrical lines of all time, pulled out of context. Maybe what I wanted was “Sehnsucht” all along.

Anyway. So all of this — music, annihilation, longing, corruption — is an on-ramp. I just finished Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me, out now from Chelsea Hodson’s Rose Books, and wanted to write a little bit about it. It’s a psychedelic Dante’s-Inferno of a novel about a guy also named Geoff Rickly who finds himself mired in the middle of a stubborn heroin habit (is any heroin habit not stubborn?) in north Brooklyn. The first section of the book is very present tense as he lets all the good things around him wither and waste away. He sleeps at work. He cops in C-Town. He gets high under the most dismal of circumstances in the Crif Dogs bathroom. He lies and lies to his angelic girlfriend. But then he has a chance to do something drastic and undertake an experimental drug therapy in a Mexican rehab clinic to get himself through the worst of the worst. He takes the lifeline, and then there’s a whole section of the book that is essentially a series of trip vignettes but also dream homes that spiral further into Geoff’s consciousness. This sounds like it would be excruciating, but please blame my shit description for that impression. Describing an experience with a drug is generally like a bad mixture of describing a dream and talking about a piece of art you saw. But this book is not that. The voice is so consistent and the architecture so thought out, even when we are leaving earth and going deep into the narrator’s glitching brain — there is an arc, and it’s a road trip of sorts, and you have to trust the narrator to follow it. It’s absolutely hypnotic; I loved it.

And as it so happens, the narrator of the book — a frontman of an emo band — is very acquainted with longing and the kind of abandonment there is to be found in music. The opening:

“No one ever hears music past the first time. Everything after is just a high-fidelity echo, fading already, even in the midst of our own incarnations. Then we’re born and we walk around for a little while, humming, whistling, tapping our feet, trying to find the beat, the note, the sound. Anything to get us back to the source, just one more time, before we start the slow, certain process of dying to ourselves, life shrinking little by little, the echo growing fainter and further, until one day it falls silent. If only we could hear that song one more time.”

What was the first music you ever heard? Really heard. I don’t even remember mine, which gives me a sense of loss now that I think about it. But this passage, and the pages that follow describes what I think of as the foundation of the search for the true thing. The book is about self-destruction and the kind of illumination that is required in order to get past it. It’s also about coming to terms with a kind of longing that is inherent in the self, a longing that has no resolution. But that doesn’t change that the book itself is an upward trajectory: there is a lot of love in it, and there is an other side.

What’s the best thing you read lately? What’s next on your book pile? I’m finally going to finish Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and then I will get into some poetry. That is, when I’m not “reading” Baby Faces to my son.