Tag Archives: The Year of Magical Thinking

Finding an Antidote for Poisoned Music

Posted on by
Reply

The shitty (tragic?) parts of my life have tended to poison things that I love, including favorite music. Low, a band I once saw in concert every year, has been off my playlist ever since Mimi Parker, a member of the duo, died suddenly of cancer. It’s been three years now. As much as I miss the music, I can’t listen. Not yet.

Alan and Mimi play Low music in Fargo (2010)

A similar grief hit when my friend Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, died although I was more prepared for his death, given his prognosis. It wasn’t grief as much as mourning, as Joan Didion differentiated in The Year of Magical Thinking. I attended one of his final concerts, and then he died. As much as I miss him, his music provides comfort.

Gord singing and contorting at Fort Henry in the ’90s

The poisoning is more intense when it comes on a personal level. I very much enjoyed Modest Mouse until a student I associated the music with committed suicide. And then, as they sing on Polar Opposites, I’m trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.

I’ve had a couple of relationships turn terribly sour and drag the joy of the music with them. The death of an ex made The Red Hot Chili Peppers feel dark and awful, while Sufjan Stevens, once a great passion, was dragged into a quagmire of triggering memories. I’m working on getting his music back into my head.

Sufjan plays Christmas Unicorn at The Bowery Ballroom

In the end, this self-cleaning of music, loving it once and then not, allowing it to creep back in, knowing it again, almost feels like wisdom, or at least the closest I will ever get to a thing like that.

Phil plays one of his last shows at The Capital Theatre

Ice Friday: Joan Didion Confronts Mortality

Posted on by

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking faces the harrowing absence of death with systematically beautiful language.

On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to understand that death was irreversible. I had authorized the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation. I had seen the ashes placed in the wall and the marble plate replaced and the service held. I had done it. I had acknowledged that my husband was dead. P1000848I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive.Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid. I happened to meet a prominent academic theologian who spoke of ritual itself as a form of faith. My reaction was unexpressed but negative, vehement, excessive even in me.

Later I realized that my immediate thought had been that I did the ritual. I did it all. And it still didn’t bring him back. Bringing him back had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. P1000829By late summer, I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.

“Half a Life” (Darin Strauss)

Posted on by

Darin Strauss’ Half a Life is an intensely personal experience. DarinStrauss-590x392The raw and relentless prose made me turn within and question who I am. Not that I have had the same experience as Strauss – who accidentally ran over a girl when he was a teenager – but that I have moments in my life that make me shudder, make me turn back and wonder who that was that went through that. Where is that person in the me that is now?cigarNo one who encountered me in classrooms, at a frat party, the campus center, noticed the fierce inner battles I’d fought to make the different Darins into a Darin that friends could recognize.

The rawness of his prose is reminiscent of Joan Didion’s devastating The Year of Magical Thinking.

Quintana, John Donne and Joan Didion

Quintana, John Dunne and Joan Didion

It is especially clear in the delicate descriptions of every moment, every thought, always returning to the same thing, someone who is gone.

I remember the first time after the accident my name was called in the class, the feel of pause and hush in the room, like deer scenting something strange. Everyone’s ears and tails flicked. 

Strauss’ story is a compelling narrative, a personal journey that won’t leave you alone, that prods your memories and makes you think. IMAG2416Relationships are physics. Time transforms  things – it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you’ve put up around your old personality.