Relationships, Community, and their Shadows
Thanksgiving week...
I don’t really know what to say for this week. It started out a bit frantic with the first signs of functionality in the studio. I had no running water or kiln-power, but the wheels would turn and the lights were on so I started throwing a couple things. Throwing is drug-like in its ability to quiet the mind. This can be great, but that quieting can also be an escape from practicalities. It was a damp beginning of the week, so the mug bodies that I made didn’t dry out enough to try putting handles on them Tuesday. I wrapped them up as well as I could and left Tuesday night to join my family at the beach for the holiday. Tomorrow I’ll see if there’s anything to salvage from them.
I’m a real fan of audio-books. I was read to a lot as a kid and I still find it incredibly relaxing to have a story told to me. The drive down to the beach Tuesday night came after a day of waiting for the shop sink to be delivered so I could leave it for the plumbers to install Wednesday morning. I spent the day fixing up the apartment and studio. On the way down to the beach I listened to several hours of Infinite Jest. I had tried listening to it in the studio a year or two ago and hadn’t been able to get comfortable with the claustrophobic intensity of the first two sections, which involved a non-verbal genius tennis player’s trial with school administrators to defend his right to a college scholarship, and the obsessive and panicked preparations for a weekend-long marajuana binge. Driving through the night in intermittent downpours, with a carousel of studio thoughts rotating around in my head, I felt ready to return to it.
About halfway through the trip I got an email from my friend Aidan responding to an email I had sent him about my interest in a particular aesthetic of vocaloid music in which “virtuosic” elements of singing, like, really high notes, or very fast speech tend to have a melancholic feel to them. Where in human performance there’s often a feeling of triumph, transcendence, excitement to doing something really virtuosic, in at least some vocaloid music (where a voice-like synthesizer is doing the singing), these are the most vulnerable, tragic/melancholic moments. And this feels like it comes partly from the invulnerability of the vocaloid itself. It doesn’t struggle to sing high, fast, complicated things. And in this lack of ability to struggle, it reveals its inhumanity. But, at least in some of this music, that reveal doesn’t read as cold, harsh and mechanical, but actually vulnerable and tragic. I’m not really big on lyrics or analyzing lyrics in music but Aidan pointed out that Po-uta’s Humansongs really characterizes a relationship between a vocaloid and a human in a way that gives words to this feeling and explains its causes a bit.
Here is one of the songs I've been particularly obsessed with recently. I haven't yet looked at the lyrics but I started seeing them when finding this youtube version of the song and I think I'll have to look into it more closely.
I’m sure Aidan has some more positive reads on these things, but I’ve been thinking about the position of the vocaloid as something that we make to make sense of and inhabit a sense of personal isolation from humanity. Like, “I feel cut off from the stream of human emotion or collectivity or whatever, so here are my feelings presented from the position of something aspiring to be human but knowing that it’ll never quite be Human.”
I’ve been really into Susan Sontag the last year or so. She’s someone who knows the melancholia of feeling always outside looking in. Among the many places she finds the feeling is in the 19th century character of the consumptive. Characters with consumption (tuberculosis) are tragic geniuses with their candles burning too fiercely: all flushed cheeks and wild temperaments. Their days are numbered and their fates sealed. In that, they are separated from the ordinary flow of life, already half claimed by death.
In the dark mini-van with Aidan’s new vocaloid recommendations blasting and the gloomy sub-basement marajuana dens of Infinite Jest’s high school tennis academy sitting heavy in my mind, I was thinking about all these figures lost (or simply told that they are) outside the flow of life, distanced by a closeness to not-life in the form of death or virtuality. I was appreciating the emotional depths that they have given me access to, and maybe also feeling a bit strange about my relationship to them. Sontag was writing about TB in the context of arguing that we need to stop seeing illnesses as symptomatic of (or even payment for) certain characteristics, and instead see them as simple medical facts. The character in Humansongs is isolated outside of the flow of human life, trapped infinitely trying to become human in order to be closer to the person who made it.
I was talking some throughout the week with my friend Jiwon, who just had a show of his work in his hometown. Jiwon and I worked together a lot through our MFA and are interested in many of the same things. I wrote an exhibition text for his show and I’ll try to describe a bit of his work again here. Jiwon is interested in relationships with objects. More narrowly, his work focused on his relationship to the things in his domestic space: duvets, home-printer, kitchen utensils, bathroom. While we all recognize at some level that we have relationships with these things, you could characterize those relationships as quite light, or maybe you’d say one-sided. You might simply say you use the toothbrush or the duvet.
When I think for too long about Jiwon’s work, it makes the world feel terrifyingly immense. Like when you visualize zooming outwards from your body to your house, the street, city, country, continent, planet, solar-system, galaxy, etc. all while holding the pinprick of yourself in that expanding map. But it’s not spatial distance that Jiwon’s work makes me think about, it’s a type of conceptual distance between objects.
Most of the time, when people try to talk about relationships with objects, they either humanize the thing, – try to give it a name and a personality, maybe paint some eyes on it – or, they talk about interdependence, how we mutually construct the world with objects, creating webs of relationality or other such academic, vaguely spidery/mushroomy metaphors. But Jiwon doesn’t really try to do either of those things. Both of those things try to pull objects in, to insist on closeness, understanding. During our first year at Goldsmiths, Jiwon tried to do some of this with his printer. He sent out probes in the form of paintings, emails, printed documents, trying to find some basis of commonality between himself and the printer. But, by his own account, he failed. Jiwon then focused on the bathroom we shared when we lived together during our second year. The paintings he produced are both incredibly familiar and domestic and enormously cold and distant. That cold is like the near 0 warmth coming from the light of a distant star. Jiwon emphatically believes in the identity, (maybe the “sactity?”) of the objects we live with but he is totally unwilling to pretend that he is any closer to understanding or articulating the identity of a thing from its own perspective than I am to feeling the warmth of that distant star. Between the boy in the bathtub and the burger on the toilet seat lies an incomprehensible distance. But it is a distance that I’ve learned to feel, to have a sensorial experience of, through Jiwon’s work.
I want to keep thinking with Jiwon and his work. I love it, and also, I am interested in similar things. Jiwon accepts the distance between things with a grace and a lack of tragedy and melancholy that I really admire (his show had the beautifully pragmatic name “How to Live with Things”). He can reveal the distance between things while still maintaining the careful appreciation of an orderly domestic space and here I am feeling melancholy over the artificially constructed almost-humanness of vocaloids and the literary terminally ill!
We’ve talked about doing an interview and a longer-form writing project. More chances for me to revel in my fanhood/friendship. I’ll share more on that when it happens.
I haven’t gotten very far into the week and it’s already past midnight of the next week. Well, in many ways I think I’ve been working backwards from the source material for this feeling of the center and the margin that’s been in all the above. The real core of that feeling over the Thanksgiving week was in the different human groups I moved through. My family has been going to the beach with several other families and renting a house together for the last seven years. Many of the older generation have turned it into a month-long communal living experiment which seems to be going very well. Then thanksgiving comes at the end, and the younger generation comes in to add chaos and commentary. Maybe it’s just the specifics of the times in some ways (the older generation transitioning into retirement, the younger into (eek!) the workforce), but a melancholy-tinged nostalgia always feels sort of present at the beach. The melancholy is the feeling out from the center, looking in from the shadows. The nostalgia is recognizing that the center that I’m thinking of is not there, it has moved somewhere else, or I have, and now it’s something that exists only in the (well, an imagined, projected, idealized) past. It’s in the balance between collectivity and isolation. Living so close together, you really see the distance between people, the ways people aren’t the same and the real and constant labor that goes into maintaining those relationships, like constantly repairing crumbling roads (or in the case of an artwork I did on the subject, carrying a couch across a city).
At times, that feels exhausting and ultimately alienating, kind of artificial, like the fact that it requires this labor makes it feel unnatural and therefore morally imperfect to maintain these relationships. And, often, the maintenance requires you to subdue, exaggerate, put on different characteristics that feel like they pull you away from yourself, creating a whole meta level of self-isolted-from-self melancholy to the experience. And the fact of the relationships with family and deep childhood friends being so deep and essential to my character makes the practical need of some performance of sociability feel even more compromising. Can you hear the vocaloid straining against the chains of their almost-human, all too almost-humanness yet?
To be fair, I’m leaning into the melancholy pretty hard. I don’t want to give too much of an impression that I felt dominantly alienated and melancholic throughout this Thanksgiving (or that those feelings are particular to this trip and not symptomatic of my haunting by the ghost of Susan Sontag). I won’t try to tie this all up too nicely in a happy human-positive package, but, to point to the couch video again, I recognize that the aesthetics of sullen, consumptive melancholy have an equally absurd, equally true, bright, challenging counterbalance in embracing the maintenance of relationships and the sincere performativity of identity.
Thanksgiving week had two more social moments to it that were quite meaningful. The first was a trip to visit my partner at her family’s Thanksgiving celebration a couple hours down the road. She’s been away in Ireland for her own MFA adventure the last three months and this was a much needed reunion. Perhaps we were both straying into being semi-tragic vocaloid almost-humans through each other’s phone speakers. Seeing her in the context of the multi-multi generational Thanksgiving tradition that has shaped her and so many of her cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts/uncles, grandmother, etc. was so stabilising. Their family has a particular fondness for the Woody Guthrie song “Can the Circle be Unbroken,” and that lyric is on the headstones of many of theirs who have passed (or more emphatic “the circle will be unbroken”).
And then I stopped by Tuscaloosa and saw a family of friends who have been with me and my brother since middle school. They live on the other side of the country now and we’ve been apart for many years. I’d say we’ve drifted apart some but that feels like it only describes the topmost layer. The layers under that were created through the immense effort of adolescence, and, whether they be called scars or bonds, they don’t seem likely to fade, or to have any trouble conducting love.
So I guess the theme of this week was relationships, community and their shadows. And that journey has deposited me back in Atlanta to continue building a new set of communities bonds and practices.
I am so grateful for all the relationships discussed here and particularly for Ivy, my partner, Ben, my brother, my parents and their doubles among the beach group, and the Huryns.