Farewell Transmission—Songs: Ohia
#365Songs: October 24th
The whole place is dark
Every light on this side of the town
Suddenly it all went down
Now we’ll all be brothers of
The fossil fire of the sun
Now we will all be sisters of
The fossil blood of the moon
I love reading Proustian novels. Meandering, complex, plot-less reflections through memory over time. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages of observations written in daunting, often complex prose. I get lost in it, hypnotized. Wandering off, forgetting I’ve left the sink on, hours and hours buried within someone else’s search for the meaning of life.
Right now, I’m on page 215 of what will likely be 3,000 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of books that begin with The Morning Star. It’s Proust for the modern world, slow-moving simple lives halted by the appearance of a new star in a climate-struck Norway. It’s gorgeous, as if the characters from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia found themselves stranded in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
What a glorious escape from a wounded world in the worst of times.
Someone must have set ’em up
Now they’ll be working in the cold, grey rock
Now they’ll be working in the hot mill steam
Now they’ll be working in the concrete
In the sirens and the silences now
All the great, set-up hearts
All at once, start to beat
A whole lot of us are lost in the doom loop these days. Have been, really, for a few too many years. And let’s face it: the world is, in fact, a dark place at the moment. The Trump years have worn us down, brought out the worst, and just when we thought it was over, he came roaring back, scarier than ever. The Trump trilogy of elections, from the shock of the 2016 defeat to the universal relief of 2020, to the impending doom of Fascism today. It’s just been too fucking much.
And it won’t get easier. We’re in for a rough stretch, no matter what happens on election day. And it’s seemingly more difficult than ever to draw attention elsewhere, to seek refuge from the chaos, to find presence in a non-political moment. It’s nearly impossible to tune it out. And yet, I felt the same almost four years ago, almost to the day, leading into that existential election.
After tonight, if you don’t want this to be
A secret out of the past
I will resurrect it
I’ll have a good go at it
I’ll streak his blood across my beak
Dust my feathers with his ash
Feel his ghost breathing down my back
There ain’t nothing united about these states, but there was a time when you could drive across America, from coast to coast, and fool yourself into believing otherwise. A few weeks before the 2020 election, during those peak COVID months, I drove alone with a few cameras from Boulder to Flagstaff and back. Through the mountains, across the desert, I stopped to gas up in small towns, ate in the parking lot of local diners, even caught a full moon rising as the sun set over the Grand Canyon. Alone, at peace, in awe of the expansive landscapes and limitless beauty all around me — even took some of the best photographs of my life. With hours and hours in a car after being quarantined from the world for so long, it was too easy to drift into my own Proustian interior monologue, reexamining a long life of unexpected adventures, unprocessed grief, and dreams for what could still be.
Those endless roads for miles without another car. Ranches littered with MAGA flags and Trump/Pence signs juxtaposed with wild horses roaming empty fields. It was Trump’s world without the people who populate it. Abandoned bars missing their angry drunks, diners empty but for a lonely waitress, gas stations nothing but an in and out transaction, open fields reclaimed by the animals who belong there.
I will try
And know whatever I try
I will be gone, but not forever
The real truth about it is
No one gets it right
The real truth about it is
We’re all supposed to try
I believed, for a time, that there’s hope to be had in those in-between places, that, as Bourdain said, we’re not all that different after all, that all it takes is a shared meal to find common ground. I’m not so sure I believe that anymore, not now at least, after these divisive years and desperate hours. It’s hard to believe just about anything anymore.
And yet, how easy it is to glamorize the past, to populate it with people that never existed and stories imagined. In truth, what made that trip so memorable is that now, in retrospect, I’m quite sure I didn’t speak to a single person along the way. Not one. Perhaps I nodded at a cashier or two, smiled under my mask at a fellow lone traveler. It was the pandemic, after all, a time when we avoided others. My hope in humanity was imagined, experienced in my internal dreamscape, an altered and more hopeful version of the American West.
There ain’t no end to the sands I been trying to cross
The real truth about it is
My kind of life’s no better off
If it’s got the map, or if it’s lost
We will try
And know whatever we try
We will be gone, but not forever
Come on, let’s try
And know whatever we try
We will be gone, but not forever
When my mind goes dark, I disappear into a faraway world that is not my own, deep into imagined lives in places I can’t be, alongside people I’ve never known. For a few days during the worst of times I didn’t have to do that. The world was my novel, opening up for me, inviting me in, reminding me to slow down and take it all in. The snow capped mountains and alpenglow, the fallen leaves and birds resting in lines atop electrical wires, in the rhythms of music at 75 mph on winding roads to nowhere.
I drove through Navajo Nation and MOAB, photographed Monument Valley and Dead Horse State park, wandered dirt roads with two cameras around my neck in search of freezing a perfect moment at the end of the world.
The real truth about it is
There ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross
I’ve really known it all along
Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws
Must be the big star about to fall
There’s no knowing where we go from here, or how this story ends. It won’t be pretty at times, might just get a whole lot darker before the light comes back, but somewhere off in the distance there’s another long road waiting for an adventurer ready to get lost again. Let that be me, let that be you. That IS the beauty of America’s expansiveness. There’s always a quiet place to go when all else fails. You just need to let it in.
Long, dark blues
The will-o’-the-wisp
Long, dark blues
The big star is falling
Long, dark blues
Through the static and distance
Long, dark blues
A farewell transmission
Long, dark blues
Listen…
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