If by some disquieted remembrance I carry with me the tokens of this year into the next, I will not be burdened by the actions I haven’t taken. I began this year resolute in my quest for aesthetic newness: scrap the old standards and proceed as a tabula rasa, anything goes. Mix it up a little, and see what magic happens. It has been a fun ride, but I can’t resist spending a little time revisiting some of the records that occupied space in my cultural inventory this past year. I'm sure on some level its an evaluative exercise, a necessary step in synthesizing the old conflicts and revising my discourse. Whatever the reason, I find myself embracing this seasonal closure with a return to one of my favourite recordings this year.
This evening’s party has the Hidden Names in heavy rotation. It's an apt choice for a gathering that will inevitably become a toast to alterity. (Are we really celebrating newness in the dead of winter?). Because this holiday, more than any other, is a culturally sanctioned conversation about possibility. It is a time to talk about things other than the here and now. It is a time to talk about novelty, and change, and dissolution and resolution that aren’t really apparent but that will certainly come. The Hidden Names -- so wholly an accolade to otherness that the question of 'where else could I be?' is less relevant than the responsive: Everywhere. And the implications are rendered all the more fantastic in the album's title: there are things outside the here and now, hidden things, and revealing them requires a change of perspective. It’s a subtle suggestion that if you're searching for answers, looking around is only half as good as looking beyond.
The album's opening tune is a kind of if-you-cross-this-threshold overture to a suite of songs about the contingency of existence and finding your place among life’s random turns and enigmatic offerings. “As the World Turned Out,” is itself a trope (etymologists: geddit?) on the paradoxes and ambiguities of our human efforts: with every gesture we make, we are at once in the process (as the world turns) of devising our own narratives, and at the same time perfecting those actions to completion, fait accompli (how every moment turns out); on to the next.
In the room where the guests are arriving, the step-into-my-parlour imperative commands a familiar response. Conversations revolve around the album’s thematic gravity, ambiguity. It is a condition very well established in the band’s repertoire, and more than a couple of guests are playfully taking stock of its post-postmodern vitality. They speak a dialect I know well. Take ambiguity and perhapses and contingency and doubt and turn them into wonder. Look back on the year that has just passed. This is how it turns out.
Alterity is the shibboleth of our tribe, and tonight we are all of us dreamers of our unrealized selves in impossible contexts. We talk of what could have been yesterday and what may be tomorrow. Talk of what should be here and now. If I resolve to state my case with conviction, I would fail to solecism. We are delinquents of otherness, the music reminds us. We are sentenced to this time and place. Here, the quest for individuality, for solitude, is always already thwarted by the noise of human activity, the cacophony of the streets outside the window, the clamour and the clutter of modern life.
"Convinced we are completed / We surround ourselves with junkpiles / We’re so far from naked / We’ve got walls all around us."
In the end if you're looking for your place in the world, what matters is not so much preserving your individuality, but overwriting it, redescribing it. Our stories are written through perpetual chains of self-deconstruction and rebuilding. Meshing our fragmented egos with something other means finding truths about ourselves in new contexts.
“If I fall to little pieces / you can fall to little pieces / we can mingle our debris.”
After all, none of us has complete agency over our existence, each of us living, rather, in “borrowed time and rented space.” Contending with the possibility that you’ve been initiated into the wrong tribe is as exciting as it is heartbreaking, but it is at the very least a way of ensuring continuity. It means your lexicon can never be final. Keep asking questions, keep opening doors, to keep moving.
Our festivities will continue into the night. There will be revelry, conversation, warm embraces and shared stories. The music will play on until the last clink of glasses has escaped into the night air and our voices have waned to a whisper. And then our last song. Motion, and gesture toward the new. Move, because dancing is ecstatic. Keep moving because dancing is ex-static. In this new year. Everything will be new. In this new year everything will be new. I will be new. This is our satori.
“Keep this fire in your heart / Keep this fire to their feet / In the day that we find us”
It's not going to make any sense, the song tells us. The answer is the question. But what matters is persistence, because everything is transitory. Our ideas get displaced; our egos become fragmented. So we rebuild, and we remember, and we go on.
If truth exists, then it is fleeting. Like beauty and pain and happiness and love, and everything else worth living for, truth is always contextualized. Its very impermanence is elusive. I am humbled by an infinity of possibilities that were never realized. So many would-be realities that arise and are lost in an instant… every instant. My thoughts now concern not only the astonishing luck that my life choices were ever made, but that they were exactly right.
You see, this is how the world turned out. So far so good.
Happy new year to you.
***
The lyrics cited in this post are transcribed, to the best of my auditory interpretation, from the following songs. The band’s name is, of course, hidden.
As the World Turned Out
Cluttered
Little Pieces
Soft Lies
Mad Mad Day
