I'm still coming to terms with the latest Bright Eyes album, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. I enjoy it on so many levels, and think it's worth mentioning here even simply & mostly because of it's title. Why wouldn't an album named as such earn a mention on this here blog?!
And, honestly, the album is for thinkers. You have to listen to it over and over to begin to formulate some thoughts about what's going on. The music is great enough to latch onto immediately - a uniquely transparent style. But these are the kind of songs you turn on during a lazy Saturday afternoon; about mid-way through the album you catch a sly lyric in the 5th or 6th song that you never ever noticed before. It causes one to slowly put down the armful of laundry from the dryer, stop feeding paper into the shredder, or drop the windex and wash towel to sit down on the nearest sitting "perch" one can find and just think about what one just heard. ... Those are the good albums. One loves them.
A particularly haunting lyric, that I think can be considered in terms of the forces of _Walden_, is from the album's opening song, At the Bottom of Everything:
Oh my morning's coming back
The whole world’s waking up
All the city buses swimming past
I’m happy just because
I found out I am really no one
Struggling, desperate, and "life-like" are sure descriptions of this Bright Eyes album. That's why I think there is a hint of awakening there. Toward the end of Where I lived and What I lived for Thoreau writes, "Be it life or death, we crave only reality." There's the parallel. In thought, writing, or song - if we communicate truth & reality (whether truth of "life or death") - we are awake.
1 comment:
You are right Shaun, reality can be painful, but if we really crave it, we will push away the epidural and embrace the agony of life. But what struck me when I read your post was the last line of the Bright Eyes quote, "I found out I am really no one." Now, I see your point about reality and awakening, and I think you are right. But I'm so totally unsure of the things we think about ourselves, or rather, the things we tell ourselves. You see, I wonder if we sometimes wish we were no one so we could just say, "Oh what the hell," and stop caring. I don't know if that is what Bright Eyes is saying, but I know some people who are. I want to share a quote with you from "All the King's Men" that has recently helped me understand this.
"So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of History, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had discovered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather complicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things–really discovered, in my own way and not from any book–Ifelt that I had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems."
See, Jack does not want to see reality, he wants to see this dream that was the "secret source of all strength and all endurance." A man who lives in the misery that Jack lives in needs something to strengthen him. So he decides to see everything as meaningless. That way when Shit happens, it doesn't mean anything. But the real reality is that Jack had made some choices, done some things that had consequences. Mainly it was just the way he was that wasn't quite right. So he told himself something to make life a little easier. All that to say, sometimes we tell ourselves things like, "I am no one," because if we are someone, then we are supposed to do something. And that is hard.
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