Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
(This is just another turn of the hourglass.)
“Blind” begins. The distorted synthesizers are a cold, moaning wind. The drums trudge forward like slushed footsteps. The hi-hats are a quivering heartbeat. The fragile piano notes fall like icicles dislodged by the slammed-door snares. The sonorous bass flows like a snow-swollen river finned with floes. This isn’t a silent, holy night. This is a dark, dirgeful December. TV on the Radio is a coal-filled machine billowing black smoke, and Tunde Adebimpe is the machine’s pilot (or prisoner). He sings: “i seen a girl / with a guy / her hair like yours / from what i remember. / he took her hand / and smiled her name. / her face like yours, she smiled the same — / from what i remember; / been so long since last december.” Each syllable shivers. I’m shivering. I’ve been shivering since last December.
I wanted to write about “Blind” like a naturalist describing a pale thing suspended in an amber-glass jar, dead and harmless. I wanted to dissect the song like middle-aged Charles Darwin dissecting barnacles; he spent eight years taxonomically organizing them, hiding from his dangerous thoughts about change. But circumstances forced Darwin to set aside his barnacles, and in 1859, despite his poor health and his fears about his theory’s consequences, he published On the Origin of Species. Like Darwin, I tried to hide from change, and “Blind” was my barnacle. But I can’t hide from change, and neither can Adebimpe; when he sings these lyrics, his Klein-bottled voice tries to hide inside itself: “she walked your walk, / she talked like you. / she shimmered strong, / she shined right through.” But he can’t hide forever: “from what i remember”, he sings, conceding to the lyrics’ past tense, and his voice unfurls like a tattered flag of surrender.
In 1866, in response to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Lord Kelvin argued that Earth was too young for natural selection: Earth couldn’t be more than 100 million years old, Kelvin calculated—not enough time for “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” to evolve. Kelvin was wrong: Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, life has been around for most of that time, and change doesn’t require the time that Kelvin assumed it required. Change can happen over millions or billions of years on continents slowly sliding across deep time to collide or divide, but change can also happen over hundreds of years in the dark. For example: The London Underground mosquito—which can be found, unsurprisingly, in the London Underground (an eponym the mosquito predates) and in other manmade underground places like New York’s sewers—has adapted to underground environments; unlike above-ground mosquitoes, the London Underground mosquito doesn’t hibernate, and it bites rats and mice in addition to aggressively biting humans. Blood-sucking reminds me of how, when I heard “Blind” for the first time, I misheard a lyric: Instead of “my love is a sucker bet”, I heard “my love is a sucker-bat”, which I thought was a clever way to rename the vampire bat—but now I’m withdrawing like Darwin; instead of taxonomically organizing barnacles, I’m writing about the London Underground mosquito because I don’t want to write about other, more rapid changes. Because change can happen overnight, too: You wake up next to someone, and then you fall asleep alone. And change can happen in the dark, but it can also happen unseen between paragraphs. The white space separating words can contain so much time: an hour, a day; maybe a month passed between the first paragraph and the second one. So much time. So much change.
But change never changes; the hourglass is turning, but the same sand is falling. In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about eternal return:
“This life as you now live it, and have lived it, you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you […] even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment […] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again […] the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’, would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight.” Nietzsche returned to eternal return in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and so did his spider: “And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and you and I in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must not all of us have been here before?” Everything that’s happened could’ve only happened however it happened; each quantum movement—each collision of probabilities—only had one possible outcome, and that determinism rises through the layers of physics. The Universe eternally returns like Adebimpe’s eternally returning December: “i said, i seen girl / with a guy — / so who i seen? / so who am i ? / now i can’t remember; / been so long since last december.”
(How many times have I written this? How many times have you read this?)
I listened to “Blind” five years ago during a December separation, and now I’m listening to “Blind” again during another December separation. I’m Nietzsche’s spider creeping in the moonlight. I’d been traveling towards this moment for twenty-nine years—but I’ve already been here, and I’ll be here again, over and over, forever. “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” Do I want this December again? Do I have a choice? “been so long since last december”, sings Adebimpe, repeating himself. Which December was last December? This December is last December, and last December is next December, over and over, forever. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche has a demon introduce eternal return as “the greatest weight”, and—goddammit, put the barnacles down and write about the song; write about change.
The greatest weight is absence: making the bed and expecting a cat to lunge under the falling sheets, or running my fingers through my beard to remove cat hair that isn’t there; even the phantom smell of nonexistent litter breaks me. And her absence—“open letter to the legions leering: / are we entertained yet? / why don’t you cast your gaze into the moonlit clearing?”
Two cat hearts. Two human hearts. If one of the human hearts is larger than average, and if both cats are large cats (they are), then the hearts’ combined weight would be approximately one pound—one pound of flesh—“my love is a sucker bet.” Four broken hearts. How much flesh have I collected? (“Do you want this again and…”) No, I don’t want this. I don’t fucking want this. I’m so tired, “but before we find another noose to fit us, / before we choose another hand to hit us / let us ask each other, / what’s the problem?” The problem: I can write about Darwin and Nietzsche, about barnacles and spiders, but I can’t write about the cats—not “our cats” anymore, not “my cats”—and I can’t write about her. I’m Nietzsche’s spider hanged from moonlit silk.
And I can’t write about “Blind”, either, because it’s more than a song now: I’ve been looping it for hours, listening for something I missed. I miss your soft, warm hands massaging lotion into my cracked, cold hands. I miss your perfume: the top notes of shampoo and deodorant, the heart notes of clothes and sweat, the base notes of… home. I’ve tried to meet you at the gateway between waking and sleeping—I imagine us “whispering together, whispering of eternal things”—but only demons greet me in my dreams. This is Hell, and Adebimpe is my blind Virgil: “because if you save yourself / i’ll save you all the time. / (i was struck blind.) / save yourself, i’ll save you all the time. / (i was struck blind.)”, he sings as the song falters and fades. I’m lost: If I save myself, I don’t need to be saved. If you save yourself, you don’t need me to save you. Is Adebimpe singing about the determinism of eternal return? If I survive this December, I’ll always survive this December because I’ve always survived this December. And if I don’t, then I never have and I never will. “Blind” begins again. It’s been so long since last December.
(This is just another turn of the hourglass.)
Sean Hogan lives in the Midwest and the Midwest lives in them; it's mostly symbiotic. Their writing has been published somewhere, probably. They recently released their first album, E'alta, under the name Pigeon Radio; some of their earlier experimental music was featured in Burning House Press. And they can be found on Twitter: @Somniferously. https://pigeonradio.bandcamp.com/album/ealta
