2020
Feeling things that are not easy to feel is a part of life.
Being worried about things (i.e. "having anxiety") and sad about stuff (i.e. "having depression") are very commonplace affective experiences that are part of a normal life.
Generally speaking, people move in and out of states of being "fine" (baseline, emotionally regulated, normal) and being distressed/anxious/depressed. These are what we could call mood-swings. We all have mood-swings, but sometimes something happens that makes our mood-swing in a way that is more than two standard deviations away from the mean... These tend to be instances where anxiety/depression becomes something that is potentially less manageable than it is within the context of a typical mood-swing.
Something I believe — Becoming aware of our contingency (of the fact that nothing is certain, that we just act as if things are) is common cause of anxiety and depression.
If we become slightly aware of our contingency then the emotional winds pick up enough to shift our affect in the direction of a little more depressed or slightly more anxious. When we become acutely aware of our contingency, of just how fragile our bodies and our lives are, when just how weak our grip on control becomes something we experience, it’s like a strong storm rolling in. The strong winds pick up and quickly move us deeper into the realms of anxiety and/or depression.
The psychoanalyst Lacan had a word he used for the combination of anxiety and depression that comes about when we become aware of the fragility of our bodies, positions, relationships, economies, etc. He called it anguish, the only affect that comes about from a direct experience of the real--the truth of our contingency, the truth of our fragility, the truth of how limited we are in time and space.
What Lacan called anguish comes about when we become more in tune with the human condition. Others have others hames for this, in Japan, it is called Mono now aware (物の哀れ, もののあはれ) Miguel de Unamuno called it the tragic sense of life, living with the knowledge that our lives will end. James A. Reeves references anguish when writing about the Film Blade Runner 2049, where he said
More than anything, Blade Runner is a story about god, a fever dream about grabbing our creator by the throat and asking, “Why did you make me? And why must I die?”
The year 2020 has made contingency something that is more difficult to repress or ignore, therefore 2020 has been filled with more anguish than in prior years.
There have been so many different events that have put our (mine yours) contingent status as fragile human bodies in our faces.
As I've tried to go about living my day-to-day life during 2020 I've made some small changes to the way I live. Nothing major. Small things that seem to make a difference.
One of the small things I've started to do is to really listen to a lot more ambient music. Prior to 2020, I would listen to ambient from time to time, mainly when grading papers in a space where the talking of other people was distracting. But when I did this I was using ambient music as a way of blocking things out, nowadays I'm using it as a way to tap into things. I do this by putting on a good pair of over-ear headphones and sitting, or laying down, or walking, and really listening to the sounds of the ambient piece I'm listening to.
This has become a way of influencing the overall textures and tones of the head noise that is always playing in the background of my life. So today I want to share a few albums that have been useful to me.
Cruel Optimism By Lawrence English:
Notes on Cruel Optimism from Lawrence English, October 2016...
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment.
This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant. I had the fortune to come across her writing almost a half-decade ago. In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of critical readings around the issues that have fuelled so much of the music I have been making recently. Beyond her keen analysis of the relations of attachment as they pertain to conditions of possibility in the everyday, it was particularly her writing around trauma I found deeply affecting. It was a jumping off point from which a plague of unsettling impressions of suffering, intolerance and ignorance could be unpacked and utilized as fuel over and above pointless frustration.
Ambient/1 Music for Airports by Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is the sixth studio album by Brian Eno. It was released by Polydor Records in 1978. The album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths.
It was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to differentiate his experimental and minimalistic approach to composition from "the products of the various purveyors of canned music".
The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. To achieve this, Eno sought to create music "as ignorable as it is interesting." Though it is not the earliest entry in the genre, it was the first album ever to be explicitly created under the label "ambient music."
Silencia by Hammock
“Silencia is a prelude to silence.”
Hammock’s Marc Byrd is speaking about the Nashville duo’s latest collection of meditative, lustrous compositions from his studio, perched south of Music City’s neon clamor.
“It was made in reverence to that space,” he continues, “so it’s great if you don’t feel a need to listen to music after it ends. Silence has become a friend.”
Silencia, which arrives November 15 courtesy the band’s own Hammock Music label, is their 10th LP since founding in 2003. And it closes a trilogy that started in 2017 with Mysterium, a towering modern classical record that Byrd and co-founder Andrew Thompson made shortly after the death of 20-year-old Clark Kern, the former’s nephew.
“Mysterium was about a shattering,” Byrd says. “Universalis, the trilogy’s second record, was an attempt to put things back together, and Silencia reflects a quiet resolution of knowing this is what life is. You have to live in the midst of both.”