For most of the last decade, the only thing I really knew about the band The National was their song Bloodbuzz Ohio, which tickles a few places deep in my soul I cannot properly describe, at least without some decent whiskey. I first became aware of the song (and therefore the band) from within the depths of a then-fresh grief, and though it doesn't directly speak to the experience of the loss I felt in a way that, say, I Don't Want To Get Over You or The One You Really Love by The Magnetic Fields do, Bloodbuzz still somehow resonated with me quite deeply at that time. (I also had a mountain of student loan debt to repay and little prospect of doing so expediently, so I may have appreciated the lyric “I still owe money, to the money, to the money I owe” a bit too keenly.)
Bloodbuzz has since drifted into my listening habits and away again like an old drinking buddy who can never quite get his shit together but valiantly trundles on, and it will probably keep trembling out of my speakers over the years. Despite my abiding appreciation for this one song, though, nothing moved me to become a fan of the band more generally — or even to seek out any other numbers from them — until I stumbled, in the early months of 2023, upon a review of their discography that made me curious about the album High Violet. Upon listening, I found another song that tickled the same sorts of places as Bloodbuzz, and plenty of other places besides.
This tune, called Sorrow, is every bit as otherworldly and atmospheric as the former, though the lyrics are perhaps a bit more coherent – and, perhaps with a dash of cosmic irony, thoroughly more appropriate to the context in which I discovered Bloodbuzz. When Matt Berninger enjoins the listener “...don't leave my hyper heart alone on the water, cover me in rag-n-bone sympathy, 'cause I don't wanna get over you”, I felt that; I understand precisely what he means when he moans about living in a city sorrow built, and it being in his honey and in his milk, in a way I sincerely hope you do not. (Though, if you live long enough, one day you probably will, too.)
In any case, I found myself listening to this song often as that winter slowly warmed into spring, sometimes multiple times at a stretch. And soon I discovered that a strange fellow from Iceland had also become enthralled by Sorrow at some point, and had turned it into an idiosyncratic piece of art called A Lot Of Sorrow. In this piece, he convinced the band to play the song repeatedly, in front of a small audience at the New York Museum of Modern Art, for six hours. (This is the type of thing the artist, Ragnar Kjartanson, refers to as a “durational performance”, and is evidently a specialty of his.) In another turn of cosmic irony, this performance initially took place in the beginning of May in 2013, which was a small handful of weeks before the love of my life discovered to a certainty that she was terminally ill.
To all accounts, the whole enterprise is an expression of true artistry – there was a novelty run of vinyl records capturing the performance, a thousand sets of the six or so it took for the task, but even if Kjartanson sold them all out of the trunk of his car it's not like he could've bought a yacht or anything. And the film was never commercially released; I've heard it is on permanent display at MoMA and in a museum in Reykjavik, though I could well be wrong, and otherwise it screens quite rarely at museums or art galleries, with a great deal of fuss and bother involved in securing the rights.
Thus you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that a group of college kids in Weimar had gone to this fuss and bother, and had set up a screening of the entire film as part of that city's “Long Night of the Museums” (an annual event where cities across Germany offer special exhibitions, often for free or at reduced cost, until midnight). Now, for a typical German, the idea of driving from Berlin to Weimar for a single night sounds foolish if not slightly absurd – it's three whole hours on the Autobahn, for God's sake, and that each way.
Be that as it may, I felt compelled to experience this mad concert (or at least the recording of it), so I booked the cheapest room I could find in walking distance to the venue and ticked Weimar off the list of German places to visit. The town itself is quite charming, like many (though far from all) small-to-midsize German municipalities, with a great deal of culture and history and yet a surprising oddball modernity to it. In the early afternoon before the exhibit opened, for example, I happened upon a banjo-picking bluegrass band playing in the street, which briefly transported me back to the place I was born. (To this day I have no idea if this was a ramshackle American band who'd somehow landed in East Germany or a trio of ambitious East Germans who loved a certain kind of redneck Americana. I might've asked, but I'm not sure they'd have been able to say for sure, either.)
I was hardly the only spectator for A Lot Of Sorrow, though I believe I was the only one who remained from beginning to end – aside, of course, from the ghost I'd brought with me. The others, the corporeal observers also drawn to the audacious performance, flitted in and out by degrees; some lasted the better part of an hour, a few perhaps a bit longer, presumably moved by their own experience of sorrow, or at least the strange verisimilitude of same one experiences as Mr. Berninger's baritone sinks ever-deeper into the soul. Others were more ephemeral, lingering perhaps three or four repetitions before their curiosity was satisfied and they moved on to other exhibits. But, truth be told, I paid as little attention as possible to my fellow human beings – I wished to experience as much of the performance as I could as though I were on an island, or better yet in some dark pocket dimension where the only things to exist were me, the aforementioned ghost, and the recording.
The full experience of some 108 repetitions (or so) over six hours and six minutes (or so) is how I imagine a sort of tantric meditation might be. The first few cycles are just like listening to a song on repeat in your room; the exercise juices those parts of you that the song normally activates, drawing out the emotions and memories associated with this sensation, bringing a cacophony of half-thought-half-feeling from your subconscious to join the normal neurotic commentary you usually deal with from your mind as you go about your day. But as the performance unfolds, as you soak it in past the point of your soul's absorptive capacity, it begins to overflow and crowd out the humdrum babbler riding behind your eyes. Your body and mind empty of other concerns and start to tune themselves into instruments of internal sensation triggered by a particular stimulus.
The main difference being that the stimulus is primarily aural and slightly visual rather than mainly tactile, the sensation melancholic rather than orgasmic. Or perhaps more than merely, mundanely melancholic; at the high points of the evening, I felt a direct connection to the platonic ideal of sorrow, unmediated by any particular causal experience and unmitigated by any thought of consolation.
The grief which was so fresh and vivid at the end of 2013 had ripened and matured over the following nine-ish years, a constant companion through the manifold adventures which ultimately saw me washing up in Berlin (and then leaving Berlin, and then washing up in Berlin again – but that is a tale for another day, perhaps once I’ve left Berlin again). At the time, a year ago now as I write, I was still lost in this grief, in this sorrow, and in some ways I was resigned to wandering in its shadow forever. And indeed, for the first couple of hours of the performance, I rode the cresting waves of this particular grief and indulged in many of the bittersweet memories and empty counterfactual fantasies which were never far from my mind during the intervening years.
But as I listened to and watched the band do this foolish and slightly-absurd thing, as I felt raw, uncaused sorrow come to predominate over any particular, tangible source of grief or malcontent I've collected over my wanderings, I was able to peek behind the curtain a little bit. I was, all too briefly, able to step outside my grief, outside myself – to understand that, though we are in many ways the rolling sums of our experiences and impulses, we are not always doomed to rue and follow them thoughtlessly. I was able to consider my grief not a burden, or a curse, but simply a thing; a natural thing, an inevitable thing, an expression of something more ancient and truer than anything I could hope to explain with anything like fidelity.
And at the end, after having wept myself dry at least three times for at least three different reasons (the decade-long grief touched upon here only chief among these), after laughing at the antics of the band as they grew ever-more exhausted by the enterprise, and after having seen so many other spectators come and go from the corner of my eye, I felt a sort of warm catharsis descend upon me as the sorrow receeded back into my soul. My spectral companion was still with me, to be sure, but – if only for an evening – I had so overdosed on sorrow that I simply couldn't be sorry any longer...not for awhile, at any rate. And I slept better that night than I had in a long time — and better than I have many nights since then, if I'm being honest.
Of course, as with all epiphanies, I was faced with waking the next day in a world almost entirely like the one in which I'd gone to bed. And indeed, the ghost of my lost love haunted me for many months still, until I could finally lay her to rest; since then, sorrows of other kinds both new and old have been no strangers to my heart.
But sorrows are inevitable.
A Lot Of Sorrow is, however, a rare and precious gift that I will cherish as long as I can keep the memory of its experience. I highly recommend you seek it out, or perhaps take the effort to organise a screening of your own.
Man that's so sad. But happy to read new stuff from you, brother. Keep it up