White Lake, Violet Lantern

On Thursday, I drove to Laguna Beach to see my friend for the last time before she moved back to Boston. Our other friend had left the week before. Now, I'm the only one from our little group who's left in Southern California.  

     Driving on long stretches of freeway feels meditative when I'm not being cut off by oil tankers or testing the limits of my gas pedal to accelerate past cement mixers in time for my exit. That particular morning, a deep white fog hung over the horizon -- it didn't occlude my immediate vision, as it sometimes does, but it made the entire sky look opaque as china. I found it unnatural and strange, but also calming. With such scenery, what better album to put on than Björk's Vulnicura?

    I've driven up north a few times this summer, and early on I decided to use any 1+ hour long car rides to listen to albums in full. I started with Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, then Weyes' Blood's And in the Darkness, Heart's Aglow, and later Björk's Debut. It had been a while since my last full album listen, and I chose Vulnicura because I saw a Reddit post where someone said it was the equivalent of an "emotional pummeling" that made them feel "like they had been through five divorces," or something like that. The amateur Reddit reviews did not oversell it.

    Paired with the intense fog, the album made me feel almost entranced for the fifty miles of straight freeway. A couple of its songs I had heard before, but in this focused environment their effect was heightened. Many of Björk's songs have a deep emotional impact ("Joga" and "Bachelorette" are two of my all-time favorites), but this album was truly on its own level. Created in the wake of her divorce from her husband of more than a decade, it is a raw expression of confusion, desperation, and pain. "Stonemilker" is probably my all-around favorite track, followed by "Black Lake."

    As I drove through San Clemente, I found I was more conscious of my breathing, but not in the usual panicky way. As the dramatic strings of "Notget" blasted through my car speakers, the dotted lines dividing lanes morphed in shape and size before flying past my eye line. I felt centered.

    The most memorable moment of my drive was when "Black Lake" played. Usually, I can't stand listening to slow music, especially when driving so fast, but I was enthralled. This was one of the most devastating songs I had ever heard. Everything came together so beautifully: the hauntingly slow strings, the beating heart sound effect, the electronic elements, the gut-wrenching lyrics, and the cathartic vocal performance.

    Some people find the lyrics to be too on-the-nose. Unlike "Stonemilker," which is carried by the metaphor of milking a stone as attempting to pry emotion out of her distancing husband, "Black Lake" is an admission of defeat: You have nothing to give, your heart is hollow / I am drowned in sorrows / No hope in sight of ever recover / Eternal pain and horrors. You would expect such a track, especially at its length of 10 minutes, to appear near the end of an album like this. But it's only the second track. It nowhere near represents Björk's final word on the subject matter, which may be part of the reason it doesn't feel too explicitly defeatist for me. She may be speaking plainly, but her style is such that it could never really feel boring.

    The song compares the artist's heart to a black lake, or an ocean in which she is drowning. Maybe some listeners feel the "drowning" metaphor has been belabored in music, which I'd concede, but I am still drawn to it. It could be because of my own morbid fascination with the ocean, my fear of suffocation (a common one, I'd say), or my childhood experience almost getting sucked away into the Pacific by a rip current. I know it's never a novel comparison, but I feel like art that analogizes emotions, such as grief, and bodies of water often succeed because of their inherently common traits: immersion, occlusion, threat, pressure, and so on.

    Outside of the car, all I could see around me were the road and the other vehicles. The fog blurred land with sky and erased many of the regular sights, such as hills and trees. Maybe it was this paring down of visual stimuli that made me feel more relaxed than usual, and that engendered my trance-like feeling.

    The fog seemed to lift after I exited the freeway. Driving through the Lantern District of Dana Point, what was previously white and gray was now imbued with color. Through my windows I absorbed mosaic murals, restaurant signs, palm trees, and even the turquoise of the ocean. I noticed the streets were all named after colors: Violet Lantern, Amber Lantern, Blue Lantern, Ruby Lantern. I'd been to Dana Point a few times before, but I'd never noticed this before. Or, if I did, I didn't remember.

    I don't know why, but that idea -- of possibly forgetting something that feels so interesting to me in the moment -- scares me. Maybe it's one of my irrational anxieties, or maybe it's just a plea with myself to be more mindful of my experiences. But how do you stay mindful and appreciative of what's around you while also accepting its potentially ephemeral nature? 

    When I read old journal entries where I took care to describe simple scenes in vivid detail, I have no trouble remembering them. Same when looking back on photos. And it brings me joy to be able to capture these snapshots of my life. But it also fills me with a deep grief for all the moments I haven't chosen to preserve. Won't it skew my idea of what my life is, since all we can reflect on is what we remember, after all?

    I can't seem to find a way of being that's in between presentness and preservation. Both are equally valuable to me. I have a horrible memory, so I feel like I'm always mourning the present moment. My friends are frequently telling me stories about things we did together -- not too far in the past -- and the details genuinely sound new to me. I find it difficult to relate to past versions of myself because I genuinely have such a hard time remembering events. I remember emotions very clearly, but that tends to mark highly distressing memories as most important in my mental files. 

    I don't want that -- I want to be just as good at remembering the foggy freeways and interesting street signs and monarch butterflies fluttering in circles around each other and puppies poking their heads out of car windows. I want to remember the quirks and idiosyncrasies of any particular day without the fear of what will happen if I don't. 

    I don't know how to resolve this paranoia, so I'll end with another lyric from Vulnicura, from the song "Atom Dance": I am fine-tuning my soul ... Restlessly turning around and around / I am dancing towards transformation.

With teeth, love, and fog,

Anika