Departures

There is something particularly effecting about the song "Here" from Pavement's first album, Slanted and Enchanted. What is it? A certain resigned melancholy sound; the tone of the mostly incomprehensible lyrics suggests imminent departure or wistful recollection of that which has passed.

The interpretation is a little mawkish, but there is something about those fragmentary lyrics:

I'm the only one who laughs
at your jokes when they are so bad
and your jokes are always bad,
but they're not as bad as this.
Come join us in a prayer.

What these words evoke is a sense of the immediate existence of the relationship described; the person whose jokes are always bad and the connection between this person and the narrator, whose existence is documented by a few lines of song lyrics, is immortalized by the song. They are conjured anew every time the song is played, their image reappearing eternally. The situation described is infinitely tenuous: if these characters knew each other when the album was released in 1992, they have surely parted in the intervening seventeen years. But the song is still here, and every time I play it, the moment in which the one told bad jokes to which the other responded with laughter is born again.

Why this moves me so much is that the moment is so fragile, so utterly incapable of withstanding the passage of time, but the work in which it is preserved shields it with its own longevity. The moment is preserved like an insect in amber. And the banality of these objects acquires inexplicable charm in their defiance of time and decay. Playing the song reincarnates these two people and the moment of their interaction. And in so doing it reiterates the impossibility of doing so in life. Memory is a sad surrogate for this kind of necromancy.

As I remarked in an earlier post, I hate the abrupt termination of friendships, which always seem to develop so subtly that we do not realize how significant they become until we are forced to renounce them. And what I hate most of all is the nonchalance with which one is supposed to treat these occasions. It is egotistical but not altogether absurd to equate the departure of a friend with her death. If others are free of the jealousy that arises when one contemplates the possibility that a friend can happily forget the memory of the friendship whose ghost takes up residence in the rotting cellar of my mind, then I will have to remain alone with this frustration. Regardless, I do not understand how others overcome the despair of separation so easily and with so little permanent harm.

Perhaps I am wrong in this - perhaps I am just as insensible to the trauma of separation as anyone else, and I am merely preoccupied with the myth of my own circumspect concern with things. Perhaps I do not have enough distractions from these thoughts.

And all the same, I am sick of parting with people and knowing that I will, in all likelihood, never see them again and that, even more troublingly, I will eventually cease to care.