#I decided to have a sisyphus lens by the end of this

[nymph-at-versailles]

My Experience as a Prom Planner: "Last night was like the ending of Carrie, if instead of pigs blood, Carrie just got to be prom queen." - What will she do with all the doubt she still carries after the party end?

July 2024

I had my prom yesterday, what made it special is that I was in charge of planning the event myself. A quick side-note: ever since my break up last year I’ve convinced myself that I hate people and don’t need them. Yet despite this initial angst, I find that I try with all my might to make the people around me happy and I still give so much love to those I adore. Showing this mentality was utterly false and naïve.

Prom was a conflicting event for me, there was no glitz and glam, pre-prom or post-prom for me, this was my last chance to prove myself to a tiny world of mostly privileged teenagers I've known since i was 7. For me the success of this event was life or death (spiritually), the happiness of proms participants was a quantitative measure of my own worth. How...terrifyingly insignificant the stakes were.

Prom came and I could finally reap the benefits of my hard labour.

...The most absurd night occurred:

People who’ve bullied me over the course of my school career gave me hugs, telling me how beautiful I was. Boys who broke my heart looked at me as if Aphrodite blessed me. People who were too pretty for me told me how much they appreciate me. A perfect end to a coming of age film.

Yet the credits haven’t rolled and I’m still going.

Still breathing.

I didn’t think I’d make it to 18, I thought this was the end of the frontier. My teenage Magnum Opus <3. Yet I wake up and slowly come to the realisation that life continues another day. I don’t know if I’m happy about that yet, like Sisyphus I have to start again.

My reflection 7 Months later

Reflecting upon that experience almost 7 months since my Prom in July I see a very broken girl. She feared her life purpose was fulfilled before she'd even properly lived. I am proud of what that broken girl achieved, but I look down upon her mindset. A self-fulfilling prophecy of "woe is me" and a heavy reliance of the "I'm not like other girls" mindset. I had forcibly isolated myself emotionally with my peers, but true admiration and love for some of them shone through that persona and I couldn't help but to care for all these people I had grown up with. I derived enjoyment from planning the prom, from the praise, but it took everything I had. It took reinvention in order to complete a task I saw as monumental, but look back and see as menial.

I was told that at university no one will care about who you were or what you did, just who you are now presently. That is painfully true. As much as I would love to gloat to my new peers that I have proved my worthiness before getting a degree, it is unbecoming and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In the mindset of Robert Greene, I have mastered the art of planning a prom, great...time to move onto the next task.

I have been forced to adopt the task of Sisyphus, I will continue to push this boulder up the mountain to prove my worth, to master something that has more meaning to the world around me. I do not know how that will manifest, but I look optimistically to the top of this unforgiving mountain. all the obstacles I will face, all the times I will want to give up, but the chance of success is too sweet not to reach.

I stretch my whole body, crack my neck, I do a few jumps to make myself limber and I look towards the sky where the mountain lies. I prepare to push the boulder once more, I smile, as I have been given another opportunity to prove myself.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#10 – 'A Loverless Bed (Without Remission)' (A Sun Came, 1998)

When your lover – the centre of your universe, the one with whom you trust your entire being – betrays you, what are you to do? You could lie there, alone, resigned to your misery; certainly it’s tempting, when you have nobody left to compel you to rise. You could leave your bed and choose to go about your life, which will help things somewhat, right up until the moment when you realise that no efforts of your own could ever restore things to the time where you were happiest. Somehow there is no good option. Your next steps cannot reverse the crushing permanence of that reality: they have abandoned you, forever.

Sufjan opts for the latter, for the former is abjectly self-destructive. He is to ‘put the axle on and roll again’. It is an arduous task – the metaphor conveys the inertia of carrying on after this climacteric, Sufjan being a piece of groaning, rusting machinery compelled to complete a task – but it must be done. I will move on, he resolves. He pushes through to the next day, and the next, and many more besides, but nothing ever changes; if this is moving on, why even bother? Another metaphor now: he is like Saturn, his stormy, roiling eye watching the rings turn and turn and turn, again and again and again, only to end up right there where they started. Days will pass, but his recovery will stay quote the same. A Camus-like absurdity. Nothing ever changes.

Hopeless, helpless, he turns to denial. ‘I close my eyes to everything you’ve rearranged, and I close my mind to everything you’ve kept the same’. If he cannot change reality, he will try to create one all of his own, and hope beyond hope that it will work. Because his partner had really changed everything, hadn’t they? Everything is stained now. Even the few constants in his life – the things that have remained reliable, steadfast – are only so because his partner actively decided to keep them that way. It is a shame that ‘everything reminds me of her’ has become a laughingstock of an expression, because it is really quite apt in describing Sufjan’s headspace here. He views the world as if through a lens, his centre of gravity shifted up and outside of him, to someone who has proved utterly ruinous to him.

Denial ultimately fails. Denial always fails. No matter his best efforts, his love for his partner endures, without decay, without remission. His bed is still ‘[their] space’, no longer his own. And so ‘A Loverless Bed (Without Remission)’ reaches its final couplet, a left-hook-right-hook pair of shocks that redefine the song. The left hook: the narrator is not Sufjan at all, but a ‘woman you’ve turned red again’. Previously assuming the song to be a sincere, revealing account of something highly personal for Sufjan, we are suddenly left doubting. (We are even opened up to the possibility that this song is from the perspective of one of Sufjan’s jilted lovers, making him the cruel, or licentious, or otherwise improper counterpart to the fragile narrator.)

The right hook: she has thrown in the towel. She is going to let her partner back in someday. I interpret ‘when the hairline breaks and lends you in’ to point obliquely at degradation; as her (presumably male) partner ages, mellows, and loses his Samson-like beauty, he will cease to desire anyone but her, and she will embrace him with open arms, her bed once again full and complete. When your lover betrays you, what are you to do? It seems you have no choice but to regress.

‘A Loverless Bed (Without Remission)’ is somewhat unique in the early Sufjan catalogue in that it anticipates much of the work that Sufjan did with trip hop and downtempo in the 2010s, especially with the Sisyphus project. This is an ur-trip hop, mind – it lacks the sophistication and misty production of that project, and seems to be heavily indebted to the 90s Bristol scene, Portishead in particular. (Its resemblance to ‘Mysterons’ – heavily tremolo-ed guitar, close mic-ed vocals, tight hi-hat-based drum loop ending in a snare roll – is especially uncanny.) The major key guitar arpeggios carry with them a honeyed melancholy that nicely complements the tonic-heavy vocal melody, and creates a complete, if perhaps slightly too twee, reflection of the exhausting trials of recovery. Of course, A Sun Came being A Sun Came, the song devolves in the end into a sludgy, atonal mess, full of wailing guitars and haywire electronics. It feels apropos to nothing; it would take Sufjan some time to grow out of that habit.

‘A Loverless Bed’ is far from a career highlight, but if nothing else, it is certainly one of Sufjan’s early lyrical successes, appropriately cryptic without turning to absurdist slurry. In an album that tends to focus on broad, universal experiences – religion, ageing, rejection, nature – ‘A Loverless Bed’ compellingly breaks down one of the more universal of all. Betrayal has never seemed so poetic.