#Transience of Life

[turiyatitta]

Walking the Tightrope

A Meditation on Life, Breath, and ExistenceIn our vast and infinite universe, there’s a remarkable dance that each living being performs, the perpetual tango between life and death. Every day, we navigate this tightrope, threading the narrow path that distinguishes the vibrant hues of existence from the void of non-existence. This intriguing equilibrium that defines our existence, balancing on…

[3eanuts]

November 10, 1956 — see The Complete Peanuts 1955-1958

[trailofleaves]

“All through your life, the most precious experiences seem to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.”

— John O'Donohue

[madcat-world]

Thy Winter is Forever - J Edward Neill

[albertwasabi]

sneaking back into tumblr town, becloaked and hooded, huddled amongst the reddit refugees..

[echoesoftheinfinite]

I don't want to be a phase

A leaf in each season

An eye with no vision

A wind that has gone

A king without a throne

A drop of water that falls and soon dries

A hurricane which comes and swiftly passes by

A day won't return

A fire that no longer burns

A gaze no more amazes

Above all, I don't want to be a phase.

[vintage-tigre]

[stressfulsloth]

You know what disco elysium place I want to know more about? Ubi Sunt?, the only geographical location in elysium with a punctuation mark in it's name. Fond of socialism and sheep. Facing crushing poverty and total entroponetic collapse. It is literally being eaten by the pale. Named after a latin phrase from the vulgate bible commonly used to mean nostalgia, translating to "Where are those that came before us?"

[kradogsrats]

just checking in real quick to reaffirm that the Merciful One's teleportation is the second sexiest thing in 5+ seasons of this show, coming in narrowly just behind Aaravos's s2e9 primal rune spellcasting

[extraordinaryhistories]

#23 - 'Damascus' (non-album track, 2001)

I have never quite been able to find my way around ‘Damascus’. Since I first delved into the cadre of Sufjan deep cuts, ‘Damascus’ always felt to me like a forbidden fruit – a song with some sort of deeper power that, try as I might, I could never quite access. There’s something strange here. Let’s try to discover it.

‘Damascus’ was released on a 2001 charity compilation album called Seen Unseen (A Benefit For the Evergreen Center For Street Youth). Looking at the tracklist in retrospect, as with other contemporaneous releases on which you’ll tend to find these bits and bobs, Sufjan is the only name on here of any current notoriety. It’s odd to imagine a time where Sufjan was just ‘a member of his class’, so to speak – one of a crop of other softly spoken folk musicians, not at all regarded as the scene’s wonderkid. This was just before Fleet Foxes, before Iron and Wine, before craft beers and plaid shirts and plucked guitars became the centre of everything that was hip, but it was welling up. Slowly, it was welling up. And you can see it on a compilation like this one, and you can see it on Sufjan’s sudden change of tack around the turn of the millennium – weirdo outsider trading in every genre under the sun becomes increasingly committed to his acoustic guitar, and begins to write more earnest, serious songs like ‘Damascus’.

About that earnestness. ‘Damascus’ is a true lyrical labyrinth, one of the most maximal and yet least specific songs that Sufjan would produce around this time. I have struggled with this one for as long as I have known it; just about every line feels obscure, but I never feel as if we are trading in true nonsense here. It’s a song with a real sense of intent to me – it is long, layered and remarkably straight-faced, with every line delivered passionately, heavily. But to where is that passion directed? What is it about?

Perhaps we can most safely break down ‘Damascus’ by talking about it in broad, emotional terms – what these lines, attached to their music, are trying to make us feel. There’s plenty of feeling in said music, and very little of it is contented. You can hear it from minute one, right there in that determined, sort of anxious set of acoustic chords, unambiguously minor in their tonality (‘Damascus’ is in A Minor and only uses the white keys in its chords.) Same with that scenery-chewing little piano lick, a heavily-emphasised part of the song, elevated by Sufjan’s vocal melody mirroring it on the ‘takes me back’ line. The whole affair feels secure, but dejected somehow, like the drudgery of a life condemned.

And it stretches on. For a while, actually. It’s four minutes and forty five seconds of pure melodrama, a language spoken in guitar, in banjo, in organ, in drums. It’s actually one of Sufjan’s more uncharacteristically generic arrangements, in the sense that I could easily see many other artists making a song that sounds precisely like this one. The rather standard drum part and reliable mid-tempo feel situates ‘Damascus’ unambiguously in folk rock territory, and though you can say this about a handful of other Sufjan songs, the later examples (like ‘Springfield’) are supported by maturity and the sense of an artist at the height of their songwriting powers. If ‘Damascus’ has a weakness, it is that this one feels a lot longer than it actually is. Not necessarily in a positive sense, either. It plods, and plods, and plods.

Perhaps that’s fitting. This is a song that deals extensively with transfer. Transfer of bodies, transfer of information, transfer of power, without bearing to whether that transfer is consensual or not. Desperation pours out of nearly every line in this song, especially in a chorus anchored by the lines ‘it takes me back against the everglades / Back against the out-of-state’ – we see immediately how our protagonist is a transient one, who exists entirely on the fringes of civilised society. They are displaced and in need of refuge (ideas perhaps even more relevant today than they were in 2001). The verbiage also puts them consistently in the role of object, never of subject; similar to the protagonist of ‘Kill’ only being able to reclaim any agency at all by wanting, ‘Damascus’ is a song more of ‘it takes me’, less a song of ‘I go’. A typically cheery Sufjan song topic, then: weakness, fear, subjugation. Every ounce of that drudgery that comes with displacement is here, musically and lyrically.

If we’re talking broad emotional strokes, though, there are just as many strokes of resentment on this canvas. Plenty of them, too. It’s reminiscent of ‘Kill’ in that sense, but while the narrator of ‘Kill’ crumbles before their massive, unavoidable id, the narrator of ‘Damascus’ resents their master’s ideology. Words and ideas are this song’s primary battleground. Lines like ‘do you know the adversary / And carry all the burdens of peoples' pasts?’ feel discursive in tone – even the choice of the words ‘adversary’, ‘sanctuary’ and even ‘border temple’ seem out-of-time somehow, like we are trapped in the centre of some grand generational Socratic dialogue with immense stakes for the asker. Our protagonist is reacting to another’s ideas with revulsion, knowing that those ideas will only lead to their perdition. It is a very studied revulsion, though, conveyed through distant, foggy verses and an instrumental that has all the intensity and thrill of the owner’s manual that comes with your washing machine. But for a song that represents the long, slow trudge following an intellectual defeat, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Okay. The elephant in the room, which I’ve been doggedly trying to avoid for setup reasons. ‘Damascus’ is a very religious song. Most every song from this era is a very religious song, granted; this one, though, is a little more complicated than the others. The title makes it clear that this song is about Paul the Apostle, who, in Acts 9, receives a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. Paul, a Pharisee, was travelling to Damascus with the intent of persecuting Christians there; the appearance of Jesus engendered in him a newfound devotion that led to his becoming one of the most significant figures in theological history.

This is far from the first time that Sufjan has focused in on a specific Biblical story and used it to argue a point on what it means to be faithful (or, hell, what it means to be human.) But it is the first time that Sufjan has allowed shades of gloom to seep into his faith. So far, we’ve seen the joy of Christianity; we’ve seen the awe of Christianity; we’ve seen the rage of Christianity. We’ve not seen the sadness of Christianity. We will see it plenty in his future songwriting, but until we reach Seven Swans: oil, meet water.

This context, at least, explains the motif of movement that underpins ‘Damascus’. Movement figures massively into the experience of being a Christian. Paul is converted at a moment of travel – Damascus is literally the ‘last place’ he goes as a heathen – and many devout have metaphorized faith as being akin to a journey that reaches no end until after death. That leaves us to account for how everything else in this song, including its emotional tenor, relates to the story of Paul the Apostle specifically. As far as I can figure, ‘Damascus’ lends itself to three possible interpretations vis-à-vis Paul.

Interpretation number one: the narrator of ‘Damascus’ is Sufjan, and this song is actually quite straightforward. He is directly addressing either Paul or God, making reference to Paul’s journey as an analogue of his own – a sinner embracing the ‘approaching light’ of salvation. Direct address to God is not uncommon for Sufjan, so this interpretation would be the most precedented. To me, though, it doesn’t hold water. There are too many antiquated phrases and references (‘border temple’, for one) to make me think of this song as anything but situated in Paul’s time.

Interpretation number two: the narrator of ‘Damascus’ is Paul himself, and the aforementioned emotional tenor here is not one of resentment but of fear. This would make ‘Damascus’ a very rare song in Sufjan’s work written from the perspective of a specific cultural figure. Paul is therefore speaking directly to the Lord at a moment where he is set to abandon every precept on which was constructed his sense of self. Naturally, he is terrified. The appearance of a messiah that he so firmly rejected chips away at his hard-line Judaism (‘Does the border temple fall down / I fall down / When the approaching light in me has stayed’) and leads him to feverish questioning (‘Do you float the sanctuary?’) Ultimately Sufjan tries – and, depending on your opinion of the song, succeeds at – extracting the scared, awed Saul of Tarsus from the costume of Paul the Apostle, a man who retreats ‘back against the everglades’ as an escape from his fears. Which, when you’re brought face-to-face with the creator of all mankind, does not seem so unreasonable.

Interpretation number three and the one that I find most interesting: the narrator of ‘Damascus’ is not Sufjan nor Paul, but a Pharisee whose life is thrown into turmoil by a Gentile Christianity. This interpretation would best explain the pangs of resentment that echo through the song. Suddenly, Paul is recast not as saviour but as terroriser, embodying a sort of theological colonialism that literally and figuratively displaced Jews who did not convert. The narrator wonders whether Paul has the license to speak on behalf of an entire people (‘Do you know the adversary? / And carry all the burdens of peoples' pasts?’), but it is all for naught. The border temple as fallen down; they have fallen down. They have no choice but to leave their community, refugees taken ‘back against the out-of-state’ where they will remain forever dispossessed. ‘Damascus’ is an empathetic portrayal of early Christianity’s victims, written by a real-life musician who aligns ideologically with their tormentors. That tension is key to the song’s power.

I speak as if I have any idea what this song is about, but I do not. I could see one of those interpretations, all of those interpretations, or none of those interpretations being correct. All these words in and I find myself no more able to taste the forbidden fruit. A song with this sort of deep, heavy seriousness to it, though, deserves a deep, heavy attempt at analysis. Maybe ‘Damascus’ has a little too much of all of that in it – even its fans (all three of them) won’t deny that Sufjan has made more engaging music than this. It is nothing if not a little theological puzzle box, though, and if some more ears found their way to it, perhaps one of us, one day, will crack the code.

[thegoldendoorknob]

Social media making me grouchy again

[worldlywritr]

Throughout our lives, we create countless moments and memories. These experiences shape our understanding and provide us with a sense of meaning. Yet, despite their significance, time will inevitably erase them.

In the end, we are mere transient echoes, barely a whisper in the infinite expanse of time.

[its-not-rainingg]

Perspective life advice philosophy bullshit I'm thinking about:

1. Stupid little things are what make up the human experience and everything is transient and you shouldn't feel guilty for moving on from places and people and things. Just appreciate them when they're there and appreciate that you got to exist with them.

2. If you're good and afloat then help other people but just because you can't help others doesn't mean you don't care. Take care of yourself first and like yourself because you're a person.

[tarpitbell]

10:40

You did not have to come for my throat yo

(story on AO3, called Marks of Transience, by notsevensamu)

[soulmaking]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[trailofleaves]

Haiku # 757

Spring morning… every green leaf aglow with sunlight

Spring twilight… facing each other the sun and moon

Enjoying its solitude a flower growing on barren rocks

The years passing… every autumn I count the leaves as they fall

Le poème… ce petit oiseau qui donne joie à mon cœur

Even the memories are leaves blowing in the autumn wind

Waking from a dream to a room floating in the light of the moon