#joanna newsom: a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version.

[septembersghost]

me watching any piece of media ever made: how can i make the thesis here about the wondrous, fulfilling, frightening, destroying, restorative, glimmering thrall of, and tragic inevitability of grief within, any and every form of love?

elvis (2022): *very first thing we hear* oh, let our love survive... *later*: love song i've known since childhood used in a dark, ominous way and a desperately tender one: some things are meant to be. take my hand, take my whole life too, for i can't help falling in love... *later still*: it was love. *last*: i need your love...

ah. okay. so you just made my job too easy. i don't even have to search for it. thank you. guess i'll go insane.

[whiteshipnightjar]

When Joanna Newsom said: "Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it."

And when Andy Samberg said: "For me, my family is the most important thing in my life. Everything in my career could go away and I would still be happy because I’m just blessed in my family. I’m so happy and I love them so much. And it means everything to me. You know, I’ve experienced career success before when I wasn’t in that situation in my personal life and it was much more empty. It doesn’t really mean as much for me personally if I don’t have anyone to share that with. And certainly that has been the case with Joanna and now our daughter. So, I don’t know, I think it’s what works for me, it’s what’s important to me, it’s the way that I like to run it. We are a lot more private I think than a lot of other people which is also just our choice."

Happy 10th wedding anniversary to the loveliest Andy and Joanna!

[weirdgirlification]

can u say more about what u mean by time as a symptom of love……abt the beast perhaps but also in general?

hello yes i would love to speak about this more! putting it under the cut because it's gotten quite long...

so the idea of time as a symptom of love comes from the song "time as a symptom" by joanna newsom, the final track on her album divers which explores the connections between love, time, and death. i'm just going to give her explanation here

"I have to admit the fear of loss was behind some of the things I wrote. Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it."

so essentially, this idea that the deepest of love is eternally haunted by death because it's the inevitable conclusion, the only possible ending. the passing of time creates this ever present fear of loss. death defines love. but at the same time, love defines death, because we would not fear this passage of time if it were not for the things we love that we do not want to lose. love effects how we view time, without it its passage would be meaningless. in some cases love can even continue to exist beyond time. after one person dies that love is still there, existing in the person who remains, existing in all the people their love may have impacted.

the connections between love and time/death are at the heart of the beast (i'm speaking about time and death as one thing because death is essentially an effect of time). the story touches on a deep, dreadful future premonition of that keeps one from being able to love others. the three timelines we see feature a connection between gabrielle and louis, this love is the common factor that unites the seemingly separate stories. it's implied that there are even more lives in which they loved each other (louis saying they listened to "evergreen" together when it came out). each timeline ends with an act that is in some way related to that love, and the connection between them continues to exist in some way even after their deaths, but whether or not it's strong even to overcome time depends on the character.

essentially, louis is a character who gives into time. in the california section, while he seems to get some sense of knowing gabrielle, and is at first hesitant to hurt her, he eventually decides to continue with his original plan and kill her. similarly, in the future world, he expresses doubts about the dna purification, but succumbs to the process in the end and comes out changed, unable to feel love in the same way he once did, the same way gabrielle still does.

gabrielle, by contrast, is defined by a love that transcends time. she remembers enough of louis in her california life to give him a chance and open the door. it kills her, but she finds him again another life, where her past memories reignite her love. what she feels is strong enough that it can't be "purified" or changed. so she goes to him again, horrified to find that while her love has persisted, his hasn't, not in the same way.

no one is shown to die in the future, but we do see the pigeon, which implies that perhaps someone will as a result of this mismatched love. or maybe it is louis's soul that has already died, even if his body hasn't. love exists beyond time, but it can't stop time or what comes with it. purification is a direct result of the passage of time, a futuristic form of "progress," but it is not without flaws. sometimes, time is enough to rid people of love. but not in every case. there's no real answer to which is stronger, just the eternal question.

[eurosleazarchive]

joanna newsom marrying andy samberg gave us the quote “when i crossed that line in my mind where i knew i was with the person that i wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. you know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

so you know. i'm doing okay.

[musicollage]

Joanna Newsom. Divers, 2015. Drag City. ( Recorded By – Steve Albini )     ~ [ Album Review | Pitchfork ]

On her fourth album, Divers, Joanna Newsom comes down in size if not scope. A love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, Divers deals with making tangible the huge mass of impending doom about the loss of love. You know, the small stuff. It's a gorgeous record, full of her usual harp wilyness and baroque rhythms.

Joanna Newsom's Divers is an album about a profound love, but it hardly features any love songs. The singer/songwriter recently explained to Uncut that her marriage in 2013 had invited death into her life, "because there is someone you can't bear to lose," she said. "When it registers as true, it's like a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." There is only one domestic vignette on the record, towards the end of "Leaving the City", where Newsom and her love go running on a beautiful day. Immediately, though, her high dims: "The spirit bends beneath knowing it must end." 2010's Have One on Me traced the death of a relationship as Newsom tried and failed to defeat a proud man's human nature. On Divers, she attempts to defeat time to stave off death.

To bear the weight of its subject, Divers fits to scale, ornate and roaming after the intimacies of Have One on Me. The arrangements—tackled by Newsom along with eight different musicians, including Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, and her brother Pete—cover the ground of all her past work in a fraction of the time, making this her most dynamic and exhilarating album. The first half in particular veers between baroque poise, jaunty blues, and rococo beauty, as if searching for answers in disparate places. Landlocked between the dry, acoustic arrangements of "The Things I Say" and "Same Old Man", the lilting harp and piano of the title track casts her lover as a deep sea diver and measures the distance between them, "how the infinite divides." The meticulous internal rhymes in the chorus of "Leaving the City" contract against the tug of her harp, a cascade of tiny parts that form a huge, billowing whole, like tiny bones in a vast wingspan. "The longer you live, the higher the rent," she sings inside the frenzy.

Divers makes a landscape out of this abstract fear of loss. On the courtly "Anecdotes" and "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", she is part of a battle fought by birds to try and wrest control of time. "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" is the most Ren Fair piece here, on which Newsom contemplates ascension to some transcendent plane, "[severing] all strings to everyone and everything." Its sister song "A Pin-Light Bent" descends sadly back towards reason and reconciliation of her unsuccessful quest to outrun time. "In our lives is a common sense/ That relies on the common fence/ That divides and attends," she sings with palpable mourning, accepting that her life, "until the time is spent, is a pin-light, bent." Where this kind of cosmic existentialism could come off like a stoner marveling at the moon, Newsom pulls it off with balance of poetry and reason. Her fantastical world is sometimes hard to get your head around, but it brings surreal, sometimes sci-fi delight to a record that's otherwise often lyrically despairing.

Where Newsom's second and third records each overhauled what came before, Divers is a refinement that draws on elements of each of its predecessors. The shapes of her records often get misinterpreted as concepts themselves, rather than the sign of a writer attuned to her work's needs. Ys from 2006 was the five-song suite; Have One on Me from 2010, the three-disc opus. On its surface Divers is more conventional, a single disc where nine of its 11 songs are under six minutes long, but it also happens to be a wild, genuine concept album. The final song, "Time, As a Symptom", ends with Newsom in raptures, commanding white stars, birds, and ships to "transcend!" On the very last burst, she clips the word to "trans—". The first word on opener "Anecdotes" is "sending." It is a perfect loop.

Most artists on their fourth album settle into atrophy, or at least comfort, Newsom delivers such complex, nuanced music, filled with arcane constructions, that she is only her own yardstick. (In a recent interview about Divers, David Longstreth cited The Milk-Eyed Mender as one of the reasons he quit college: "[What] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level?") Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. D**ivers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real. Nothing will stem the fear of a loved one's death, which western culture does little to prepare us for until the very end, but by pulling at the prospect of mortality from every angle, Newsom emerges straighter-spined, and invites you to stand alongside her.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

It’s interesting to read HCTM’s ending as not quite happy, when Mes’s unsure after-life expectancy is exactly the fate of life-expectancy we all live with.

The musician Joanna Newsom (married to SNL alum Andy Samberg) articulated beautifully how love and loss are sewn together in an interview with Uncut. “When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

And though I can’t speak much on Thai-specific beliefs, from what I’ve read in Taoist and Buddhist inflected philosophies, this understanding of existence’s preciousness is pretty integral to connecting to the world in a healthy way.

I’d add, as someone who grew up with early parental near-loss for one parent and actual loss for the other, that the early parental loss both Thun and Mess experience shades their experience of love in adulthood this way, too. Not only that loss hangs over the ghost and afterlife themes, but I also could not watch the opening and ignore the specter of the HIV/AIDs crisis hanging over the queer death narrative—not in an overly heavy way, but having a gay male character die in the 90s carries symbolic baggage. What I find so beautiful is that the characters escape death and loneliness, and by the end have this deep gratitude for however long they get to spend together.

inspired by @dudeyuri pointing this out in He's Coming to Me

I'm thinking about how HCTM goes HARDER with the concept of 'if you know how it's going to end, why start anything?' than even Bad Buddy.

In Bad Buddy, Pran doesn't see the use in verbalizing his feelings for Pat because it can only end in tragedy. He looks at their situation with their parents and doesn't see any way that he and Pat can have a happily ever after. But Pat's relentless optimism and love in the face of this helps Pran realize that some things are worth trying. Like in the episode 5 rooftop kiss, where Pat kisses Pran and Pran goes "...what the hell. Might as well go all in" and kisses Pat back. (I've talked about the kiss here and here (shout out to @dudeyuri' contributions); and more broadly about Pat and Pran and genre/tragedies here and here)

In Bad Buddy's case, Pran and Pat are able to defy their seemingly pre-destined tragic ending through the power of their relentless determination to be together (see @chickenstrangers' brilliant post here). If it means fake breaking up, if it means hiding parts of their lives from their parents and others, they can do it. They refuse to have their story end in tragedy. And they succeed! They have found enduring love and a future together in a situation where that seemed impossible, a guaranteed inevitability. They defied generations of family feud forbidden romance endings (Romeo & Juliet, Kwan & Riam) (and their own families' intergenerational trauma - see this post by @waitmyturtles) to find a happy ending.

But Bad Buddy's ending is not 100% happy - Pat and Pran aren't able to be open in front of their parents, they aren't able to realize their achingly simple dreams (Pat being respected and not questioned by his father, Pat able to join Pran's family at dinner - see @grapejuicegay 's tags peer reviewed here).

In the same vein, HCTM doesn't have a fully happy ending either, and it also deals with the looming spectre of inevitability tragedy. Only this time, it's even more inevitable.

(If you haven't finished HCTM beware spoilers)

HCTM establishes that ghosts remain because they died before their time, because they don't know the reason they died, or because they didn't get the proper funerary rites. If these issues are rectified, the ghost will be able to pass on and be reincarnated.

(forgive my potentially hazy remembering of HCTM, it's been a few months since I watched it and I'm writing this on a train)

Mes hasn't passed on because he didn't know the reason he died (and he hadn't received the proper care post-death from his family). Thun helps him rectify this: solves the mystery of how he died and helps arrange a proper send-off. Thun does all this because he loves Mes and wants to help him, and despite knowing it will help Mes pass on and leave him - the inevitability of their situation looms large.

At the end of the show, Thun cries because he believes Mes had left him forever, but by some miracle Mes has remained. But this is temporary, and we all know this. One day, Mes will pass on and be reincarnated. Not today - today Mes and Thun get to stay together - but one day, that is how this story will end.

So like Bad Buddy, it's not exactly a happy ending (Pat and Pran are trapped in a glass closet, Thun and Mes will be separated one day). But unlike Bad Buddy, there is less chance of a reversal of fortune, of defying the inevitable. Thun and Mes are working with cosmological forces of death and rebirth. Perhaps their love will be able to overcome this and Mes can stay with Thun... but the show doesn't confirm this. If anything, the show makes it clear that this is temporary, that eventually Mes will leave Thun.

Despite this though, and like always in Aof's stuff - better to have loved and lived than not at all. Despite their less than stellar ending, Pat and Pran have found an enduring love in each other and their lives are better and happier for it (Pat says it himself: he was happier when Pran wasn't in his life because he didn't have to compete so much, but he was damn lonely). Thun and Mes are the same - sure their love won't be everlasting because eventually Mes will have to pass on, but the joy and love it brings to their lives (and the self-realization it brought to Thun's) is worth it all.

Bad Buddy ends in the middle of things (Pran and Pat still haven't rectified things with their family) and so does HCTM (Thun and Mes are together, but only temporarily. We don't see their ending).

Shout out to another @dudeyuri post that made me think about this (here) and @waitmyturtles masterful post about suffering in Asian BLs and, more specifically, the lack of closing loops in narratives/relationships, which I have been mulling over since - Bad Buddy and HCTM's stories aren't over, we don't see the endings.

[wynsalls]

Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.

Joanna Newsom, 2015 interview on her album, Divers.

[whiteshipnightjar]

it is so unbearably hard to write or talk about love when that love is so knotted, interlaced and entangled with grief. when it feels like all that’s left is all-consuming grief. when it seems that love becomes grief. idk how joanna newsom does it. bc it just hurts too much. idk how she does it.

“Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

idk how she does it. idk how to do it. idk how to see through it.

[whiteshipnightjar]

“Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

Joanna Newsom on her fourth album “Divers” and her marriage to Andy Samberg

Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (One World: 2020), xv–xvi, xvii.

[whiteshipnightjar]

[whiteshipnightjar]

hello,how would you deal with lost ? I think i just cant make peace with it

hi :) that's a big question. Loss is such a hard thing to comprehend sometimes because whatever it is, it changes you and your life. It's always been a difficult thing for me to accept (and still is tbh) but I think the loss of a person means you're losing a part of yourself too. So, you have to learn to live with and accept the new you too. And that's really hard when all you can feel is immense pain. Grief and loss, at least at the beginning, does not give much space for reason.

I'll use a Joanna Newsom quote here to help me cuz she's better at putting it into words than me: "Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." Isn't that so true? Loss and grief is inseparable from love. But it also means, your loved one, whoever or whatever it is, lives on in your love and in your memory. It's hard for us as humans, brought up in a physical world, surrounded by things, to maybe see the loss of someone as just a physical loss, a loss of a body, touch, but not soul, their memory, how they made you feel because we tend to first equate the human with the body. But they're still there in those past experiences, and those memories and feelings are yours forever. No one can take them away.

There's a really beautiful story about Kafka encountering a little girl who had lost her doll told by May Benatar:

"Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate.

Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.

"Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures." This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted.

When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: "my travels have changed me... "

Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: "every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.""

Time. I think it a big part of it comes down to time. It doesn't mean that time necessarily heals all wounds but I think it can help soothe them. It can help you accept the loss or teach you how to live with it.

Someone once asked me how I interpret the line "Love is not a symptom of time. Time is just a symptom of love" and I think I'd say it all rings true to me here too. Loss is part of love. I'll add it here, maybe you'll find something in that response that might soothe you <3