#this is my rambling brain on pfizer like rip organized thoughts

[wistfulrat]

heyo, it’s me, mary oliver/phoebe bridgers anon. :-) i’m so happy those connections resonated with you!! pls feel free to word vom to your heart’s content. i seriously adored cruel river and would love to hear anything you have to say about it/time/longing/intertextuality/anything. <3

aahh thank you so much i’ve been listening to funeral on repeat since yesterday! also you truly have opened the wistful floodgates with this ask.

sometimes i feel like my brain is just one tangled mess of thematic comparatives. bc it went from your (cruel river -> funeral -> in blackwater woods) to (nick drake’s place to be -> alabama shakes’ sound and color -> patroclus retelling his story to thetis in madeline miller’s song of achilles)

i feel like if were to force a through-line here it’s looking for that specific bittersweetness of holding sand—having something and watching it slip through your hands simultaneously. it’s this really specific kind of longing that widens the definition of nostalgia to me. i feel like eleventy7 is really good at accessing that emotional tension. bc in the act of remembering, an artist gets to suspend you/a character in time—where all versions of the past and present self are occurring at once. you’ve temporarily breached an inevitable distance. and i love how concrete language sort of fails us in describing that disorienting feeling.

so mary oliver talks about nameless ponds, trees whose bodies turn into pillars, and black rivers. and phoebe bridgers talks about a dream where she’s screaming underwater. and alabama shakes talks about “falling awake”—sleeping and waking up to a strange world. and nick drake talks about himself as colors in nature that emphasize how he’s changed. and madeline miller writes patroclus saying “But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth.”

like it’s about the immensity!! of time, loss, change, newness, etc. and i think that’s something i love about post-deathly hallows drarry fics because you get to chase the nostos after kleos—all the reflections on the loss of adolescence/innocence that come post-war. it’s such a satisfying narrative movement to me. which i think makes sense bc i’ve always favored the odyssey over the iliad for this same reason.

i think mostly it’s the surreality of this mood that really does it for me. that almost sublime occurrence in visceral memories that sort of pull you outside yourself. the longing is near unbearable but you can’t help but want to sit inside it and look and look. like trying to hold a world in your hand. i love it.

anyway thank you for this, it’s put me in my favorite art headspace tbh haha.

here are the sound and color // place to be lyrics :)