desire, desire, desire (pt. 1)
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Dear ones,
I’ve been thinking through an essay on desire that will hopefully drop next week. It’s Scorpio season, which as I noted last week, is a time for sex and death energy, and so of course I’m thinking about the kind of craving that can overturn lives, the kind of yearning that can sometimes feel like a new motion of the blood in our veins, the kind of hunger that people write desperate, feverish songs about. More musings on this notion soon. But speaking of songs, as I’ve been chewing on this essay, I’ve had—on and off for weeks now—Joanna Newsom in my head.
Newsom, for anyone who might be unfamiliar, is a waify, warbly-voiced harpist whose album Milk-Eyed Mender gained her indie-darling status and Pitchfork-heyday-era success. Her music is weird and wordy, the lyrics are layered and at first (and usually, second, third, and twentieth) listen, often seem absurdist. In “Peach, Plum, Pear,” she describes “knocking me down/with the palm of your eye.” In “This Side of the Blue” (in my top 5 favorite songs of hers), she finds a way to include “the signified butt heads” alongside the sweetest saddest melody.
I told you…weird.
The reason she was in my head though, was for a song off her second release, Ys, called “Sawdust and Diamonds.” There’s a part of the meandering track where Newsom just starts saying “desire desire desire” over and over again. It was playing on loop in my brain, and suddenly the same craving I’d been thinking about waxing on more broadly took over me in relation to listening to this song. I needed to hear it, needed to remember how it started, needed to feel the harp in the back of “desire desire desire” on my skin.
So this week I played “Sawdust & Diamonds,” over and over. “Desire desire desire” comes after her first use of the word: “settle down, settle down my desire.” The pulse of the song does not obey. It’s a building, urgent song. ‘Desire’ apears a second time, right before the repetetive part, that unhinged murmuring. She sings:
“So enough of this terror/ We deserve to know light/ And grow evermore/lighter and lighter/ You would have seen me through/ But I could not undo that desire.”
We know that. We can feel it. Music/cultural studies theorist Greg Siegworth describes our somatic response to music as “this other language of resonances.” He argues that “affect” —a fancy academic word for embodied, nonlinguistic reverberations of emotional responses — “is our first, and remains our most, fundamental relationship to the world around us.” Siegworth locates this most easily in music. I do too; I’ve written before about the visceral transformation that takes place when you discover a band or even a genre that shakes you at your core.
“The best part about finding out who you are is the craving,” I say (and still standby) in Rust Belt Femme. “It feels so good to want things so desperately, that when you finally get them it’s like water on cottonmouth, like a sigh, or a bed when you’re exhausted. It’s the sinking deep relief when you know what you love with such certainty that it becomes how you make sense of yourself.”
I like to believe the same thing is true for me today, though a recent article in the Guardian expressed doubt that we can maintain the same relationship. “For the last few years, I have felt the inescapable disappearance of music from my friends’ lives,” Daniel Dylan Wray writes. His appetite, as a music writer, is as hungry as ever, but he has evidence to corroborate Spotify data suggesting that people stop seeking out new music after age 33. Both Wray and I understand that our peers with children or high-demand jobs (etcetera) may have different priorities, but there’s a grief when, as Wray writes, “what are you listening to?” is replaced with “what are you watching?” (Though I like talking about tv too!)
Admittedly, the first time I played the Joanna Newsom album on repeat, I lived at a somewhat more ardent volume. In some ways, not much has changed: I’m still a Pisces stellium, making romance out of life at every turn. But back then, I was also a little more….reckless? Large-living? Wild, probably. I remember quoting Newsom in a livejournal post, just raw and open-gutted: “Your skin is something that I stir into my tea,” for example. (She has a lot of, like, cannibal-esque lyrics that I felt so drawn to, despite never once having an actual cannibal kink. But it was hunger, a literal one turned metaphor, that I connected with….)
I was a senior in college the year that album came out, in a relationship that I’d soon end, and listened on repeat with my roommate. We partied on the weekends (in a punk way), we loved hard, we felt really romantic about Chicago, and Newsom was part of that, her harp vibrations sunk into us the way people talk about pollution, but, like, in a good way. Listening to her again this week, I remembered the heat, that yearning. I have those moments today too—with music too; see the past few weeks’ posts gushing about Plains!—but there was, I suppose, something slightly more feral in my initial discovery of her. Something hungrier.
Desire, desire, desire. This is how I’ve craved music, and sex, and love, and, in more rare occasions, traditional success (getting a book published kept me parched until I got to drink it).
Part two on desire coming soon. Until then, I invite you to listen to Newsom’s weirdo warbles and think about what leaves you….thirsty.
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading
A powerful interview with Saidiya Harman on the 25th anniversary of her profoundly important book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. I’ve only read one essay so far, but this whole issue of DSQ on sex work and disability looks awesome. My friend and brilliant radical scholar, Austin McCoy, on the state of post-George Floyd rebellion.
Watching
Started season two of The White Lotus, and as I suspected it’s not yet as compelling as the first season. But I’m going to see it through, so conclusive thoughts still TBD. I also saw the movie TILL, about Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, and her fight against racism in the wake of his death. It was beautifully made and absolutely devastating to watch.
Listening
Obviously I am listening to Joanna Newsom. :)
Joy and Attention
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