Wintersleep's Faith-Healing

Originally posted Friday, October 26, 2007

Track review: “Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes” from Welcome to the Night Sky by Wintersleep

It seems to me that the most powerful aesthetic responses are based on a certain kind of mistake.* You hear a poet speaking in your own voice – not your voice, of course, but the one you would use if you could see more vividly, speak more clearly – and the world means something again, the wind animating the leaves, the late arm of light slung across one corner of a field – these things speak to you again, just like when you were a kid and believed that the universe had nothing better to do than to tell you things.Or you hear a song, a human voice expressing the sort of misery in which one seems intractably (if irrationally) alone – and feel, for a moment, wholly understood, feel as if this voice, coming from nowhere, suddenly spoke to you directly and personally.The nature of the mistake, I think, is that it is recognized immediately, even simultaneously – that’s probably why it hurts so much. You return to the world as it is – a world where the trees aren’t talking to you, where the voice on the radio doesn’t know your name, and your unhappiness is still very much your own.Philip Larkin offered his own take on the error in a poem called “Faith-Healing”, and though he was speaking of rural women seduced to hope by the half-minute’s attention of an American evangelist, the mistake is common in religion and art – wherever an impersonal gesture, a prayer or a movie or song – is taken personally so as to resurrect some spark, some ardency and self-absorption that properly dies sometime in adolescence: “[A]s if a kind of dumb/And idiot child within them still survives/To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice/At last calls them alone, that hands have come/To lift and lighten...”My own dumb and idiot child, who has slept pretty soundly through these last several months of illness, woke a couple weeks back at the sound of Wintersleep’s “Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes”. If you read my entry on “No One Would Riot For Less” you might notice a tiny bit of an apocalyptic strain in my thinking lately, and “Dead Letter” speaks to that, drawing epic lines between sickness and grief and numbness in private life, and the public spectre of environmental collapse.The thing is, it doesn’t sound like an epic song, With its downbeat piano-based setting and intimate Hayden-esque vocals, “Dead Letter” sounds more like a message in a bottle than a public service announcement – or, rather, like the abandoned letter the song opens with: a voice that doesn’t expect to be understood or answered or to reach its destination, a voice that isn’t even sure if it has anything to say beyond the usual “it hurts” or “I can’t” or “help me make it through the night”, but is compelled to keep speaking anyway. What it says is oracular, almost incomprehensible, but points towards a crack in the world mirroring the crack in the self.In the face of the logical response, you just think the world is broken because you are, the voice affirms, tentatively, unswervingly, that he’s seen something “real and significant” in the swamp of self-absorbed pain.“I think it’s coming,” he sings, again and again, even if in between he admits that he brings a fair bit of personal baggage to the question and yeah maybe his therapist is right and maybe he thinks too much and maybe that’s even part of why he’s sick in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that a whole lot of people are sick in the same way – numb, frantic, but mostly just really, really, tired.“Dead Letter” hits its emotional stride right after the first chorus, when, high on the momentum of the “I think it’s coming”, the singer suddenly breaks from the “I” to the “we”. “I don’t know why our bodies are dead,” he sings – and it’s both a leap of faith and an admission of defeat. The sensitive, naval-gazing singer-songwriter has abruptly shoved his face in the listener’s, announcing “I know you feel like I do” – only to look down again and shrug and say he has no clue what it all means.(Cue my “dumb and idiot child” “twitching and loud with deep hoarse tears” – Larkin again – for whom I played the song a dozen or so times the first night I heard it, not just because those sobs are the sort of thing the Object Formerly Known As My Body can actually get behind, sap running again through leaden extremities – but because of something else, unique to the sort of song that, if it works, makes you grieve for both yourself and the world in the same spasm.At some point that evening while I was wandering around, sobbing and pressing repeat and feeling comfortably sorry for myself, I noticed that I could see certain things again. Like the trees. Most years around this time I’ve been able to dredge up some feeling at the changing of the leaves, some residue of the age – say, pre-sixteen – when it was all just prelude to setting the world on fire.So this year I was watching, cautiously, waiting to have my gaze caught by a patch of vivid colour I knew was there because my eye registered it, passing over, no nothing. But after wandering around and hearing “Dead Letter” for the umpteenth time, something happened – nothing, of course, like the miracle in the faith healer’s tent, no abrupt return of the deadened sense “I can SEE!” – but I did notice a patch of orange, translucent in the dusk and vivid against the solid background of evergreens, and I noticed that I could look at it pretty closely and keep looking and not feel as if it was all some exhausting assignment to find the world beautiful.It helps, of course, that “Dead Letter” is a very pretty song, full of open chords and with a delicate, piano-led counterpoint at the climax, rising as the melody falls. It doesn’t say, “it’s all going to be okay”, doesn’t stand against the desperate lyrics, but like the brief ministrations of the huckster priest in the Larkin poem, it does surprise the listener with just enough hope to grieve again. Unlike in the Larkin poem, that hope doesn’t frame itself as a momentary regression into sweet and groundless faith. In “Dead Letter”, at least, it’s framed as a question of sorts, urgent, if unanswerable.I don’t know why our bodies are dead, either, or why 10% of women between the ages of 13 and 30 feel the need to self-mutilate into order to feel something, why my friends, those with certain genetic or psychological vulnerabilities, are breaking down fifteen, twenty earlier than their parents, or why depression has grown into an epidemic such that the WHO estimates that, if current trends continue, suicide will be the leading cause of death by 2020. I can think of lots of perfectly reasonable explanations that don’t involve projecting my private angst onto the world: we expect too much, spoiled by the materialistic eighties, we eat the wrong foods, too many pre-packages chemicals, we’re over-dependent on the constant influx of new media, the instant gratification of the digital age blah blah blah blah which has crippled our ability for deeper forms of meaning (almost none of my friends fit this last description, by the way – introspective, media-unsavvy sorts whose insularity from the culture of distraction turned out to be more liability than advantage during periods of extremity – it seems to be far more difficult to weather illness and exhaustion and hospitals when one is incapable of giving oneself up to the television set).I can think of lots of more reasonable reasons, but I’ll tell you what it feels like to me – and if I’m not projecting here, too, what it feels like to the writer of “Dead Letter” – it feels like we’re falling apart because the world is dying.Pretty stupid, huh?

*I should say that I’m not talking here about the kind of power art has over a Bach scholar who spends ten years trying to synchronize the movements of the Goldberg Variations to the order of the Fibonacci sequence or a Beatles fan who knows how every part on every track of Abbey Road was made, and has several dozen theories as to why. “Powerful” here, means the intense, immediate response for which a pop song and a Shakespeare sonnet are equally fair game. Durability, I think, is a separate question.