Swift Going
At the 1989 Tour - photo by Chaz McGregor on Unsplash
Taylor Swift was two years old when a group of researchers at the University of Florida recruited eight pregnant subjects and, carefully inserting a miniature hydrophone into each, recorded various sounds as experienced by a human fetus in utero. Studies examining fetal aural and neurological development in response to various sound stimuli (human voices, low- and high-frequency sounds, music) had been in progress for years, and the market responded in the typical American way to our expanding neuroscientific body of evidence. Products and programs abounded. Any parturient could now anticipate great things from her offspring just by playing Mozart or Patsy Cline to her growing belly. Of course, obstetricians warned that the converse also applied, that prenatal toxic noise could potentially damage junior’s development. But the matter of preference is a sticky wicket, and the line dividing great music and noise has always run between the ears of the listener. Is this division as essential, deep, and pre-rational as the laws of physics? Or is it irrational and somewhat lame—rather like any cultural prejudice which might sprout from infancy?
Who knows what played on the stereo during that larval stage, but for whatever reason I never developed a great love of popular music. I do recall some limited experiences stretching back to childhood, circa 1984, when I would sit on our green shag living room carpet and listen repeatedly to my mother’s original Beatles LPs. “Here Comes The Sun” is still an all-time favorite. My older brother was always the real fan, and his early teenage deep dives into Vinyl Solution (the local record shop, now defunct) also seeped into my musical consciousness by osmosis. He educated me on the classics from Led Zeppelin to Steely Dan, from the Pixies to Prince. There was also a Grateful Dead phase, but more on that later.
The fruits of age ripen to a curse, but until they do, each cumulative memento mori allows a more generous honesty with oneself about preferences. Most evenings after the daily grind I simply want to listen to the sonic equivalent of a glass of wine—say, a soothing viol or lute (I like pieces of Scheidt—Samuel Scheidt, 1587-1654, an early baroque German composer) or Miles Davis or Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard—what my father, whose own idiosyncratic tastes overlap with mine in these areas, has facetiously dubbed Nice Music®. I still sometimes obsess over certain “popular” artists. In 2014 I listened to Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie & Lowell'' on repeat for about three weeks straight, and a few years later I went on a pretty long Vulfpeck bender, but these dabblings tend to be less than comprehensive. We all know friends and relations who put such narrow and uneven connoisseurship to shame, who could describe in philosophical detail their preferred aesthetic for sub-sub-genres of Scandinavian electronica and then pivot to their top five Soukous bands—displays that quickly border on self-parody. Ultimately I’m just a tourist in these parts, but I know what I like.
Let us at least acknowledge that taste in music, like anything personal, can get touchy. In high school English I once gave a report in which I asserted that Bach represents the pinnacle of musical expression in history, arguing both his necessity and sufficiency. The teacher (a bland, unhappy person) gave me a B and said, “You can’t make that argument; it’s just what you prefer.” Well, an honest critic is willing to say that certain things are better than others, that some opinions are wrong, and that Bach is the greatest writer of music in history. So there. But as my ancestry reminds me, I am of the people, and so I should think about popular things, I guess. Here goes nothing.
Rock and roll arose from the resilience of Black Americans, who chose levity in the midst of their long and just lament over oppression. Bourgeois teens quickly claimed it as the siren song of sex and drugs, of the party. Along came punk, a big loud middle finger to the popular talented crowd. By the disco age, pop seemed to represent a new version of the rock and roll party scene shellacked to a mirror polish upon which its users could neatly line up their coke. “Conscience rock” grew out of the protest songs of the sixties and seventies, with perhaps U2 headlining as cool rockers caring about injustice. Alternative arose as a sort of…what’s the word…alternative thumb-sucking version of punk’s middle finger. (I hesitate to go any further. I confess I’m feeling ledged-out on a “coolness” cliff at this point, like a lot of parents struggling to understand their kids’ music.) Eventually parents insinuated themselves into junior’s social life, schlepping junior around for playdates (and later, one presumes, for real dates, although it’s doubtful they still have those), organizing junior’s college application portfolio, and all the while co-listening to junior’s music. The bedroom and record store were no longer secluded haunts in which to toy with rebellion.
The license my parents granted me as a kid almost beggars belief. It was even shocking to me at one point, come to think of it. Summertime, age six, maybe around ‘83 or ‘84: my parents had left us home with a youngish babysitter who didn’t pay much attention. I got a hold of a metal fork, and applying my practical experience with Lego, I judged that the squared-off end of the handle would slot in perfectly with a wall outlet. What I remember most vividly was the buzz. Not so much a light tingling sensation—I mean an audible baritone buzzzz which exploded from within my brain pan, extended down my right arm to my white-knuckled hand, and shook the entire house. The babysitter screamed, yanked me from the wall, and carried me to the church next door where my parents were attending a wedding (although it may in fact have been a funeral, which could have been handy to double up on). Other examples: we would ride our bikes sans helmets across town, across active train tracks, across multiple lanes of traffic like little feral mammals; we built (and burned) wooden forts; we staged live bottle rocket fights; we broke up model rocket engines and repurposed the propellant for miniature IEDs—any of which today might land us in counseling and our parents in prison.
I’m still amazed that my folks allowed me to see the Grateful Dead unsupervised as a seventeen-year-old, something I’d never let my own kids do. Historians claim that ancient Greece would strike a time-traveling contemporary American as bizarre. The religious rituals, for instance, would seem utterly alien to us. These historians have obviously never seen the Dead live, which is a Dionysian ecstatic festival par excellence. Pre-show, I watched an acquaintance load a grilled cheese sandwich with a good half-cup of magic mushrooms. (He came out of his trip some years later and is doing well now, by all accounts.) Mom and Dad would be happy to know I did not actively ingest any substances other than good old H₂O, but I am quite sure I got a contact high in the skunky smoke-enshrouded arena which in essence doubled as a giant hotbox; I believe it was during “Eyes Of The World” that a nearby security officer threw in the towel and took repeated hits off a spliff the size of a Cohiba. Quite simply, it was the most charismatic church service—albeit a drug-fueled, pagan one—that I had ever witnessed. Until I saw Taylor Swift.
Parental obsession over prenatal exposure unfolded into a wider worship of safety, and kids predictably grew more boring and eunuchoid. This shift happened to coincide with the last time I set foot in Soldier Field. I saw U2 in concert during their PopMart™ tour, which was apparently designed to level a critique against corporate greed. (Sarcastic Bono: “We made more money on tour than any band in history, and so we decided to build this!” <pointed to mainstage jumbotron> I sort of got it, but also I didn’t get it.) Twenty-five years on, we live in an even stranger time. Bono himself has now confessed his belief that the greatest factor in alleviating global poverty is ”entrepreneurial capitalism.” Half of Americans slumber under the blanket of consumerism, snug in the dream that our artisanal turntables and heated steering wheels help lift up the destitute in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, while the second half run around like headless chickens ritualistically squirting on the artwork and squawking the house is on fire. From time to time the third half of us look up from our screens, wipe off the Cheez-It grease, and scratch our heads in dazed apathy. Meanwhile, our safe and ruthlessly validated kids sink into a collective depression. What’s left to bind everyone together but a public spectacle? And who better to take up that cross than the world’s most successful, popular, and wealthy pop star—one who bridges X and Z?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who were there when Milli Vanilli lip-synched their way to the top and everyone else. And this, incidentally, describes the generational bread slices holding together the Taylor Swift sandwich.
Last fall my brother and I (both weighing in at the tail end of Gen X—cohort one) laid the groundwork for attending a Taylor Swift Eras Tour™ performance. We decided to spring for tickets to the June 3 Chicago show (not on the night she swallowed a fly—I don’t know why she swallowed a fly). My daughter and my niece and nephew (all teenagers, Gen Z, and confirmed Swifties—cohort two) were foaming at the mouth to go, and so I did what any loving father would do. I asked my wife to babysit the computer and endure the eight-hour Ticketmaster struggle session to buy our tickets. News outlets covered the disastrous presale rollout, culminating in bipartisan congressional antitrust action. According to billboard.com, the site (calibrated to six-figure traffic levels) likely failed due to unregistered fans and bots launching upwards of three-and-a-half billion simultaneous ticket orders.
Sarah’s a tech whiz with the patience of Job, and she deftly secured five tickets together in section four thirty-seven. Perfect seats. She clicked “confirm” and the website crashed. Reports vary, but she might have said a swear word. She frantically restarted the procedure and was only able to find five seats together in section four forty-five, nosebleeds in the upper corner of the stadium. The frustration abated somewhat as the resale value skyrocketed over the next few days. One began to mentally negotiate with one’s daughter about selling up…a scalped ticket would cover airfare to southern France, where I could eat duck at a real bistro and wash it down with a glass or three of Bandol… Then I reflected that a few upper-crusters had snared front row seats with backstage passes (potential resale value north of twenty thousand dollars per ticket). That some are willing to pay twice the lifetime earnings of your average Burundian to see one concert leaves me a bit nauseated, but then most Americans don’t even know Burundi exists. One could say it’s not popular. Or one could say that we Americans deserve whatever is coming for us.
The third of June dawned bright and clear, a beautiful upper midwestern summer day, one of thirty per annum allotted to us by the weather gods. We drove down the West Michigan lakeshore to I-94 (a grim but serviceable expressway; a symbol of our workaday lives), rounded the cervix of the big lake from whence Michael Jackson arose (Gary, IN. motto: We Are Doing Great Things), until we rolled into the south loop. After dropping off the car in the eighty-dollar parking garage, we took a stroll along the lake from Grant Park down to the steps of Shedd Aquarium, where we sat on the green grass overlooking the lake and I silently judged people partying on moored yachts. One of them, listing, looked a bit top heavy with dancing large people on the flybridge, and I worried about that, but I was also keen to watch a surrealist parody of the capsizing of the Vasa in which the ship’s subwoofers blast out the “Cha Cha Slide” while going down.
We enjoyed an early supper at Minghin restaurant. (Highlights included stir fried udon noodles with duck, various dim sum plates, and Hong Kong style lobster. Let it be known, I’ll capitalize on any chance to taste the true wok hei, and this place basically delivered.) From there we had an easy one-mile constitutional, ignoring hawkers selling seven-dollar water and light-up cowgirl hats, snaking our way around the museum park to the stadium just south of the Field Museum which advertised a new exhibit: “The First Kings Of Europe.” We were soon enveloped by a murmuration of Swifties fluttering into Soldier Field, and suddenly the masters thesis potential of the whole scene struck me—First Kings/Taylor Swift—a near-perfect juxtaposition of archaeo-masculine and neo-feminine manifestations of power, wealth, etc. Have at it, kids.
We entered the big flying saucer-looking facility and made our way through the echoey concourse and tunnel up to the stairs, pitched at a fifty-degree angle and providing good practice for a Swiss Via Ferrata, leading us to section four hundred forty-five, row twenty-five, tucked right up in the armpit of the stadium. My sanguine brother described it as an “extreme side view.” Carrying the body metaphor further, this vantage point offered a delicious prospect of the right buttock of the main stage and the entire membrum virile of the thrust stage.
I am given to understand that it’s no longer polite to assume gender, but my medical training has equipped me to distinguish biological sex. On the basis of external phenotype, I estimated the demographic ratio of the crowd ten-to-one, female to male. A majority were fifteen to thirty years old. A small minority were vigilant dads scanning for middle-aged men going stag, middle-aged men with…how shall I put it…impolite predilections. (A career in medicine affords an unblinkered view of humanity. I will spare you the details, gentle reader, but one story involves Viagra™, blindness, and the old-timey euphemism “yoke my mule.”) Alas, I was too preoccupied to confirm reports that some fans accouter themselves with adult diapers to avoid missing a single moment. In conclusion, young women love Taylor Swift even more than boomer dentists love Billy Joel.
I had a really hard time engaging my brain. I felt numbed by the crowd, space, noise, the jumbotron running a continuous Taylor Swift infomercial (behind-the-scenes clips of various music video productions interspersed with paid lackeys gushing over their boss). The week before the Big Day my daughter read reports of a strange Taylor Swift post-concert “amnesia” (henceforth “TSA”), a phenomenon in which fans wake up the next day possessing no specific recollection of the event; and so my initial brain fog had me a bit concerned. More on that later, because now the opening acts were coming on:
1. Owenn
Who reminded us six times that his name is “Owenn. With two N’s.” One imagines his publicist pulling him aside after dress rehearsal like a boxing coach in the corner: “You’re really moving well. Very pelvic. What I need you to do is remind your opponent that you aren’t just any ‘Owen’; hit ‘em with the two N’s, again and again. No mercy.”
2. Girl In Red
Who tried to win over our hearts and minds with Dickinsonian lyricism: “You stupid b----- / can’t you see / the perfect one / for you is me.” And yet poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden reminds us, and so she resorted to frontal assault: “AFTER THESE FIRST FEW SONGS, YOU’VE PROBABLY GUESSED THAT I’M A RAGING F***ING LESBIAN!” The crowd roared.
Our armpit-level seats afforded us a view “behind the curtain,” so we could catch a glimpse of performers walking from the green room to a sort of holding pen, or chute, behind the main stage. Scattered shrieks arose at these moments. Whoever was in charge (a sort of offensive coordinator, one presumes) gave us a breather after the openers, and then an animated clock appeared on the big screen, counting down from the two-minute mark. Fans anticipating The Big Entrance had the look of a young bride about to receive unqualified praise from her mother for the first time in her adult life.
And then She arrived, rising among giant red silk sails on a motorized lift embedded in center stage to achieve full phoenix bird-goddess effect. Initial impressions: I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but while addressing the crowd after the first couple numbers she sounded like the CEO of an ultra-high-end river cruise company, something like—I’m honored to be here this evening, and to deliver you a world-class curated entertainment experience for the next three hours. Also, she looked a bit like a babysitter made up for a Vogue cover shoot. In fact, appearances carried a lot of weight here:
TS: “How many of you put in a considerable effort to be here this evening?”
(Loud cheering. I raised my hand. I don’t think she noticed me.)
TS: “How many of you made a considerable effort toward your outfit for this evening?”
(Louder cheering. I looked down at my drab slacks and T-shirt. Whoops. But I still don’t think she noticed me.)
TS: “How many of you made a considerable effort to memorize lyrics for this evening?”
(A real eardrum-splitter, this one. Uh-oh. I felt like a delinquent student. And now she looked and sounded more like a schoolmarm. Was she looking up this way? No, it’s just her smiling visage on a big-ass screen.)
I’ve never participated in a Viking berserker attack, but I know that sustained trancelike frenzy is possible. I’ve seen and heard it. Each song intro shoved the crowd’s communal fork deep in the socket, so to speak—a sinus-rattling massed shriek in the treble register, which shifted instantly into a sixty-three-thousand-strong unison singing of every lyric. The concert was a rapturous three-hour forty-five-number sing-along. How is it possible for fans in the upper deck to be looking down at a severe angle and yet simultaneously appear to be gazing up in euphoria?—a knowing euphoria, as if to convey, “But of course she would play my favorite song next; every song is my favorite, plus we’re friends!” What really floored me was the aggressiveness of the participation; the stadium deck literally rocked underfoot. (I recalled the high school physics video of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure and wondered if the Soldier Field engineers had accounted for vocal resonance.) At one point after a quiet pause an animation of a snake flashed briefly on the jumbotron, and the crowd went Pavlovian. The signal was lost on me.
What wasn’t lost on me was the level of production. I had never been to any show or performance in which the technical melded so absolutely with the creative. I saw a sound and light and dance show. I saw a rock concert. I saw a series of semi-autobiographical musical theater set pieces. The sound, light, visual effects, musicians, and dancers were the best a gazillion bucks could buy. The stage itself was a huge mechanized robot built of integrated high-def LED screens. (At one point she literally dove into an opening in the thrust stage, whose entire surface transmitted the wavy image of a turquoise Caribbean lagoon, and then carried along an image of her “swimming underwater.” Pop goddess auto-baptism in full technological effect.) But what impresses the uninitiated the most is the sheer breadth of Taylor Swift’s performance: folk, country pop, piano songbook, hip hop, discotheque, choreography, acting, all done at the highest level.
Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner
What’s a critic to do when his subject has a billion in the bank, a servile fanbase, and an airtight preemption (“Haters gonna hate”)? I don’t know, but I cannot ignore the two shadows, one economic and the other aesthetic, which darken my admittedly limited experience with Taylor Swift. Artists have always needed money to do what they do; artists have always needed patrons. But modern production brings something more dishonest into play. In popular music culture, signaling often occurs at a superficial level—the lyrics, chord structures, rhythms, poses, glances, costumes, even the conventional address to the fans (“I love you guys!”). Convenience renders the product hypersalable and therefore remunerative; it’s far easier to buy industrial baloney than the true mortadella. When it seems that every song, every choreographed move, every gesture, every coy expression leveled at the jumbotron camera is literally calculated for a return, I begin to feel put upon, the enchantment cracks, and I’m less willing to allow the performance to affect me. My emotional defenses are raised; the “human” moments, and there were a few, run into the wall of my incredulity and I even start to question the reality of the music. The Eras Tour™ represents the pinnacle of a corporate-artistic complex. The product is synthetic inspiration.
I sense that Taylor Swift herself recognizes this problem. Artists with absolute conviction tend to “fourth wall off” the audience and offer themselves purely on a musical level (e.g. Miles Davis, virtually all premier classical musicians). Taylor Swift oddly compensates by doing the exact opposite. She creates little personal vignettes to connect with the audience between songs, but the songs themselves are all “acted out” with a wink-and-nod, a sort of benevolent deception which, for me, creates a spiritual force field between the actual music and listener—is she performing for us, for the jumbotron camera, or for herself? The crowd, many of whom were watching through handheld screens of their own, didn’t notice or care. Another curiosity—this was the first high-level arena concert I’ve attended in which the performer described her creative process and asserted the existence of a “narrative arc” in the upcoming song, which seemed vaguely grasping. But I’d rather not hoist myself with any petard, much less my own, so I’ll shift gears and try to enumerate the reasons for my utterly numb reaction to her music.
1) Lyrics. Unless you’re Bob Dylan, pop lyrics are forgettable, especially when they rely on common tropes and fail to transcend the self. Taylor Swift leans heavily on boy trouble and a beige personal history. Not a whole lot to mine there, and she seems unable to convincingly extend the creative scope beyond herself. I admit the “Folklore” set was somewhat more compelling in this respect (see: Aaron Dessner, who co-wrote a number of these songs), but by and large her banal themes, almost-slant rhymes, and cliché evaporated into the Chicagoan air.
2) Melody. It’s what insinuates any new popular music into the deep memory and saves it from oblivion, and it is why many folk songs have lived on for centuries. Strong melodies do the heavy lifting, and the professionals I know tell me they’re difficult to write (or is it rather, to discover?). A hook is sort of fun for a while, but driving around with the windows down and stereo up won’t whisper a deeper truth into your sister’s cancer diagnosis. Songs relying on catchy hooks, money, and viral momentum just don’t stick. In a sublime irony of nomenclature, the Eras Tour™ epitomizes gratification now, not the delight and instruction of generations unseen in the future. Obviously, I’m a lone ranger here and there are a billion Swifties prepared to sing me into oblivion. I stand by my prediction. A few songs will make it into the shopworn wedding reception playlist, but otherwise TSA will set in well before two generations have passed.
J.S. Bach was never rich or even famous until a young man of genius named Mendelssohn made him so a century later. What is it that makes his (Bach’s) music sound fantastic on literally any instrument, in any musical genre, on any continent? (hear: Wendy Carlos, Jacques Loussier, Béla Fleck, Bach Collegium Japan, Vulfmon, et al.) I don’t know, but those who might argue contra artistic universality must turn a blind eye to the scope of Bach’s achievement. “What is the basis of real, durable art?” is a question I wish I could ask Mark Rothko, whose work I can’t say I love, but which serves as a powerful memento mori, a sublime counterweight to Bach’s positive account. Technical skill and raw talent should go without saying, but it probably needs saying. Perhaps a willingness to sacrifice material gain and popularity for the sake of integrity. Maybe a reaching out and a reaching up—to God?—let us at least say to the human experience beyond oneself and one’s present context and to the rather controversial idea of our redemption, which I take as the gravitational center to art’s galaxy; a Singularity which divides and defines both darkness and light, Melpomene and Thalia.
Of course, none of this is life or death. Or is it? Does music rise to the level of sustenance? If so, we need the gut-check seriousness of high art. Only the first bite of a deep-fried Twinkie delivers something of a rush, yet the market for crispy glistening treats continues to explode. Has the snack tsunami overwhelmed our mental palates and rendered us unfit to give mortality the respect and attention it deserves? I consider what we’ve clinically renamed “assisted living facilities,” where our elders hideously linger awaiting the scythe, often alone, and then I reflect on the inevitable push for euthanasia. We Midwesterners can sometimes take our earnestness too far—maybe I have a hard time accepting unabashed happiness which so often comes off as obtuse. If Taylor Swift can laugh at herself for unplanned public bug eating, maybe I should ease up on the old intellectual tack piano, sit back, and enjoy the show. Except my rebound melancholy was almost overwhelming as we walked back to the car past mendicants literally crying out for food. At that moment it seemed disproportionate and pretentiously tone-deaf to consume vast resources on such a shallow and fleeting pageant.
It’s tempting to assume that a wildly popular production will grow beyond its own root system, but it never does. The Eras Tour™ will fade from the imagination because it has nothing new or transcendent to say. And Ms. Swift will be doomed to create yet another entertainment even as her thoughts run dry and her body shrivels. All the while, unassuming, honest works grow into the cracks and crevices of a culture, working on the edifice until those with eyes to see and ears to hear are forced to renovate.
My brother drove us home. And as he did and as the kids slept, my mind boomeranged around the glory and tragedy of progress. Just as we complain about driving and flying at speeds incomprehensible to most people in history, just as we enjoy access to every possible food in quantity and grow ill and unhappily divorced from the land, just as medical advances have raised an insatiable idol of physical well-being, so we’ve gained access to every entertainment, imaginable and unimaginable, and have unhinged our souls.
Aesthetic squalor amidst material abundance typifies our culture, and the expressway we rode upon embodies the grand and impoverished way we live. Vaguely Roman in its utility, it channels the impatient power of the moneyed individual. As the apotheosis of lobotomized consumerism, the expressway is loud, competitive, alienating, and never complete. We cruise at speed in our separate cells along a one-dimensional swath of the nation, tricked into believing this is freedom, when actual freedom is as hidden as the mental picture of a rolling field and is pursued at a foot pace. While not nearly as dismal as air travel, the expressway is often uncomfortable if not dehumanizing. (On one childhood road trip my parents were forced to pull off in the middle of nowhere when I reached what the ancients might have called vesica maxima—imperial levels of desperation. I stumbled out of the van like an encumbered grunt, ran through crunchy grass toward the second cut of rough, and relieved myself in the Gallic manner. The thick taut stream looked like a yellow pole, unbending and disproportionate to the caliber of my little boy weenie. Two minutes later my dad remarked, “Boy, I guess you really had to go!”). Even some simple beauties brought to us by industry, like the aural pleasure of cracking open a canned beverage, are disgraced by the contents. As we picked up the interstate, we popped a couple of iced coffee drinks to keep us awake; alas, a few sips of the unctuous gaggy syrup smothered the fresh metallic hiss and clack of the pull tab.
Maybe it was too late for anything to appeal—the unchristian hour laced the personal injury lawyer, strip club, and fast food billboards with an even more slimy, pervy, and vomity bite. The route home (seven lanes jousting their way into the city, seven fighting their way out, I-94 east through Indiana and into Michigan, I-196 north) is so familiar that it shifted from the merely mundane into soporific background noise punctuated by moments of terror. In the dark we swerved once, then again to avoid a succession of raccoons bumbling out of nature into our lane, their eyes leering like phosphorescent silver dollars. Then from behind and without warning, a string of two dozen motorcycles screamed by at ludicrous speed (I estimated them doing at least a hundred twenty miles per hour to our seventy-five); they looked and sounded like a burst of quarter-ton tracer rounds extending into the darkness toward an unseen asymptote.
What do our diversions aim for? On a moral level our shows and concerts certainly surpass monstrosities like medieval bear-baiting and cat-burning (not to mention the horrors of the Roman arena). But because they are monetized, they mostly resonate through the same primal psychological valence—dissipation—and our technological prowess somehow both distorts and amplifies the defect. Maybe the majority seeks not an aesthetic, but an anesthetic from our relentless way of life, and who am I to blame them? My tendency to assign moral weight to matters of taste arises from a corresponding trait; a primitive, perhaps vestigial survival mechanism. I scrutinize the reckless motorcyclists more or less the same way I do the big dancing yacht people and the entire Taylor Swift phenomenon, and I settle on a sort of injurious folly to it all—the injury arises from aesthetic charade; the folly, from our susceptibility.
That evening still leaves me drained and I can’t bring myself to lift the glittering carapace of Taylor Swift’s oeuvre and pick through her collected lyrics for savory morsels. As I say, I’m a mere tourist. I can only struggle to understand a world in which no unmapped islands remain, where there is no true exploration, only a series of wide-eyed stunts. Ocean depths and outer space are both uninhabitable and also documented safely by robotic devices; and yet we go there. No dolomite stands unpeaked, and so we climb without ropes and for the camera. Beauty seems to have been tapped to the creative limit, and so we’re presented with kitsch, grotesques, or spectacles. I don’t condemn our striving, since I certainly benefit from technology and I also feel the temptation to amuse myself with novelty. I reflect on the givenness of it all, vis-a-vis those aforementioned Burundians. What would they make of our empire of diversion? I’m not sure they would respond with indignation so much as bewilderment. Speeding without a destination, so to speak, betrays a sterility of imagination purchased by our fantastic material privilege and unbounded digital access; not a static ennui but rather an oscillation between listlessness and mania. In our haste for relief we forget the innumerable islands surrounding us, each of whom could be discovered and named Formosa, beautiful, but only in a state of mind engendered by a deeper interaction with meaning. Attentiveness. Mutual repose.
We arrived home Sunday morning, 4:00 am. My head finally landed on the cool voluptuous pillow and I was embraced by sleep. My rambling thoughts dropped like mayflies and a song seeped into the inscrutable void. I don’t remember which one, but I’m sure it will come back to me.
