THERE'S NO DOOR INTO THE MANSION, PT.1

The inner reaching hand

Photo by Phil Elverum.

When I was young I was mystified by the blue tint of the distant hills I could see from the place where I lived. What kind of hills, what kind of grass was that colour? One of the many charms of childhood that knowledge disenchants us of is that visible distances can feel incalculably vast – I had little concept of the horizon, so there was no limit to how far away the things I saw might be, and I certainly had no concept of atmospheric perspective. But I knew colours, and there were hills that I did know, that I had scampered up and rolled down and tore tufts of grass from, and none of those hills were blue like the ones way over there.

Little did I know at the time, I had probably been on those hills, I had probably walked across their grasses knowing no different, having no idea that I was there. But even if I had walked across them, I hadn’t really. They were not the same place beneath my feet as they were in the distance. I could have planted a flag on one of their peaks to wave at me from back home and my bemused younger self would still have had to conclude that those blue hills were another place entirely than anywhere I had ever been. I could never have accepted otherwise.

My infatuation with distance only deepened in later childhood. Things seemed to be possible far away that were not possible up close – there was magic out there. I watched red lights flashing on faraway factory chimneys which all day long gave birth to clouds, I watched the waterfront lights of the Wirral streaking evening colours across the River Mersey like crumbling bridges of light too frail to survive the journey across, I watched Welsh landscapes turn blue through the rear window of the car and I began to understand that there was a world that I could see but that I would never touch.

Needless to say, I was a dreamy kid and a melancholy adolescent, and all of my great young romances happened at a distance. On family holidays I sat late on balconies after everyone had gone to bed and watched planes carrying their lighted interiors far above.¹ I became accustomed to looking more than I did to doing. I spoke little (in most company), and I watched.

And during those nights on Spanish or Cypriot balconies, when I saw something in the distance that called to me – the irregular slow pulse of a cigarette in a high window, the lights of a truck on a mountain road, the neon sign of another hotel – I felt something inside of me grasping, wanting to extract some essence from these things. An inner hand, or mouth, hungering and reaching across distances.

Within the philosophy of Henri Bergson² this persistent reaching with no final consummation would be equated to a repeated self-thwarting, or self-flagellating of the will. In Matter and Memory he says:

“…my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads as pass from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able to make an appeal to my will and to put, so to speak, an elementary question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a perception… We may therefore say that while the detail of perception is moulded exactly upon that of the nerves termed sensory, perception as a whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement.”

Ever since reading this I think about that inner grasping hand in these terms – I was trying to enact the beginnings of contact with something beautiful. My nervous system was responding to stimuli that registered, however dimly and subliminally, as desire – I was receiving intangible calls to action like garbled messages on an out-of-range radio frequency, and so there was no clear action that I knew to take. I simply knew how to look, and how to sweeten my loneliness a little by the appreciation of distant things.

There has always been a part of me attuned to far away things with the keenness of a horticulturist picking flowers for a future arrangement. I had the impression that if I just kept doing it, kept witnessing, then one day, when I was not so dulled to the world, my efforts would pay off and the gate to the garden I had cultivated would be opened to me.

But in the meantime, though I saw it, I couldn’t feel the beauty of the world in the way I thought I should. Somehow I never doubted its beauty, even if I did begin to feel myself personally excluded from its bounty.³ I knew that it was there, and that it was accessible to more faculties of myself than just my perennially wandering gaze. I never stopped searching for it, but over everything a kind of veil had fallen, like the blue haze of distance. I had myself become distant.

In Bergsonian logic, everything that I perceive is an invitation to act in some manner or other, or at the very least to deliberate over the preparation of a future act. And yet I gravitated towards faraway glimmers and vagaries of light, instead of anything around me that I might actually be able to touch – things so distant, so indistinct, so half-dreamed that any possible activity they might have called me towards was virtually indeterminable. I was keeping myself in a sort of paralysis of unfulfillment, stimulating myself with signals to which my body had no reasonable means to respond. Seeking out unclear provocations upon my will. There was no other outcome in persisting with the sparking of this broken circuit but to leave myself numb.

It must be said here that the aesthetic appreciation of beauty is of course one of the most wonderful experiences available to us. The crucial difference in my case was that the gratification of my will had gotten vainly bound up in the admiration of beauties that were unattainable to me in any significant way. I was searching intently, cravenly, for things to admire.

But Arthur Schopenhauer claims that the pure appreciation of beauty requires us to become so arrested by a phenomenon that we are momentarily free from the service of our will, and though this experience is always available in nature, he considers art to be the easiest window into this mode of seeing:

“Whilst science… is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is the only essential, the Idea. The method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and useful in practical life and science. The method of consideration that looks away from the content of this principle is the method of genius, which is valid and useful in art alone… The first is like the innumerable violently agitated drops of the waterfall, constantly changing and never for a moment at rest; the second is like the rainbow silently resting on this raging torrent… Now as this demands a complete forgetting of our own person and of its relations and connexions, the gift of genius is nothing but the most complete objectivity, i.e. the objective tendency of the mind, as opposed to the subjective directed to our own person, i.e., to the will. Accordingly, genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service.”⁴

For most of us, I don’t think this state is all that rare. Who hasn’t momentarily lost themselves in a book, a film, or a landscape? But its persistence is the very stuff of enlightenment itself, or of genius as Schopenhauer would have it – to always be aware of beauty, to have permanent access through the gate which everywhere is closed and everywhere is open depending on whose eyes perceive it. This is why so many of the old parables dealing with enlightenment – or with trying to see – so playfully suggest that what is sought after is already here, in plain sight. This is a favourite example of mine:⁵

The Search for Enlightenment

“There once was a poor man who led a donkey every day across the border from one kingdom to another. The border guards suspected that he was smuggling something, so each day as the man passed the border they carefully searched the man and the donkey’s saddlebags, but they never did find anything.

After a while the man starts to wear more expensive clothing and buys a large house. The border guards redouble their efforts to inspect the man and his donkey closely because they now are certain the man is smuggling something. But in their daily searches of the man and the saddlebags they never come up with anything but straw.

After 30 years of this daily routine, one of the border guards retires. One day when the retired border guard is walking across the street, he runs into the man and says "Listen, I am no longer a border guard and I can no longer hurt you. I promise I will never tell anyone, but just for my peace of mind, please tell me what you have been smuggling all those years." The man replies "Because I know that you can no longer arrest me, I will tell you. I was smuggling donkeys.”

I was like the border guards, searching frantically for some hidden secret in passing clouds or the patterns of shadows, missing what was right in front of me in my desperation to see it. But to some extent, I found what I was looking for in music. It was a saving grace for me, as it is for many adolescents. When I listened to music, sensations that were otherwise invisible crept up to the edge of its fire, and though I could still not wholly embrace them I could at least see the play of that fire in their eyes and know that I was not alone. Over the course of a song an inner journey took place. Schopenhauer considers music to be a virtually direct analogue to the movements of the will:

“Now the nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on and on; in fact his happiness and well-being consist only in the transition from desire to satisfaction, and from this to a fresh desire, such transition going forth rapidly. For the non-appearance of satisfaction is suffering; the empty longing for a new desire is languor, boredom. Thus, corresponding to this, the nature of melody is a constant digression and deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways, not only to the harmonious intervals, the third and dominant, but to every tone, to the dissonant seventh, and to the extreme intervals; yet there always follows a final return to the keynote. In all these ways, melody expresses the many different forms of the will’s efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately finding again a harmonious interval, and still more the keynote… the composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand… music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon… but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; this is the reason why music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and the world, at once appear in enhanced significance, and this is, of course, all the greater, the more analogous its melody is to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.”

It's commonplace to the point of cliché to say that a certain musical artist made you feel less alone, resonated with you, made you feel seen… all of this is to say that their presentation of the adventures of the will harmonised with your own experience of it. In quite a direct sense – at least as Schopenhauer would have it – when we resonate with a musical artist in a powerful and personal way, we have found a kindred spirit.

There was always a pressure I put on myself as an adolescent to try to experience the music considered to be most ‘classic’ (at least within the pop/rock realm). Another symptom of my hungering for beauty – if there was good music I wanted to experience the best. But I had a hard time connecting with much of that stuff. Even my hometown boys The Beatles. My musical palette has widened a lot now, but at the time what I was really craving was that kindred spirit, I was on the hunt for songs that I could live inside of.

The Beatles had undeniably great melodies, The Beach Boys were full of adventurous and exciting chord changes, Bob Dylan could unravel a yarn as bemusing as it was gripping, but I was a sad, numbed-out teenager. I wanted to wallow, and none of it dug a pit deep enough for my satisfaction. To this day I still struggle to emotionally resonate with a lot of the pre-80s classics of the pop canon, as much as I’ve grown to enjoy them. I’m sure my retrospective relation to them colours my experience, and would not at all match the feeling of hearing them when they were new, but there seems to be among them a certain expected formalism that had not yet been broken through en masse, a certain pre-punk manneredness to their presentation that matches well with and probably fostered virtuosity and exemplary songcraft, but which always felt as if it was singing to me as part of an audience, not to me intimately and alone.

In the 80s maybe I would have fled towards Joy Division or The Cure. As it was, I found Phil Elverum⁶ (i.e. The Microphones and Mount Eerie). When I put on his album The Glow Pt.2, and especially the song The Mansion, something in me sighed with recognition. Now this was loneliness, at least as I knew it. It sounded like someone who barely had the energy to strum their guitar, every changing of chords felt like a huge upheaval of will. There was a voice that sang as though too wounded to sing, and a song that was swallowed in its own atmosphere as I felt like I was. I had finally found some company in my sadness.

Phil Elverum’s music has over the years become like a home for me. The sounds that he adorns his songs with make them feel like places extant in space, even when those sounds are just his voice, a guitar, and the silence. I have walked around in the leafy, woody glade of My Roots are Strong and Deep, I have paced the foggy temple grounds of Summons, I have curled up by the fire in the cabin of Climb Over. I feel so much space in these songs, as if even within their sound worlds there are further distances and possibilities only glimpsed – such as the second vocal track in The Mansion, half-buried in the mix, singing the different lyrics of an alternate version of the song just slightly askew from the lead vocal, deceptively trying to make of itself an echo so as not to be noticed, or the infamous foghorn sample that repeats throughout the Glow Pt.2, an aural template of distance, achieving sonically some equivalent of whatever it is a flashing red light atop a distant hill evokes in me. The knowledge of an elsewhere. Elverum’s songs situate themselves somewhere, and they carry within them a kernel of whatever world exists beyond their little charmed circles of imaginal space in that landscape. Each of them is like a campfire lit along a way, like the one on the cover of The Glow Pt.2.

Long before the tragedy that split Phil’s career into a clear before and after – the death of his wife Geneviève to cancer in 2016 – I had bonded deeply with his works. I was devastated to hear what had happened, and when a new Mount Eerie album appeared less than a year afterwards, I was hesitant to listen to it. Phil’s music had never shied away from darkness – I knew what this album would be about. And sure enough, it was a brutal experience, an almost voyeuristic insight into the grief of a man I felt somehow so close to. But there was one song and one lyric that struck me personally – within his grief, the theme of that inner grasping for distant things I knew so well emerged. I had recognised the presence of its distinctive tone of longing in his music before, but never so straightforwardly expressed as it was here. In the first verse of Soria Moria he sings:

“Slow pulsing red tower lights

Across a distance, refuge in the dust

All my life I can remember longing

Looking across the water and seeing lights

When I was five or six, we were camping in the islands in July

The tall yellow grass and the rose hips fragrant

After sunset, island beyond island

Undulating and familiar, not far from home

With my fragrant, whittled cedar driftwood dagger in the mildew canvas tent

I saw fireworks many miles away but didn’t hear them

And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy

And then I went to sleep

And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging

Reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place

That could fold me in clouded yearning

For nowhere actually reachable, the distance was the point.”

If you want an example of feeling seen by a musician… well, I don’t think I could give you a starker example from my own life than this. The distance was the point. Beautiful things seen from afar are all possibility. They excite the will when the will is unfulfilled, they set the imagination dreaming. In this way they are like escape routes from reality – it is unsurprising that grief or loneliness would draw a person’s attention into the distance. Just think of the “thousand-yard stare” that describes the blank gaze of the traumatised person while dissociating – they are staring inward by fixating on some distant object, whatever it may be. The object is not the point, it may not even be registered consciously, or in focus – the distance is the point. Seen at a distance, all things can be a door to a mind in need.

---

Read part 2 here.

---

1. and almost certainly listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, so much so that now whenever I see the lights of a plane at night, that ghostly voice from Providence sings “Where are you going?” in some part of my brain now chambered off for exactly this purpose.

2. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a small explanatory extract from my post The Human Animal:

‘When it comes to the intellect, Bergson believed that as a living being becomes more complex, and its needs therefore harder to satisfy, its powers of perception expand in proportion to these growing needs so that the aspects of the world on which its survival depends are rendered within its purview. The human being, as excessively complex as it is and yet possessing in and of itself insufficient tools with which to survive the harsh environment, he playfully labels ‘homo faber’. Unlike the wolf with its teeth and its fur, and unlike the scorpion with its sting, we are creatures for whom it is necessary to craft our own tools. Fundamentally creative beings. As such, our perceptive faculties necessarily evolved in such a way as to offer up to us a world within which we could find the means to build and create.

Bergson says:

“The vision of a living being is an effective vison, limited to objects on which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalised, and the visual apparatus simply symbolises the work of canalising… consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential activity... It signifies hesitation or choice.”

So, for Bergson, all consciousness is, first and foremost, consciousness of potential action. It exists as a field of possible activity, a sort of sandbox for making connections and manipulating the matter of the world to our advantage.’

3. I was a teenager, let’s not forget.

4. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I.

5. I’m not sure of its origin, I found it uncited in the wilds of the internet.

6. Who does, in fact, have a Substack.