Modest Mouse: Tundra/Desert

Last year we were out in the van, all of us, smoke seeping out of the windows, the acrid smell of cheap beer in the air. It must have been early in the fall, because it was warm enough to have the sliding doors open to the dusty night. We were listening to Modest Mouse. Marian set it to track 11, but first she paused it and called for quiet. 'Listen up,' she said, 'this is what F. used to do when we played this song.' Years ago, in a different van, when he was still alive. As the track played, she told a story over it...not poetry, just the natural rhythm of words and sentences. About getting up in the morning and going to class, very simple. Anyone can do it, once you've heard it; you just have to keep your eye on the display, so you can say the words "...class begins" so that they explode when the song does. Very simple, but the juxtaposition of the spoken words and the song seemed to sum up the cold, tired futility of being at the college. Because we all knew about it, about getting up in the cold morning air and going to a place we didn't want to be, for abstract reasons that weren't convincing or comforting at all on a daily or an hourly or a minute-by-minute basis.

Hearing that, and trying to do it myself, made me think for the first time that maybe the theories about the origin of the Iliad are right: that the poem could have existed for centuries without being written down, and yet be the same poem every time and yet not a rote memorization. You hear something like that, and you don't remember it by heart, you remember it like a story. You remember its effect, like a map out of emotions, so that in the end you don't remember it through the individual words at all but backwards, feeling your way to the right words through their effects. Not "This line comes next" but "The words I say next should make me feel this way." I'm not even close to being able to express this so it makes linear sense.

Every time I hear that song, though, I try to tell the story over it, and I think about it all, the van, the college, the man I didn't know.