when things fall out
Collage Paper Playlist 13
when things fall out
"Heavy Eyes" The Carolyn
I know what it's like to wake up tired. For the morning to come hushed and heavy. To pull back the sheets with a brick in your chest. It's hard to rise. Hard to breath.
I know what it’s like to cling so tight to a dream that you can't sleep.
But "longing is momentum in disguise", Susan Cain says. "It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine."
It's a place to start. To build. Up from and out of. Again and again.
"The place you suffer", Cain says, is the same place you care profoundly". It's the place you care enough to make something. Something that "will begin to make things right".
*Special thanks to
for sending this song to me.
every yesterday
"A Letter to Elise" - The Cure
"Part of every misery, C.S. Lewis says, "is...the misery's shadow". A dark shape cast over the surface of our hearts when anything stands between ourselves and the light of the sun.
There is the object, the obstacle, the hurt, the hinderance, and there is the midnight it shrouds us in.
It is, Lewis says, "the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."
Living in an "endless day" of grieving is one thing but living "each day thinking about living each day in grief" is another. It's what the Buddha might call the second arrow. The pain, and our reaction to it, our dwelling upon it. The first is unavoidable. But the second is escapable.
Every yesterday comes with something regrettable, but there's no need to stay.
rebuild
"Cruel" - Broadside
Most dreams don't come true. Some almost do. And some never even come close. Sometimes they come down all at once. Concrete and steel crumbling under the weight of a wrecking ball (but in a Miley Cyrus kind of way).
Sometimes they're worn down quietly over time. Glacial ages of gentle, but merciless and unrelenting erosion.
Carlo Rovelli says that "big dreams founder against the force of daily life." We discover that our dreams, as enchanting as they may be, are only "short-lived...momentary intervals" that crash land, either because of the mistaken engineering of our own naivete, or because of disillusionment and defeat. In both cases, Rovelli says, "our aspirations melt like snow in the sunlight” and evaporate into oblivion.
How it all comes apart is inconsequential. Everything does. Everything will. "How you rebuild is all that matters".
*Thanks to
for suggesting I dive deeper into Broadside’s catalog.
life is stranger
"My Name is Carnival" - Jackson C. Frank
Lewis Hyde says that “The highest discipline is the discipline of chance operations”. That’s what I love about collage. it gets me out of my “head”. It's one of the few things I do that's intuitive.
I have a drawer full paper detritus, and a collection of saved images. I grab the bits I respond to. I change them around until they change my view. I shift their position until they shift mine too. Until something feels right. Until something feels true. Or until I throw it all back in the drawer because I hate everything. It's funny how unpredictabel even a disciplined practice can be. That no matter how much I think I know, life will always be a stranger to me.
*Thank you
for requesting this one.
That’s it for this week’s playlist. If there’s something you’d like to recommend or request for the next one, feel free to leave it in the comments.
Take care.
A Letter To Elise has to be my favourite recommendation from here, and your write-up is so good. Happy to see more Broadside in here too!
I've been getting into the band Static Dress over the last week, especially the song Marisol, and I feel like the lyrics would suit one of these posts pretty well (although all of their stuff is really good, I just feel like the vibe of that song could work). Same goes for Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes' new album, but I don't even know where to start recommending there, because every song is just as good as one another.
Really great words and work 👏