By Cypress Butane
I bought a few new CDs. Albums of a band that I had the privilege of meeting once, the couple who made up the duo. I won’t name the group, but I was in a coffee shop and hours before they were to play that evening in my town (I didn’t know their work at the time) a man approached me. I was reading ‘The Royal Family’ by William T. Vollman, a powerful and idiosyncratic, biblical work about a matriarchy of whores in a fallen world. “That’s an amazing book,” he said to me.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I said in reply.
We started talking and he and she invited me to the show. So I drove over and go, and they put me on the guest list so I got in free. I ended up buying one of their albums and get it signed. I talk to them more and since I’ve mentioned I’m a writer told of an idea I have for a Halloween concert where writers post fictitious articles around an area about hauntings to gain buzz for locations and then a band would swoop in on the buzz and play the haunted location to make a happening. Taking inspiration from Alternate Reality Games.
But unfortunately, I never got back to him after he gives me his email. I had some problems with mental health and struggled for the next few years. And I heard about a year after that concert that the band – and the couple – broke up.
I was thinking about this as I put on one of their records. And this will all be superfluous and have the sense of being vain and vague, as it’s just my contemplations of some famous people I met once and could have potentially known better, but… There’s a feeling with that view, where the public eye looks in on a breakup. Let me try to describe what I mean.
The look someone gives in a glance to someone who’s broken up from a meaningful and long-lasting relationship, whether they’re a friend or just an acquaintance acknowledging the breakup, tries to convey sympathy with an expression of concern. In a furrowed brow and attendant carrying of pain in the face, the condoling person says, “I feel for you.” But it’s judgemental at the same time. The look says ‘I’m sorry you’re not together’ at the same time it asks ‘Why couldn’t you make it work?’ And that double sympathy/regret from another view piercing the mind of the now “single” regretful person, makes them, I believe, ashamed. Ashamed of having lost love. Which– is not shameful, so it’s not shame that’s the feeling, really, is it?
And so the look back out at this public’s leering, if that’s not too strong. (It may be forgiven to respond harshly to prying if the breakup is fresh, after all why should the eye stare to intently and interrogate the devestated like that! If they were a friend they would be gentle and understanding!) So this duplicity of the eye on the “single” person, why should it not receive at least a tinge of anger in the response to it, and even rebelliousness. ‘Who are you to ask why my love is gone?’ When… ‘You, haughty humanity, when have you ever had a love that stayed?”
The look then upon the brokenhearted —I might go so far as to say— is the jealous look of blame that one is human and had love to lose. Astonishment that they live still, having been cut off. That they fight. And do not surrender, having known the blessed state that all these outward downlookers would love so much to be in. That we all strive to know, or know again.
Perhaps, they wish they had a chance only to punctuate a time and chance. And they look close and peer deeply when they sense they are near the opportunity, for what they most need and desire. What they want most is the luck to make the world, in their own way a haunted bubble of dream, where music rises to take the place of a world of ghosts.
‘Chance meeting’ my album was inscribed to me that night by these wonderful artists. Would that we could scare up some more.
The Haunted Typewriter 