Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  A page further down, and there are no new photos of you. There is a mirror above L’s desk. I glance up to see what I look like when I look at you. I look hurt, but maybe it’s a trick of the light.

  Why do I want to burn myself this way?

  Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us.

  Freud, ibid

  9/10th May

  I empty out the ends of change I have from other countries, looking for spare Euros to feed the washing machines in the laverie across the road. I don’t have enough. Unsure how soon I would return to the Eurozone, I’d spent coins or given them away. There is a change jar on L’s dressing table. She’s not in the country, and you only store change when you know you’re coming back. You may never use it, just as you may live in Paris and never go to Versailles, or Fontainebleau, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

  I’m bored and alone so I take a long walk, crossing, not by chance, the streets in Paris that bear your three names. The approach to the café I’m looking for is oblique, triangulating by the Gare du Nord, that Monop… Inside the café there are already Macbook Airs x3 flipped out (I remember the Greek girl who stroked my laptop), though no WiFi. Disconnected, the world is different; it’s like being underwater, or behind a screen.

  There’s music in the café, and I notice it because I’m not connected. In this café the songs’ words fill the gap where online words might have been, so that the people here don’t have to talk to each other, or write, or even read and – if they’re waiting for someone, alone – the music masks their disconnectedness.

  International songs play in all the cafés in Europe: the same tunes for all of us. Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ has been playing in all the gin joints in all the towns in all the continent. They’re playing it again now, and I notice. I’ve learnt to pay attention to songs that make a mark, and I know that the songs I notice – the songs that come to my lips or circle in my head – tell me something. If I notice I’m noticing a song, I slow it, pull the words from the music and strip them down them for clues.

  When I am in love, songs mean more to me than almost anything else, or perhaps they mean more to me than almost anyone else – except to all the other people in the café, each of them with their own internal musical hooks.

  Songs are like names, impersonally personal, vehicles for emotions I never knew I had. And they never change, however often they’re played. Or do they? Sterile bandages – not so sterile though: dirty with their singers’ love or loss – they can be applied to anyone’s hurt. And every time they play it again, it pulls off the plaster, exposes the wound, and adds to it the pain of revelation. You must remember this… Musical clichés are just waiting for us to happen to them. They snag me with the universal, hooking my specifics, never changing yet altered by each instance they are played, so that even songs that seemed banal when released sound amazing today. The time between adds something, if only the weight of time, as time goes by, or maybe this time erodes context, leaving the song washed up out of time, an instant curio. But a current hit – always on your mind, always on the jukebox – doesn’t refresh like that. Repeated too often, in all contexts, it can’t attach itself to anything specific, can’t mean anything new.

  Everyone knows that what is written ‘Especially for You’ is subject to copyright.

  Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music

  Once it was difficult to track down old songs but online I can telescope the gap. I’d been willing to let those feelings go, no wish to revisit them. Once a feeling is set down, sung out, it’s dealt with, but when a song can be replayed just the same over and over, the feeling’s never finished. The songs I replay are the same every time and each replay satisfies the same thing in me, though it never satisfies me so much that I do not need to hear them again. My problem, now that I can listen to a song whenever I want to, is that I can’t not want to, and when I listen I know it distracts me from doing and feeling other things I might need to feel, or do to move on.

  The moment of recognition is that of effortless sensation. The sudden attention attached to this moment burns itself out instanter and relegates the listener to a realm of inattention and distraction.

  Adorno, ibid

  Adele is still wailing about memories. The best love songs are all about remembering-about-forgetting, without which the ghost of emotion remains dormant, unplayed, unrepeated, and all songs are sad, because all songs know that, no matter how many times they replay, they’re going to stop, even those that fade out in denial of their own ends. What little of you not lost is caught in the past. What we had is not ongoing, so I crave ways of replaying, and I will do this any way I can, because someone like you might walk in at any moment.

  When the audience at a sentimental film or sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in happiness… at last one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing that one is unhappy.

  Adorno, ibid

  Adele’s finished, and another song – She may not be you… but she looks just like you… – whines from the corner box, before the sound stutters, starts to splinter. The waiter crosses the bar to change the CD – back to Adele again. A CD? More out of date than the Bossa Nova hit it’s playing, which must have been recorded as analog before being remastered on digital.

  On vinyl, analog waves manipulate the air in just the same way as the singer’s voice – a sound so physical it’s called ‘warm’, still warm from voice, which is still warm from love, or hate, or whatever. Digital converts sound into code, makes a translation of feeling, while analog’s analogous, a recreation of the real thing that stands beside it, as love songs are analogous to love.

  When analog goes wrong – a scratch, a piece of dust – the sound warps but is still recognisable as human, though a love song on vinyl loses fidelity through repeated contact with the machine that repeats it. Some people love analog all the more for its human imperfections, its slow decline of memory – but digital shatters like a mirror, each shard reflecting a single element of voice: a pattern, not human at all. For back-up, CDs contain not one recording of the song, but many, layered. If one fails, parts of another come in, then another, and more again. But if there are too many false paths, their memory corrupts completely. The errors may have been there all along, as every digital disc is full of errors, but they’re not ones we can hear. Some people say digital has no soul.

  Slow decay or violent shatter. How do you like to lose it? Is there anything you can do to smooth the gaps, make the letdown less devastating? Depends what technology you prefer: digital’s dither and jitter, or analog’s wow and flutter. Jitter correctly spaces samples or blocks of sound, and dither smooths the digital jags, the jumps from sample to sample, step to step. Wow and flutter balance analog sound through the machine it’s played on. Digital or analog? The consensus is, one’s no better than the other, and fidelity depends largely on your equipment.

  There is no gradation between the vague recollection and full awareness but, rather, a sort of psychological ‘jump’.

  Adorno, ibid

  Beyond CDs, which we’re all but beyond now, we hit a ‘memory wall’. Random Access Memory means computers process faster than they can store, that memories can be replayed more easily than it can be laid down. Our storage can’t keep up with the playback, with the songs, and the experiences they revisit. Analog memory is linear: reads only from front to back in the direction of its vinyl spiral. CDs read and write data in a nonlinear, but predetermined order. The digital model – RAM – is necessarily non-narrative. It reads in bursts, is ‘volatile’. RAM can cut straight to the emotion, hard as you like. Whatever is accessed at random each time R
AM replays is, perhaps, something other than memory, is bent to the intention of the music as much as that of the listener.

  This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

  Adorno, ibid

  How can I continue to know you from what I remember of you? I mean both drawing from memory, but separating you from its qualities. A song replayed warps memory even as it’s triggered, like the background hiss on vinyl, like background noise in the café, adding another layer of memory to musical memories that are not even mine, derailing them with fresh replays of songs that recollect for me.

  Mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns. The composition hears for the listener.

  Adorno, ibid

  I like to think I am my own pain and happiness, but perhaps I am only the parts I remember, and perhaps I remember only what is replayed for me. To be replayed, something has to be over. If I remember things that never happened to me, or misremember things that did, it’s not a fault of the recording but of the playback. Like RAM, songs point at information but don’t store it themselves: the memories are stored elsewhere, in the listener. But, even in the heart, the brain, memory is not a single thing: emotion related to an event is stored separately (in the amygdala) from the recollection of the event itself (in the hippocampus) and, each time a strong emotion is remembered, the adrenaline it releases strengthens the reaction to that memory. Perhaps some of the things I remember about us never happened at all or, at least, not the way I recall them.

  The complicated in popular music never functions as ‘itself’ but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived.

  Adorno, ibid

  Passivity alone is not enough. The listener must force himself to accept.

  Adorno, ibid

  Our memory – yours and mine – never having being joint, relied on the crutches of external things. We didn’t exchange love tokens but we did swap music, and the songs we sent stuck to each other making meanings analogous to themselves – like that time you sang a song to me, and it wasn’t a love song, but it had the name of the place we were in, and you sang it as a joke, which seemed loving and, oddly enough it was a song another man had sung to me once, also as a joke, though we were not in the place it referred to at the time, proving no more, I guess, than that songs are transferable. When you sang it to me, I thought it meant something. I was wrong. Or I was right, but only for 3 minutes 55. Problem is, you’re part-constructed of the songs you sent me, and I don’t know if revisiting them now in new places gives you an altered reality, or casts your shadow over the here and now. I was always looking for you to come and inhabit them. ‘Always Looking’, that’s the name of a song I first heard just before I met you, when I was looking for someone who, coincidentally, became you, and you snagged onto that song like a pocket on a door handle. When we were together-not-together, I listened to that song a lot, and now, you’ve gone, I’m still looking, still listening, and if I hear that song in the street, in a café, by chance, I take it as a sign, though of what, I don’t know… The problem with the songs we exchanged is that now I keep thinking you wrote them all, or that I did, and I’m never sure whether all the men in the songs are the same man, and if all of them are you, or if all the women in the songs are me. When you sent me songs I thought you were sending me everything in the song, from the words and the sentiment, to the notes, to the breaks of emotion in the singer’s voice, and the crackle of vinyl or glitch of bytes. What you sent me, I welded so strongly onto your being I almost thought you’d made every part of it yourself. I won’t make that mistake again. Some of the songs – the ones where I only knew a phrase, a chorus – when I go back and listen to the whole thing, I realise weren’t about what I’d thought they were at all. Some of them weren’t even love songs.

  I don’t know why the words don’t fix themselves without the music, or why only both together make any feeling worth replaying. And I don’t know why they play songs in cafés. Is it out of fear that in our meetings there, we could never feel anything so big, so concisely? 3 minutes 55 seconds: an ongoing moment barely longer than the exposure of a camera when vinyl was invented in 1888, though a photograph is taken to prove an experience was real, but a song played proves the reality of experience on the listener: I meet any memory only when I am ready for it. Like a photo, a song incites a desire to hear the experience through to the end, however sad, makes being sad a kind of fun. That’s why I am scared of new songs like I’m scared of new books, or at least I think I am, then I’m surprised to find them easy, that they fit just right, or I fit right into them. I’ve been avoiding new music, especially by women: all those maenad albums: riot grrrls shrieking, letting loose in pain, in ecstasy, and the singer-songwriters, always breaking up, breaking down. I never wanted to be in either girl ghetto. But here I am, now, and nothing else makes any sense. So don’t play me new songs, songs that will show me anything new in me. I can’t take another story. How can there be more good tunes? I want the old songs, my parents’ songs, emotions I’ve heard played out a thousand times before. I’m tired… I don’t want to listen any more, but how can I stop?

  The people clamor for what they are going to get anyhow.

  Adorno, ibid

  I’m in a bar. I could get drunk so as not to remember again and again, like a maenad: music maddened them like wine. They were seduced by music in punishment for refusing to follow Dionysus, who was a music god, but not like Apollo. Dionysus is the god of raves, a pub singer at home in all the gin joints where music comes together with anything that blots out the memories it prompts, in the service of servicing something in us. Maenad groupies ripped the rock god Orpheus to shreds and couldn’t remember afterwards what they’d done. Full up with drink and song, they killed what they loved, because they found, in their madness, a kind of clarity: they knew attraction harmed them.

  The waiter changes the splintered Bossa Nova for another CD, and a song comes on, and I clasp my mouth in shock. It’s that song I heard when… I turn away from something, towards the window, and catch in my smudged reflection, as in L’s mirror, that look that must be there. Hearing that song out of place, where I didn’t expect it, I don’t move away. I want to test myself. I want to know what I looked like the week that song kept me sane with its three-chord pattern, a dying fall. That whole album, but that particular track. I know what’s coming, that cough at the beginning of the song by the dead man.

  We were between the bars in another city, where it patterned through my head, the only thing I could hold onto, that gave any shape to what happened, as it happened.

  Say yes.

  My mind loops on replay.

  I turntable away from the music. But, when I look into the glass, I don’t see my own face. On the other side of the window a man, seated at one of the outside tables, talks into his phone. He leans against the glass, his elbow to mine, our bodies less than an inch away from each other’s. He can’t hear what I hear – and maybe no one in the bar can. The thickness of a pane of glass, the space of a song: 3 minutes 55 – such processes!

  I get up. I’ve spent too long alone with you – or with your shell: your messages, your photographs, your music.

  •••

  I meet R for lunch. On the café speakers, another woman singing. Always women singing that they’re tired, so tired, of someone, of something. Outside the café R lights two cigarettes, one for her, one for me. She tells me, ‘You’re acting like a teenager.’ She tells me that once she went out with a man for ten years, and at the end of that time they had nothing left to say to one another. There was no reason for them to get in touch again. But, after they broke up, he moved close to her, only a few streets away. She hid from him. Once, she saw him in a supermarket, and she knew he knew that she knew he was there, but neither said anything. They follow each other online, but she didn’t want to see hi
m again, not in the flesh.

  I show her your photo. She sees the shell, says, ‘At his age, only hipsters have beards. Pretend May ’68 Greek intellectual. Does he need those glasses or are they just fakes?’ I say that you do need glasses and that you are not older than me. R says, ‘I know several women who have been very happy with much younger men.’

  Come to Prague, you wrote, but here I am in Paris, with only your pictures. I could have changed at any number of stops on the Munich train. I could have changed at Munich. It would have been an easier journey than coming here.

  Come to Prague.

  Well, why didn’t I?

  At Munich station the ticket offices were all already closed. Better wait for the train, and buy a ticket from the guard who, holding a clipboard, told me there were no berths available on the sleeper to Paris, no not even seats as there were in Athens, but that I could take a separate train to Stuttgart and try to reconnect with my original train there at 1am, when extra coaches might be added. If I wanted to get to Paris by tomorrow, she said, I would have to take a chance. So that is what I did.

  12 Amsterdam/Objecting

  Paris–Bruxelles 11th May

  ‘Welkom op de Nederland’: how many welcome messages have I received on my phone? BIENVENUE EN BELGIQUE, WELCOME TO FRANCE, WILLKOMMEN IN DEUTSCHLAND, AUSTRIA, HUNGARY (I’m working backwards), WELCOME TO BULGARIA, WELCOME TO SERBIA, WELCOME TO GREECE, ITALY, FRANCE again. No WELCOME TO ENGLAND, which I left. I am welcome, it seems (almost) everywhere.

  This time I didn’t want to leave Paris, didn’t want to move, but L was due back and would need her apartment, and I was promised a place to stay in Amsterdam, plus I have to be in Berlin in a week. Back on the train, having broken the connection, I relax, realise that, yes, this is home.