The Blue of Distance: More Thoughts On, And From, Rihanna; on Teenagers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Rebecca Solnit, Proust; as a Tribute to a Friend

A few years ago, in the early hours of a weekday morning, I walked through the Hyndland area of Glasgow with a friend after an evening of drinking and talking. Past town houses and terraces mostly dark and sleepy, he spoke about wanderlust and the desire for a life of drama.

My friend was restless and talking about moving away. He worried about having nothing to complain about, about a lack of drama in his life. He was finding contentment difficult to deal with; to him it was a threat to life's potential for excitement.

My nostalgia for my teens began almost immediately after they ended, and lasted for most of my undergraduate degree. Despite conscious relief at the closing of certain dark chapters, the heightened sense of being alive that such dramas - however contrived - bring is one never entirely forgotten. It becomes a template of sorts, and it takes time to shake off.

The process through which it is, eventually, shaken off - cautious and occasionally abortive explorations of new people, a new city, new art - is a combination as heady as it is intimidating, and it is unsurprising that a certain amount of uncertainty results; a confused fluttering between known dullness and unknown futures.

I learnt self-indulgent self-created/ing drama through the sentimental emotional wraught-ness of sitcoms and teenshows, not to mention certain bands and books. I wrote my A Level English paper on Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar and compared those books to my happy life. It was the perfect age to read them: 17 and happy, acting unhappy.

This video a perfect audio-visual instantiation of what I'm talking about:

It's part of growing up. Something excruciating yet necessary.

You stretch beyond yourself to give that self room; some bits go back to where they were, others remain extended. Some lead to new places.

But its exhausting. It artificially heightens everything to an emotional pitch that is unsustainable. By making every misunderstanding or miscommunication a cause of intense internal wrangling, it adds to the very confusion it is part of; you're never quite sure what is you feeling something and what is the public "you" feeling.

(That late capitalist complaint: valorising emotion whilst simultaneously distancing us from it.)

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Nostalgia isn't simply a longing for the past. It is a longing for the recreation of the past in the present. In a sense it is fiction-making - world-creating - though a creation that always falls short, and which leads to nostalgia's frustration at its limited powers. It becomes a desire for recreation and a desire for greater powers of recreation.

The temporal span of "What's My Name?" is uncertain. Is the meeting in the store at the start of the video their first meeting? Are the blue scenes in the bedroom later in their relationship? If so, why the mournful, submerged, and nostalgic synth strings that play throughout? Because they suggest a gap in time between the tale and the telling. Is the entirety of the video set in the past then, with two time periods - the first meeting and the height of their intimacy? In this case, the synths might speak to this same nostalgia and desire for nostalgia. The video wants to recreate not just the perfection of intimacy but the excitement - the drama - of the first meeting.

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I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide To Getting Lost. In it, she writes:

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgeting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

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Her book is interwoven with chapters entitled “The Blue of Distance”:

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost ... For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains ... Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in ... "

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"Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away."

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My friend is moving away today. Less from wanderlust, though, and more for love.

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Tom is re-reading Proust this summer, and as I stretched out on the sofa reading Solnit's book and he sat in the yellow chair by the open window, a breeze (which we looked up the scientific definition of: "where does it come from?") rustling what I call my nephew's Dadaist type-writer poems pinned up on the wall, he read out one of Marcel's frequent aphorisms: "It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same."

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Marcel thinks the drama of love is incompatible with enjoyment. That love's emotional turmoil doesn't allow for enjoyment.

Perhaps he writes about it elsewhere - he seems to cover everything else - but here he misses out this: those who enjoy the lack of enjoyment (ie: drama) that love brings. Though it soon becomes less enjoyment than addiction.

A possible reading of Proust: a story about addiction to drama.

Doesn't Marcel at every turn create drama rather than resolve it?

Drama with its literary and theatrical overtones. Addiction to drama also being an addiction to telling the drama's story.

In Search of Lost Time's cyclical structure: the story of how Marcel becomes a writer.

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Personal contentment vs public discontent. Personal contentment can be a bulwark, a safe place, a created world where everything is perfect; from which to escape the world with which one is so discontent, but also, neccessarily, to fortify oneself against it, to refuel for the fight, to nurse one's righteous anger.

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I will miss my friend, but I am happy for the reason he is leaving.