tannoyblanc

“Baby, it’s time for you to face the weather.
Open your eyes as long as you’re together.
Your heart, your mind, your arms, your hands,
Your heart, your mind, your mind’s invincible.”

There go the opening lines of “Your World is Eternally Complete,” a song by the magnificent indie-electronic rock band Sweet Trip and a mantra that I find myself returning to obsessively since my moving to chaotic, restless New York City. There’s something about the record that soothes me, like a grandmother’s hand resting on my shoulder. The lead vocalist’s wispy hums float so gracefully over a soft, thumping kick to give the record a psalm-like quality, as if delivered by a chorale of prophets, saints, and holy mothers to a child about to embark on a long-awaited pilgrimage. 

I am 22 years old now, far from a child, and yet I feel into these lyrics more deeply than at any other stage of my life. I was on an upstate-bound train one pensive Sunday afternoon when a familiar wave of nostalgia overtook me. A glance out the window showed an aging of gold and a passage of memory. On this autumn train, I watched winding roads, auburn lands, and cloudless lakes morph and form about, taking the shape of a gentle, wistful smile. It was a melancholic smile that comes only with age, the kind one has when letting go of something most precious. Call me a sentimentalist, but there’s something about fall’s sigh here that brings back more than anything else the simple comfort of what home and family used to represent to me. As the leaves fell and the trees wept, I felt a fierce yearning for a past version of myself. How wondrously must a child see the world from his nest!

Perhaps I truly am a puer aeternus, unable to tear himself away from that train window, unable to keep tears of reminiscence from forming at the eye’s corner, unable to accept that things will never be the same. How straightforward life used to be back then, and how complicated it has become now. The suffering of change can be the most crippling of them all. At times I wish that my train had no destination, that I was on a line that headed towards none other than infinity, and that all I needed to do was watch the world pass through the glass, free to daydream to my heart’s content. 

I’m reminded of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, a film about a place where heartsick people go to escape their loss and their memories, a place where nothing ever changes. It’s a refuge for souls eroded by harsh truths, broken promises, and lost innocence within the kingdom of time. There’s a pervasive numbness there, a reflection of those who have relinquished their will to move forward in life. It’s the feeling of flattened emotion and dampened longing, like a ballad autotuned. I asked myself, was I riding this autumn train to 2046? Do I want to become crystallized in eternal boyhood, eased out of life’s rasp?

A flurry of falling leaves outside the window seemed to whisper my answer. What good is it to spend a lifetime moving in place, frozen in time? To live a forever passive, ghostly life that plays out without meaning or substance is to not live at all. And so I was reminded of my very reason for being on the train in the first place – to seek out new destinations and unknown experiences. To dare step outside, endure what conditions might be waiting for me, and face up to whatever is in my path. I suppose that it is most natural that the man made from mud must travel through it as well. 

At some point, one must realize that life isn’t about avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. That there must be something a lot deeper and more divine at the core of this whole experience. The process of growing up is delicate, but surging. One must journey through their life and emerge out of it with new understanding, otherwise they will have completely missed the point of it! At the same time, one mustn’t come trudging out of the mud embittered, with soot on the skin and coal in the heart. To retain the creative wonder of a child and infuse with it the noble strive of an adult is the most worthy way to live.

And to be honest, I’ve never really seen the world as inherently cold or tyrannical, and I don’t think such labels are apt for describing its truth. This is, of course, a testament to my family’s warmth and my fortunate upbringing. Yet still, I can’t shake the feeling that no matter how grandly or poorly one’s experience on this beautiful, unruly earth is, their world is still, to the tune of Sweet Trip’s gospel, eternally complete.