constellations #92: personal archives

Hi again.

Last week I was texting a friend about, of all things, the music video for Straylight Run’s “Existentialism on Prom Night” — an all-timer, as far as both of us are concerned. The song came out in 2004 and I used to listen to it all the time with my sisters when we were kids; I think of them immediately when I hear it. One of the top comments on that video right now, in part, says, “Teens don't be in a rush to grow up, it sucks.” Strong words!

Reminiscing about this band with my friend led to me telling him a long story about a trip I took in 2009, seven or so years (and practically a lifetime) before we met, halfway around the world. One of the guys from the band was on that trip; that’s why I brought it up. My friend was genuinely surprised by the details of the story, the where and why and who of it all, and surprised that I’d never mentioned it before. Afterwards he sent me a text: “I thought I knew you,” he joked, “you have *lived*”. To be honest, though it was in jest, the message felt like kindest thing I had heard in weeks. If my self-image, especially lately, is of an early-30s woman flailing through a zigzag of choices that seem to be leading exactly nowhere, this comment from my friend was a reminder that I, at the very least, have lived!

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Last weekend Madeline and I went to an event in Ridgewood celebrating the new edition of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (which, full disclosure, I have not read, though I bought a copy at the event). During the event, Kate was in conversation with Jamie Hood — both are memoirists of one sort or another — and the two of them talked in part about spending time in their personal archives: their old published writing, personal journals, defunct blogs, etc. They were thinking about what it means to revisit earlier versions of themselves, particularly because Heroines came out more than a decade ago, and Kate has inevitably changed as a person, as a thinker, as a writer, since the book was first published; the new edition means she’s been faced with re-encountering the text — and thus the version of herself who wrote it — over and over. Jamie mentioned that, as part of the process of working on her new memoir, she had been transcribing some of her old diaries — if only, she joked, in order to burn them. They talked about how writing about the self at a particular inflection point in a concentrated way — the length of a book, for example — could feel like an exorcism, a way of releasing whatever it is that stands between that version of the self and the future. I related to this.

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A trip into my personal archives: A couple weeks ago I was trying to track down an old song I wrote. Its title was written a million times in set lists from way back when I used to play shows, but I had no memory of any of the lyrics or the melody. The search led me through a bunch of old voice memos and GarageBand files and works-in-progress lyrics documents; finally, it led me into the one overstuffed closet in my apartment, behind the winter coats and Christmas decorations, into the box with my old journals in it.

I didn’t find the song in those journals, but I found a lot of other things: packing lists from ancient work trips, lists of unachieved personal and professional goals, various to-dos. I had detailed every moment of my time in Stockholm in 2019 and in Nashville the year before. There were lots of other unfinished and half-finished songs; mix notes on demos I had recorded; guitar tabs for other people’s songs that I had painstakingly transcribed from tutorials I saw online. More than anything, what stood out to me were all the actual journal entries, mostly from my mid-20s. In there I witnessed myself in some of my most heartsick moments, reeling with shame and confusion and hopelessness, freighted with the heaviness of potential. (Like everyone else, I journal most when I am at my wits’ end, so the desperation of this era is perhaps overrepresented.)

Of course the tenderness I felt towards this version of myself was intense and immediate, because I knew where the story would go: that I wouldn’t drop out of grad school; that I would get back together with my boyfriend; that friendships would heal; that my job would get so much better before it took a turn for the worse. I knew all the happy resolutions and wrenching endings and uneasy truces that lay in wait for her. It was all, collectively, more proof of having lived, and even though I didn’t find the song I was looking for, I was glad to have at least found that.

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Another trip into the archives: mentioning a shared memory to a friend and then looking back through old text messages between us from that moment, and from years and years ago, a whole decade or more. Finding a text I sent when I was worrying about a career move that didn’t line up with the path I was supposedly building towards in graduate school, and my friend replying, expertly, “the path gets clearer as you go.” Lately the path is not looking very clear; the evidence of having lived, though sometimes thrilling, feels scattershot and incoherent. It was comforting, then, to dig into the past and see a reminder about the future.

from part of a Pipilotti Rist exhibition I saw this month

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Doxology by Nell Zink; An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane; Drive-Away Dolls; Sleater-Kinney at the Tiny Desk — which hasn’t published online yet, so instead I recommend these excellent recent performances by Soul Glo and Chappell Roan; Mitski at King’s Theater; Ovlov at Market Hotel; Kim Gordon at Knockdown Center; I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy (which I wrote about for the New York Times); Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee; Bright Future by Adrianne Lenker; UTOPIA NOW! by Rosie Tucker; the poem “Having ‘Having a Coke with You’ with You” by Mark Leidner; a trip through Philly & Baltimore & DC, a group of fundamentally wonderful cities filled with people I love <3

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This time last year I was: getting laid off, lol, ugh, so I sent you some good poems; and before that, giving and getting compliments; and before that, reading my friend’s love letter to spring and moving out of a city I loved

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Thanks for reading. Hope you encounter some reminders of having lived this month! See you next 24th.

xo,
M