I Feel Like an Echo

Facts are sorta overrated. I mean, don’t get me wrong, some facts are now considered irrefutable. The unequal distribution of resources on the plant. The unparalleled power of kings that corporations wield as “people.” The grinding hatred that motivates so much human behavior. The fact that space ship earth is trying to boil us alive like a bunch of shellfish. I have walked in the halls of the great temples of the cult of facts, the social facts of life, as a doctor of sociologist. I used to have a sort of naïve optimism in the fact that the truth will set you free. I wanted to produce truth and change the world. Yet, I didn’t anticipate how contested facts really were until I was in the work of creating them. Every little bit of knowledge that we consider a fact today has been subjected to a gauntlet of political, economic, social forces fighting over what is able to settle into established truth. There are simple facts in my work that I have never been able to print, because of these active, invisible culture wars that rarely are rendered visible. Here you can easily conjure up an image of the wars over facts regarding climate change and the health effects of cigarettes to get my gist. This is the byzantine labyrinthine of a fact worker, so you will have to excuse my disenchantment with the realm of facts. It’s all just another culture industry.1

I retreat from the domain of facts into my own impressionistic feeling-scape of being as an animate hump of clay with a pumping heart and sensory organs that allow me to FEEL. YES, my escape from the great grinding gristmill of fact production is in my feeling through, getting acquainted with, and expressing what turns up as I move through a reality is a multi-dimensional overlapping venn diagram of over 500,000 people sharing the same terraformed high desert plains city. There, as I pick my way around the city on two feet or two wheels, I am free to let my imagination roam as I observe the pressure points in where these realities intersect, conflict, or are ignored. As George Orwell said, “At present, we know only that the imagination…will not breed in captivity.”2 Yes, and in fact production, there is rarely any impetus for creativity or imagination. There are just memos and copy machines, memos and copy machines, memos and copy machines. Yet, the minute I am able to put on my headphones and retreat from the ministry of fact production, I can find some freedom listening to the songs that recognize the pain in me now. That’s bliss. That’s sweet bliss.

“Well, I've never prayed but tonight I'm on my knees, yeah
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now”

The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony

I am in good company in trying to be more directed by my emotions and vulnerability in my creativity. Adam Curtis, legendary leftist film-maker noted that when he is crafting his films he is, “never literal, you see, I’m emotional.” When one looks back to his iconic film Hypernormalisation, he is explicitly describing a feeling that is pervasive in the population:

Similarly, Geoff Rickly, writer and musician in bands Thursday, United Nations, and No Devotion noted that his willingness to be vulnerable has driven him in his writing of his new book Someone Who Isn’t Me, an auto-fictional account of a musician named Geoff:

This week I have felt the pangs of Denver changing. Like any major metropolitan area in the US in the last ten years it has undergone an incredible metamorphosis. Lily has lived here most of her life and we still have spots that we go to that she went to as a kid. Other spots like that have disappeared. I have watched friends leave. I have watched people I wish were my friends leave; I am a hermit after all so there are a ton of people I would be friends with if I was more interested in company. There were bike rides I wish I had gone on with people. There are buildings I used to work in. Roads I never go down any more because of hobbies I don’t do in the city any more. All this and I have lived on the east side of Denver for 10 years. The city isn’t just buildings and food.

No, the city unfolds like watching an old super 8 film on a projector each time I move around its streets. As Rickly noted in Someone Who Isn’t Me, “No one ever hears music past the first time. Everything after is just a high-fidelity echo, fading already, even in the midst of our own incarnations.”5 Its the same with a cityscape, even in its churning, capital-scraping change, the city is still experienced as a fading echo.

I feel like the Beth Abraham Congregation Synagogue at 16th and Pearl Street, a building nearly 125 years old that is on the national register of historic places that sits near the center of the Queen City of the Plains watching the booms and busts, watching the capital devour all it can and then flee. The Beth Abraham Synagogue housed the largest Jewish congregation between Kansas City and the West Coast between 1899 and 1953, when the community left for a bigger building a couple miles south. Since then, Baptists, Pentacostalists, and some Christian church with an “Executive Pastor” have used in the space. Yet, regardless of what community is using the synagogue or what sort of development has gone on around the building, it sits there almost unchanged. Its an echo of when former U.S. Senator from Colorado Simon Guggenheim (1907-1913) worshiped in that space, about 10 years before a Ku-Klux Klan Member would become mayor of Denver. I have only lived here 10 years and I, too, feel like an echo of a previous version of the history; a piece of local color that doesn’t quite fit in a city where there are almost as many dispensaries and breweries as there are families.6

I already feel awash in the impressionistic hues that the music of Boards of Canada brings you into. Their target is to bring you back to smoother soundscapes from educational films of the 80s. I use it when there is memory work to do. I use it when I want to view the world through that super 8 film lens and soak in the echoes that I have already lived through. I suppose this is not a surprise. My biggest inspiration, John O’Donohue, referred to the memory as a temple that one can visit to harvest all the wisdom and emotionality from their experiences in their life. This track “Bocuma” circles round and round like I do on my bicycle going past buildings where I have seen concerts, down roads where buses have forced me off the road, or past reservoirs that I have circled around dozens of times. I like Boards of Canada for that reason.

Picking though these echoes is tinged with the melancholia that accompanies Boards of Canada’s music as well. Take the track “Pete Standing Alone.” It’s just pure melancholia for a time that has past. It feels like my using Rickly’s echoes concept is an explicit attempt to express that some age has indeed passed here in Denver. It feels like that for me, but I wonder if it is the city or me that has changed. Maybe we both have. That can certainly lead to a feeling of dislocation, that uncanny sense that one might not belong in a place anymore. I don’t want to say that there are not more friends to make and new experiences to be had. That’s not the case. It’s just I am getting older and its getting harder to put myself out there. Some of my friends who are still here have plans of leaving. Such matters are only complicated by my colonizer and gentrifier status. Maybe I don’t deserve to feel like I belong in a city I came too late to, but that is likely too harsh when I am already doing real work to address those concerns.

I guess I am not sure, dear reader. I am just awash in the melancholia and that is a-ok with me. I am here for it. I am here for being an echo just like the Beth Abraham Synagogue building. I am here for being absorbed into this place and remaining with it, haunted by all the echoes of people and places that have left. I suppose that’s all we ever have anywhere if we stick around long enough. I hope you and your kin are well. I hope y’all are nourished and safe. Please let me know if any of this brings up anything for you.

All the best dear reader,

James

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