remake/remodel

i am the cosmos

Have you ever heard Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos?” It sounds as if it were sung by a damned, groaning spirit; it’s one of the most miserable songs I’ve heard in my life. Bell’s just singing about talking on the phone or driving his girl home, but he produces a wretchedness that is deep and vast, an infinite sphere, of which the center is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere. Like all good pop music, it makes me feel like a teenager, delirious and stupid and self-absorbed, but kind of grown-up, too. I’ve been listening to the song obsessively today, yesterday, and last week, playing it over and over. This makes no sense, because I’ve actually been feeling extraordinarily cheerful. As soon as the song finishes I play it again, drawn to the majestic hurt and loathing of the music, allowing my brain to trickle forth a few delicious painful associations, but my good mood is unshakeable still. The more I hear the song, the better I feel, actually. Where does this come from, I wonder? I feel like one of those idiot schoolchildren that made me want to die of old age at eight years, the ones that interrupted my earnest sketchings of minotaurs and archdevils, lifting up their shirts and daring me to punch them in the gut. Feel my muscles!

So what draws me to this song, then? There is something compellingly romantic, I suppose, about sad, sad music — well, sadness in general. In this time and place so well suited to smug comfort, a thousand bumper stickers attest daily to some need for vicarious tragedy, something awful and bigger than any one of us, though perhaps not entirely real. You want to be made to feel that your unhappiness is but a single string of taut emotion on an aeolian harp of cosmic crumminess, over which the vast breeze of universal misery sweeps. Listen — have you read the story by Mishima, the one about the young man who must break off his romance with his girl? He resolves to do it one night — no, that’s not right, he has been planning it all along, calculating and anticipating even as he was courting her, holding her hands, making love to her. He breaks the news to her at a tea shop while outside a storm thunders. She says nothing, but immediately begins to cry. He leaves the shop, not as pleased as he would have liked, and she follows him into the rain, silent and weeping. He resents this, he hopes to make her feel ridiculous, puny. He leads her to the imperial palace, where three great fountains spew water against the rain. The two walk and walk, and still the girl is crying, the boy’s dismissals drowned out amidst the great fountains and the falling rain. The girl slips in a puddle. The boy walks into a doorway; a bucket of water falls on his head. Bonk! He ought to feel stupid, shouldn’t he? But: The storm does not abate, and the earth quakes, and the island is engulfed by a tsunami, and the entire country is swallowed by the sea.

I may have misrepresented the details or even the point of the story, but it doesn’t matter, does it.