The Rest Is Noise

Do you ever have dreams that make you cry about your life? I don’t mean a specific moment or even season but the whole thing. Like you wake up in the middle of someone trying to split open your grapefruit heart with their bare hands and don’t try to stop them, or something. Back in 2017 my friend Katie told me about a dream she had where someone was stirring stars into concrete, and I still think about it all the time. It’s easy to focus on the cosmic pieces of the image and forget the way quicklime burns your skin if you aren’t paying attention, the same way it’s easy to forget the act of creation is a type of suffering. Everything that matters costs us something, and I spent this morning thinking a bit about how one of the benefits of living in late stage capitalism (or whatever stage this actually is) is how it gets us comfortable with transactions. I’ll admit, that’s a bit like saying a beautiful thing about LA is the way its traffic teaches you to be gentler with yourself and the time it takes you to grow short distances, but I don’t think it’s untrue. The truth is that our hearts just go on breaking, and while I think there’s a great deal of comfort to find from the reality that they are breaking open rather than breaking down, it nevertheless is a difficult and permanent sensation. And if you’re going to make anything, especially on a regular basis, that sensation is the only kind of currency that’s actually going to cover the costs. The artists I look up to most aren’t just people who suffered a great deal, everyone does. To me, they’re people who gathered their suffering into their own deep reservoirs like grain from a harvest and turned it into something that brought them life, even if only for a few moments at a time.

Most metaphors break down, and the ones above are no exception, but when I wake up from a dream like the one I mentioned at the beginning I usually wander through an arc like that to find my footing again before the day starts. It’s a funny way to wake up, and my dogs probably think I’m sad because I’m having trouble finding my slippers in the dark, but it is what it is. Another thing I usually do in these sorts of moments is put on “The Rest Is Noise”, for some reason that song has always sounded to me like what these sorts of mornings feel like, and you can give it a listen below if you’d like to.