Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Song 19 | Aug 21 2003

It wasn’t the taped-together cover, nor the fuzzy orange ovals floating in a darker orange ether, nor even the giant black-and-white close-up of fork tongs and their shadows that made me sad. It was my own happiness. Which is absurd because if I can’t be happy when I’m happy, when do I expect to be happy, when I’m sad? Said another way, Ceyda just called and said we can’t watch any films tonight because Leili doesn’t want to, so I said, “Maybe we can put plays on for each other” only Ceyda heard, “Maybe we can put pastries on each other,” which I in turn heard as “put pasties on each other,” pasties being a word that Ceyda, who is Turkish, doesn’t know. Actually that has nothing to do with anything, however it occurred to me after hearing the final song, Sing Swan Song (did you know—I looked this up—that swans are said to sing some exquisite song as they die, thus the expression swan song?), that the song list was a map, each song a stop along a route you laid out. Or that’s what it felt like to listen, a full day between songs, and that too is why I found it heartbreaking: because I want to live (I typed love) in that place (a place forever down the road?) and never leave. I’m reminded of the songlines, which if you don’t know (I learned this from the book by Bruce Chatwin) are paths in the form of songs, or songs in the form of paths, through which the ancestors of today’s aboriginal Australians sang into existence all the visible world, and which their descendants today must walk and sing (both together, for they cannot be separated) to guarantee and confirm the existence of creation. It’s a bit much when speaking of a mix CD but who knows what our descendants will be into and anyway other than that Wire song and also #12, which I still haven’t listened to, it rocked.