the island, part 6: ontario

This is the sixth in a song-by-song series about why I chose FULL FORCE GALESBURG by The Mountain Goats as the one CD I would take to a desert island. Previous installments are available here.

Every morning after I first wake up I go to the beach, assuming it's not raining too hard, and I do my morning stretches. They aren't calisthenics, per se, but meridian stretches that are a way to promote the flow of ki in the body. I used to intend to integrate spiritual exercise into my daily life, but would nonetheless find excuses, whether I was working 70 hours a week or taking a month off between jobs.

On an island, alone, you realize, finally, you have no more excuses.

I never talked about my Taoism much, back in the world, for lots of reasons. Spirituality is something very few of my peer group are interested in hearing about or discussing, for one, unless it's to bitch about fringe practitioners of Christianity or to rabidly assert that obviously faith is absurd - unless it's faith in the man-made systems of reason, in which case it's infallible. Another reason is that I'm still learning and not really sure what the hell I'm talking about. (As I discovered during my early online research, some would argue that unless I spoke Mandarin Chinese and lived 2000 years ago I don't deserve to even consider myself Taoist. I like to think of these people as "twats".)

Another reason is that Taoism is so fundamentally different from other religions, in that the Tao is all around us and part of our experience. In the Taoist mindset, interacting with the ultimate God-essence of the universe isn't something that happens when you die and go to heaven, or to help dictate what happens to your soul upon your resurrection, or what have you. It's all around us. Not a transcendental worldview, but an immanent one, I heard it explained to me.

When I first learned about Tao, I tried to find a Taoist service. Boy did I not understand the deal with Taoism. Here, with the sand crunching underneath my legs as I sit down for some of the stretches, this is a Taoist service.

So much of Taoism is about being in the now, and here, stripped from everything, I should be in the now. And I try. But my mind keeps reaching back, and it's not helped by the music I brought with me. But I brought it because of its connection with who I was, and what I really want to hear, I think to myself as I complete the eighth and final meridian stretch, is to listen to "Ontario".

I wipe off the sand, wash my face in the ocean, head back to the cabin. A glass of water, some seaweed chips, a banana, an orange, some smoked fish. This is breakfast. Also, often, lunch and dinner.

It's time for track 6. Repeat play.

Yes, "Ontario" is another song about self-knowledge and its limits. But it's something else entirely to me as well.

Ten years or so ago, I got FULL FORCE GALESBURG in the mail serendipitously, unexpectedly, unsolicited. Some months prior, I had put up John Darnielle and Craig Stewart, the former being Mr. Mountain Goats and the latter being part of Trance Syndicate/Emperor Jones Records, when their tour with Alastair Galbraith came through town. As it happened, despite or because of being around one of my most revered musicians, I spent a good amount of time on the porch talking to Craig.

Several months later, on a Saturday, I go to put in an extra day at my grueling labor building global communities, and on the way to the car, in the mailbox, is a suspiciously CD-shaped envelope.

I open, and I contemplate bailing on work for another hour, but I can't. So I take it to work to listen to.

I had to work, so I wasn't giving it as full of an ear as I'd like. First listens for me are almost always impressions, kind of an idea to prepare myself to really hear the album the second time. The first time you're hearing it against what you expected it to be, the second time you're hearing it for what it is.

Then I got to track 6, and straight out of the gate there's something slightly charged, something that catches me about the guitar riff. And at the end of the verse the guitar suddenly stops and the vocal hits -

there was nothing in it but pain for me

and then the song picks up again, but I'm hooked now, and not having really heard the first verse, I listen to the second verse closely.

I know what can hurt me real bad
and what can't hurt me any more
I know how to rise up with the sun
and I am learning what sleep stood for
I thought I figured out the world in its circular way
and then I saw the sun fall out of the sky the other day
- there was nothing in it but pain for me

And I didn't know what it meant, exactly, but it seemed true, partially because of the words and partially because of the insistent quality of the vocal delivery that made every word sound like truth to me. Today, I think of the closest thing to a spiritual advisor I've had in my life, and his typically blunt advice about how you never figure everything out, and if you think you have, the universe will happily upend this belief of yours.

I have dwelt in the past here. Of course I have. I am a man scanning for traps, hidden dangers. Things that can break me. And these are likely to be the things lurking in my brain, apt to sneak up on me if I am not wary. Survival takes up some time but the island is largely bucolic, intermittent storms aside. I can live here forever, I believe, if I can stay sane.

But I am not done with the past. I still remember sitting in my office in the data center on some high floor of a Houston skyscraper, and the song continued, unrelenting and unexpectedly, into a description of a bucolic paradise of its own:

squirrels climbing trees in bloom
soft yellow light spilling into the room
my favorite records
my favorite books

- and I had no idea how it connected to the rest of the song, but I'm on the hook now, and then it happens -

the people I love

- but see, it's on love that his voice kind of breaks or goes into a different register or something completely vulnerable, and then is immediately followed as he regains his vocal strength with an audacious brilliant line expressing a sentiment I'd never quite heard before but makes perfect sense -

the people I almost love

- and that's the knockout punch, and I am fucking shattered out of nowhere, and perhaps nobody else has ever or will ever feel that way about this song, perhaps somehow I was and am the ideal listener.

And if your question is "shattered then" or "shattered now", the answer is yes. But it's a good shattered.

It's September 23rd. Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be older than Christ was when he died, according to the most commonly believed historical records. No idea how old Lao-Tsu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, was when he died. But I suspect he would be appalled to be venerated.

I imagine a birthday party. A beautiful cabin, dappled with sun. But somewhere with people. My favorite records, my favorite books. The people I love, the people I almost love. Perhaps they are beckoning. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps they have no idea. Perhaps the world thinks I am dead.

But I am alive and I am here, and I turn the music off and throw the food waste in the compost heap down the beach and then I jump in the water for a swim around the island. I have loved being in the water for as long as I can remember, and it's perfect here. Idyllic.

I remember me a decade ago, in a skyscraper in Houston, and the days and weeks before and after that, thinking I was on the verge of figuring out everything if I could just get the right job, the right girlfriend, the right future. Now I know that I will never figure out everything, that if I think I do sudden pain will sneak in as unexpectedly as it does for the narrator of "Ontario". And that maybe the coda of that song is just about being aware of what's around you and recontextualizing it as paradise, and as tiny minnows dart past me in a silvery swarm, light reflecting off of their minute scales, I swim with them, following the current, supposing that this is a fortunate way to spend the last day of my 33rd year of life, at one with the sea, with no idea what is to come next.

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VIDEO #6 for people who don't give a shit about the Mountain Goats: the children's ballet version of Deerhoof's "Milk Man".