day53 - 'grace' and re-experiencing art
dear luci,
tonight i am laying on the couch while I play Jeff Buckley's Grace on vinyl. I know that sounds super fucking dire, but I promise, I'm actually okay. honestly the main reason I'm listening to it again is to play some music for my bird. I've just looked up and she's actually trying to sleep, so I feel bad for annoying her with my whims.
I haven't listened to this album on vinyl yet despite having owned it for a month or so— I bought it almost out of desperation, possessed with the desire1 to own a physical copy. Once I had it on my shelf, that desire was satisfied2. I absolutely intended to listen to it of course, but at the time the thought of letting the needle hit the surface of that disk made me ill, as if it were some cursed arcane object.
I listened to Grace for the first time last year. I realised that despite hearing its praises, I had never heard its contents. For some reason, I was driving at the time. I loved it a lot, I was surprised to enjoy it so emphatically, and even more surprised to hear songs like 'Mojo Pin' and (particularly) 'Eternal Life' from an artist who is kind of mythologised as a sadboy ballad singer. Songs like 'Last Goodbye' and of course the obvious 'Lover, You Should Have Come Over' had an unimpeded record of making me cry. They spoke so profoundly to things that were going on in my life at the time, as if this man's voice was reaching out through time and space to encapsulate the intensity of all the pain I was feeling— 27 years after he had died. I'm not the first nor the last to say that truly incredible art has a way of making you feel like it was created Just For You, whilst also making however many other people feel the exact same.
I spent an afternoon listening to 'Last Goodbye' and 'Lover,' on repeat as I walked down a main road, crying under my sunglasses, because I could hear myself and someone I loved in the narrative of those lyrics. I've scream-sang those songs in my car with tears in my eyes. Like I said, they always seem to affect me.
But tonight, they passed me by without even a sniffle. Granted, I feel too tired to cry anyway, but there just wasn't that pull this time.
Tangent time. We've all heard of Pavlovian or classical conditioning, right? In technical terms, classical conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus (NS) becomes associated with some kind of biologically potent, unconditioned stimulus (US), which ordinarily would produce an autonomic reflex response, or an unconditioned response (UR). Once the association has been made, the subject exhibits the response, now called a conditioned response (CR) when faced with the previously neutral stimulus, now called a conditioned stimulus (CS). In context, Pavlov's eponymous dogs were conditioned to associate the chime of a hand-bell (NS) with the presence of food in their bowls (US). The US caused them to salivate (UR). After repeated pairings, the association had been learnt and the dogs simply associated the sound (CS) with the thought "Oh cool! Food!", which caused them to salivate (CR). What you may not know is that if the CS is presented without the US often enough, the CS will stop causing a CR. That's called "Extinction". But! There's also the phenomena of spontaneous recovery, wherein even after extinction, the CS can spontaneously elicit a CR in the subject. Granted, this renewed CR is usually weaker than it was before extinction.
Now, Pavlovian conditioning isn't really an applicable idea here. There's no biologically potent stimulus that I've paired Jeff Buckley's album Grace alongside. It's just a thought, a feeling, a memory. But let's ignore that. Just because I didn't cry this time, doesn't mean that's gone forever. Maybe a brief period of extinction has come about. But there is an equal chance of spontaneous recovery. Maybe even renewal.
Tangent aside, this listen brought a different song to my attention. I wasn't particularly affected by 'Hallelujah' the first time I heard it. But this time, something had changed. It dug its claws into my soul. I didn't cry, nor did I feel like crying, but I felt... so peculiarly moved. By a song I don't even ordinarily find to be that moving. But maybe I do, now. That's the beauty of revisiting art. It lets you experience and re-experience things in completely different contexts, different times in your life, different moods. Things that you didn't pay too much attention to before suddenly become vital. Your love for the work deepens. I don't need to cry to know I love this album. Purely the fact that it can elicit such emotion in me is enough. Purely the fact that it has elicited such potent emotion in me in the past, is enough.
And one day I will listen again and I will have new thoughts and feelings. But I will not be any less of the person I was when I walked down that street, crying to Lover, You Should've Come Over. Because it felt like these words were about me.
"Too young to hold on and too old to just break free and run."
"My body turns and yearns for a sleep that won't ever come. It's never over. My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder. It's never over, All my riches for her smiles, When I've slept so soft against her."
"She is the tear that hangs inside my soul forever. Oh, but maybe I'm just too young
To keep good love from going wrong"
Sweet dreams, Luci <3