Poor Chris Cornell. His passing has definitely triggered some heavy thinking on subjective meaning and the stories we tell ourselves about the sum value of our lives in isolation. Suicide scares me; it’s something that has felt like a dark figure in the periphery of my social circle for a long time. When I was very, very young, my father found his friend, our neighbor, in his barn. The first boy I ever kissed committed suicide. My grandfather did, for reasons I don’t understand and he did not explain. During some nightmarish teen years, I considered it myself. Luckily, I never found the resolve, and life improved and took me places I never imagined and gave me many, many reasons to be thankful to be here. I don’t feel in danger anymore, myself, though when something happens like a relatable creative figure choosing the act (despite seeming to have mastered their own emotional turbulence, having every reason to be satisfied with life, having resources to do what they want and positive influence in the world) it frightens me. It’s worse since Chris Cornell was such a large figure of my youth, and I’d been enjoying his music right up to the present; he seemed to have come to a good place of sobriety, contentment, seemed like a decent human being, and to be a great family man, too.
This song used to make me cry in a happy girly way, hopeful for the peace of middle age and the companionship of family. Now it makes me sad for a daughter without a father and burdened forever with the mystery of his reasons. For the mystery all of us are doomed to be to each other.
He spoke in a Rolling Stone interview in 2014 about the death of Kurt Cobain and a few other friends and how it colored the time around the creation of the Superunknown album. What he said sums up the feeling around his death, too:
“It’s not so much the person and the relationship with them, but the creative inspiration that person has and I would get from that person. My perception of the world of music at large artistically shrank, because suddenly this brilliant guy was gone. I’m not even talking about what he meant culturally; I’m talking about his creativity. It was super inspiring from the very first demo I ever heard. It broadened my mental picture of what the world was creatively, and suddenly a big chunk of it fell off…The tragedy was much more than the fact that I would never see him again – it was that I would never hear him again. There’s this projection I had with Andy, Kurt, Jeff Buckley and other friends of mine that died of looking into the future at all these amazing things they’re going to do. I’ll never be able to predict what that is. All this music that will come out that will challenge me and inspire me – that sort of romantic, dramatic version of the perspective. When that goes away, for me in particular, it was a really hard thing. And it continues to be a hard thing.”
Maybe it was the Ativan he was on. As maybe in my grandfather’s case, it was the Ambien–I’ll never know. Or maybe some of us have brains that are prone to falling in to something that we can’t always crawl out of, independent of our lives’ circumstances. Luckily for me a tendency toward emotional turbulence seems to be tempered by a rapid cycling through of emotions; the worst is usually soon passed. As long as there’s hope of improvement and I still enjoy my obsessive interests, my tendency is to just grind through unhappiness. But feeling isolated compounds it all…which gives more impetus to try to connect in some way, at least, to other people and to remember to work at some kind of expression.
I used to write constantly. I’m a lapsed poet, even, which has something to do with my personality type (INTP, stereotypical nerd) and not wanting to live in my emotions, so I pretend they just aren’t there. It’s kind of impossible to write poetry without exposing feelings. Even if I mistrust my emotions as something ephemeral and more like weather moving over a landscape and not something upon which to base my actions, they are going to have an effect. I’m not the rational creature I tell myself I am; no one is. I read a description of INTP emotion that compared the emotions to a quiet passenger in a limo seated in the back behind closed, tinted glass. You, your in your head monologue version of yourself is the semi-rational, driving agent at the wheel, pretending the passenger isn’t there, and going about your business. That’s all fine and good, until, as if in some Godfather movie, emotions assert their existence despite you and the passenger swarms up from the backseat to try to choke you and your supposed control out and you wreck the car. It’s sad how apt a metaphor that is for my own life experiences. The modern version of Plato’s horse drawn chariot.
So my desire is to crack those windows a bit, between emotion/cerebral inner monologue, self and social world. I may be shit at small talk, but I can strive for a semi-regular “this is what I’m working on and this is what it means to me” ramble.
Lately, just bras that experiment with posture control, some work at an 1860s style corset cover. Bullet journals and lifehack systems. The former, nostalgic femininity; the latter, comforting illusions of structure and control.
Bye for now.
a word is elegy to what it signifies 