I believe it was the spring of 2007 when Lauren, a student
in Daily Themes, gave me a disc of songs. One of them was “Fake Palindromes” by
some guy named Andrew Bird, whom I had never heard of. Actually, I had heard of
almost no one on that disc. But the song by Bird was one that I found myself
looking forward to whenever I played the disc. Come to find out he had a new LP
out by then, called Armchair Apocrypha.
I got it and it was one of my favorite LPs of the year. It was either that or
The New Pornographers’ Challengers.
And I saw Bird open for the NPs in Philly that summer. Bliss.
So today’s song is one of the latest songs I’ve loved by
Andrew Bird. It’s from 2011’s Break It
Yourself and features his oddly stripped down sound, what with whistling
and little glints of musical sonorities that seem not so much suppressed as
shrugged off. What Bird has done since The
Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005)—the album with “Fake Palindromes”—is
maintain a mix of the intricate, the delicate, and the casually off-hand. Most
of the songs on his albums are simply pleasant sonic spaces to inhabit, but on
each of the albums I’m familiar with there are some standout songs that kind of
take over my psychic space for a time, seeming to be, in their almost affectless
attachment to their own idiosyncrasy, badges or emblems of something I’ve
always counted on music for: the illusion that life is hummable, I guess. Or
maybe hearing beauty delivered.
Bird’s beauty is that he’s able to allow a lot of space into
his music and let the song seem to construct itself as you listen. Apparently,
he works a long time, with many different iterations, constructing the song in
the first place, but what we get sometimes feels like it’s being worked out as
we listen. Check out the video to see how this looks in person.
“Lazy Projectors” I’ve chosen because its theme relates well
to the general purpose of these posts. It’s about how memory doesn’t so much
play tricks as simply create, like a filmmaker, a version of events that accords with its own powers, prejudices, and emphases. “If memory serves us, then who
owns the master / How do we know who's projecting this reel.” We do the same in
writing, of course, in altering our wording to suit the conception of the moment—the
moment of writing—regardless of what we would have said or how we would have
avoided saying anything in the time we’re recalling. Already I’ve visited more
than a few of such instances, born back ceaselessly into the past—as Scotty
says, in his best high diction—for the sake of a few last snapshots. That’s
about the best you’ll get.
Not only questioning who is projecting the reel, but also
who is doing the filming, calling the shots.
Now who's the best boy
and the casting director / And the editor splicing your face from the scene / It's
all in the hands of a lazy projector / That forgetting, embellishing, lying
machine
I’ll go with that—there is forgetting, for which we sometimes
substitute “wrong memories.” And there is embellishing, which isn’t wrong so
much as reworked. And then there’s lies, just because. There’s always a good
reason to lie, I believe, unless you’re a sociopath who does it automatically.
The lie is for the sake of avoiding the truth, for a purpose.
The idea being that there is a truth “back there” but that it is not and never can
be shared exactly. Or precisely. And all the doubt comes from the difference
between the person who was there and the person who recalls. There is a key
non-identity present (or past), which Bird figures as the “lazy projector.” Lazy suggests he
might get it right if he bothered. And sometimes that is the case. Often. Like
when a student simply writes something wrong and you can tell they really
knew the right answer, they just weren’t careful. But sometimes they remember a distortion or
relay one, at least.
I remember telling a stressed friend studying for a big exam (they’re
called “comprehensives”) in grad school: just talk about what you
remember. What we don’t remember is infinite. What we remember is finite, so
let’s get that part right. After all this isn’t poetry.
Poetry, as the estimable Harold Bloom says, is a lie against
time. In that kind of “lie,” getting it “right” isn’t the point. The point is
the embellishment. But then such embellishing is often the antithesis of “lazy.”
It’s very, very deliberate about the liberties it will take, and why.
I like the bridge in Bird’s song because it’s where he seems
to step forward and take to task his own conceit that memory is somehow a case
of “projection” (which is his “lie against time,” if you like):
They say all good
things must come to an end
Every day the night
must fall
How it all came to
this, I simply can't recall
Too many cooks in the
kitchen
How the mighty must
fall
But I can't see the
sense in us breaking up at all
Each day, good or bad, comes to an “end” (which itself is a
kind of lie), and the “simply can’t recall” eludes the point of saying anything
about the past: “how it all came to this” expects that there is an explanation.
It’s easier to say we don’t remember than that we don’t know. Then a few clichés
that might “explain”: too many cooks, the mighty must fall . . . the first
generally means that there are too many contrary opinions or “recipes” so that
a plethora of explanations means none are trusted; the second suggests “fate” (ananke) and perhaps the ancient Greek
ideas (earlier Pyramus and Apollo are mentioned) of hubris and hamartia. The “breaking
up at all” seems to come out of nowhere until we realize it’s in reference to
the good thing coming to an end and the “it” that “came to this.” It was good
but now it’s gone, to cite “Boy from Tupelo.”
The song seems to suggest—with its most passionate,
non-shrugging moment in the reiterations “no, I can’t see the sense in us
breaking up at all”—that the lazy projectors can cover the difference. We don’t
remember things the same, we don’t know how we got here, we wonder if it’s
inevitable, but, all the same, “forgetting, embellishing, lying” are in the
nature of the beast. “It’s nothing to get hung about,” as Lennon might say. Or
Bird: “Come on, tell us something we don’t know.”
Maybe, if we lie against time sufficiently, things will turn
out differently.
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