Nostalgia, Romance, Sentimentality & Grace

C.S. Lewis, 90's Post-Punk, Ecclesiastes, and Grace

Poets are priests mediating the invisible world for us spectators. Inasmuch as they describe the transcendent realm, they are relating to us truth about life, about love, about ourselves...if they do it with raw honesty, it helps us connect with our own personal register of emotions, memories, and sets of experiences. They might even help us reconcile the tension we experience living in this veil between the seen and the unseen...and help give words to what our souls can't articulate, but what our hearts intuitively know. The musical genre known as emocore (and its subsequent variants) arguably began with Washington DC post punk bands, Rites of Spring and Embrace, though both their respective front men, Guy Picciotto and Ian MacKaye have gone on record invalidating the use of the terminology to refer to a period when hardcore punk became infused with introspective lyrics and a more nuanced approach to musical structures. Even as early as Minor Threat’s Out of Step EP and Salad Days 7-inch, a proclivity persisted toward the implementation of more complicated time signatures and the invocation of existential lyrics. One can note parallels for example between songs like Give Me Back by Embrace and Spring and Deeper Than Inside by Rites of Spring. While we can trace this impulse back to Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory or the Bad Brains, Why’d You Have to Go?, the roots of such sentimental pondering can be even found in the likes of 1970’s Soul and R&B as the lyrics to Rites of Spring's Hains’ Point bear a striking resemblance to the Stylistics’ You are Everything.

The characteristic traits of emocore, including its penchant for nostalgia, and its preoccupation with themes of romance ultimately invoke the language of ‘law’ - especially as St. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 3:6-11.

...the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!

2 Corinthians 3:6-11 (NIV)

Referring to the Old Testament account in which Moses descended Mount Sinai having received the decalogue (for the second time), Paul notes how the glory of the Lord that shone from the Prophet's face, eventually faded and lost its brilliance. Daily life retains a similar effervescence as noted in the book of Ecclesiastes, in which The Preacher bemoans our universal failure to realize life as it should be…If I may be tongue-in-cheek for a moment, we could argue that Ecclesiastes was the first emocore album: a narrative documenting the hopeless journey of running through an entire recollection of stream of life experiences, while indulging in maudlin sentimentality and reminiscence.

We are all familiar with the quixotic allure of taking a trip down memory lane, revisiting the sentimental moments and nostalgic places we have been in life…Often such a reminiscence is provoked by an old photograph signifying some significant life experience or idyllic time in our lives (as implied by The Cure's Pictures of You). I can remember fixating on an old photo of my late father and thinking about how real that captured moment was at one point. I could vividly remember everything that was going on in my life at the time and, yet that season is gone - it now belongs to the past. Still, there remained this impulse to want to recover that time, but why? Because I - because we all are in search of the elusive, nebulous 'something' - i.e. we are all in search of life. But life is not found per se, rather it is given. Furthermore, God is not found by our searching and seeking as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians, ’...in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know Him...' It is we who are are sought and consequently are found in Jesus Christ.

Nonetheless, everyone's in search of the ineffable ‘something’ to make living meaningful. One of the ways we attempt to do this is by reminiscing on old (and often failed) relationships. We may attempt to recapture the ecstatic experience of falling in love or discovering romance for the first time. Yet, the concept of romance is never limited only to dating, love, or sex - these are mere aspects thereof. When you consider what draws you into a relationship, is it not that something happens in the magic of experiencing intimacy that hints at something bigger or more transcendent? This idea extends beyond relationships, then. It even implies those memorable, iconic seasons of life like the innocence inherent in childhood for example. This is why Jesus talks about the necessity of being made like a child (Matt 18:3) or being born again in order to enter the kingdom of God. Adverse Childhood Experiences notwithstanding, generally speaking, during childhood, we tend to be more trusting. Life is less heavy because there tend to be fewer responsibilities. We are drawn to the remembrance of such ideal moments because they promise us life. In resurrecting those things, we are lifted out of our present circumstances and afforded a glimpse and a foretaste of another realm.

Nowhere is such a phenomenon more acutely pronounced than in mid 90s Midwestern emocore, replete with its signature approach that featured the use of broken time rhythms, from jazz, the interpolation of a trumpet or some kind of a brass instrument, lyrics written about sentimental, romantic themes, etc. In Milwaukee, the Promise Ring epitomized such distinctions, particularly on the EP, The Horse Latitudes (a collection of their early 7 inch recordings) that I can remember listening to on repeat...often as I slept at night. While I really didn’t follow them much after 1997's Nothing Feels Good (notably, their breakout album), I found their early material bore a uniquely vintage quality. Two songs in particular bear significance from the Falsetto Keeps Time 7 inch - namely, Saturday and Scenes from Parisian Life. The former compliments the latter, yet the two songs musically couldn’t be any more different. Saturday is bass-driven, reminiscent of the hardcore sound of their preceding bands Ceilishrine and None Left Standing, as it trudges along, dripping with distorted guitars. Scenes from Parisian Life bears a lighter tone, intimating the indie rock direction the band would take going forward. There's this odd dissonance between the two songs - yet, they’re complimentary, maintaining a 3/4 time signature. They share each other’s language and in some ways reiterate it. On Saturday, lead man, Davey Von Bohlen sings, ‘She drank white wine/I wanna marry your memory’. On Scenes from Parisian Life which immediately follows, the lyrics indicate, ‘Sun comes up a little later/so you can drink a little longer/I wish I had a dream last night/half the time you would be here…’ The insight is apt, that people are often in love with versions of their beloved…i.e. versions of themselves. In his classic work, A Grief Observed, CS Lewis offers insight that underscores the futility inherent in the sentiment, 'I wanna marry your memory'. The work documents the grieving process Lewis underwent while mourning the death of his wife (referred to in the book as H.) In it, he aptly considers how the natural tendency to want to cling to a phantom notion of those we love ultimately remains an exercise in vanity.

It doesn’t matter that all the photographs of H. are bad. It doesn’t matter–not much–if my memory of her is imperfect. Images, whether on paper or in the mind, are not important for themselves. Merely links. Take a parallel from an infinitely higher sphere. Tomorrow morning a priest will give me a little round, thin, cold, tasteless wafer. Is it a disadvantage–is it not in some ways an advantage–that it can’t pretend the least resemblance to that with which it unites me? I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The tension in any relationship concerns whether we are loving the actual person or the ideal of that person. As people, we are more in love with love, than with the flesh-and-blood, flawed human with whom we are connected; with whom we live day in and day out; whose breathing we hear; whose distinct scent we know; whose faults, quirks and idiosyncrasies we have to contend with constantly. While Jesus defines real love in terms of sacrifice and laying down one's life for another (John 15:13), how willing are we to consistently love in this manner? We are more apt to want to romanticize the person into whom we want them to be. That person then becomes the icon of what we want out of life itself. We love what we want them to be or what we think we need them to be and thereby, we end up loving a manufactured version of them. This only betrays that we are in love with an imagined version of ourselves.

The source of our grief, especially in moments of despair and failure is in the death of the idealized person we thought we were. St. Paul writes in Romans 7, "Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died." Or to restate this in the context of relationships, "I thought I was this righteous person until the relationship showed me that I am far from the sanctified vision of myself I had cherished...". The gospel has a good word for us though. It's no doubt painful to lose the idealized version of what you thought you were, or of what you thought life was. Through our death with Christ though, it is not just the ideal version of what we thought we were that has died, but we ourselves as well. As Paul notes in Galatians, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live..." The ideal version that we thought we were and the wretched version of what we didn't know we were (and still have no idea we are) have been graciously put to death by God. In Christ, we will find real life in and through the deaths, failures and disappointments that we suffer.

The concept of Romance as emocore celebrates it is basically a form of ‘law’ that promises us life if we pursue it (cf. Romans 7:10)…yet the illusory picture of what a relationship ‘could be’, what we ‘could be’, what the other person ‘could be’, fundamentally, what 'life' could be, always remains out of our grasp, a million miles away. It’s mirage is ever present in front of us…yet its attainment persistently evades us. ‘It’s not supposed to be like this…’ is how we often feel in life and in relationships...yet in such moments, The Law is doing its perfect work in us…and the inevitable result is always death. The good news is that death is always the fertile ground of resurrection in the economy of God. The kingdom of God works by way of weakness, humiliation, frustration...and eventually grace, as Peter writes, "after you have suffered awhile, the Lord will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast." In relationships, we often hope to find ourselves and some sense of fulfillment, but it never works. Under grace, we are found in Christ... where the work is complete, and we stand forgiven for eternity. While the explicit articulation of such a sentiment may not always make for very sexy emo lyrics, it does suffice as good news that sets us free...