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And you can’t fake it hard enough to please everyone or anyone at all

For some reason I’ve suddenly had the urge to revisit the emo classics of my youth. After a week of non-stop Senses Fail I’ve had Dashboard Confessional on continuous rotation for the last few days. I’m surprised by how much of this still resonates twenty years (?) after I last listened to this, particularly when the final chorus kicks in on two minutes 😢 

And you can't fake it hard enough to please everyone
Or anyone at all..or anyone at all
And the grave that you refuse to leave
The refuge that you've built to flee
The places that you've come to fear the most
Is the place that you've come to fear the most
Is the place that you have come to fear the most

My ex-fiancé once said that our relationship was woven in music. It’s the one relationship I’ve ever been in motivated by a shared passion for music, as well as a willingness to reciprocally expand our tastes through going to each other’s gigs. The fact we never actually got married suggests that probably wasn’t enough. But I’ve been thinking recently about how the texture of inner life is woven through aesthetic experience. This music still resonates because it remains part of who I am, superseded and overwritten by more elaborate modes of expression which came later. But without this there never would have been those.

Indeed that’s in large part why I’ve spent the last six months reading everything Christopher Bollas has ever written. He suggests we only become who we are, becoming this self with this idiom, through aesthetic experience. To recognise that is important but to share it is perhaps even more important. It’s not that other people can’t get you unless they share your aesthetic tastes but rather that something fundamentally is lost unless they are willing to attend to your tastes. Attention being, as Simone Weil pointed out, a form of love. 

And the picture frames are facing down
And the ringing from this empty sound
Is deafening and keeping you from sleep
And breathing is a foreign task
And thinking's just too much to ask
And you're measuring your minutes
By a clock that's blinking eights
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