Embracing Delusion
at my desk job, at The Metro, on the tube, in near death experiences with a compact SUV, in the suburbs, amongst the stars
It’s a Wednesday night and I’ve sat at a desk all day. I’d rather let the grass around my grave wilt away, proverbially speaking, but one of my favourite local musicians is playing at the Metro. ✺
Alix and I spot each other through the window first and have a glinting moment of frosted delight, smiling back at each other. The card machine isn’t working, so the person at the door sends me to the bar to get cash out.
“Hey,” I say to the tall figure at the bar next to me, “you’re Aloe, right?” I ask unprompted and with the unadulterated thrill of an extrovert. “Er, yeah.” He says after thinking about it for a second. I only know his stage name like some kind of groupie. Maybe just committing to the bit, I hope he thinks. “I really loved your album,” I say, insisting on buying him a Coopers sparkling. He tries to refuse me, which shows I was unsuccessful in conveying how much I love his album. I am in debt to you, I’m trying to say. Your music made some kind of near ineffable impact on me. I wrote a blog about it, I want to say but can’t care more than I want to be cool.
When I finally get in, Alix has wandered off to the merch table. I get caught in a conversation with people I don’t know talking in the indecipherable cadence of close friends. The cooled air pushes against my layers. I notice how we all wait impatiently to talk about ourselves but then get bored of our own points and pander off the end of our sentences.
Alix returns with a lino print of a wizard that looks a bit like them; curls and gown, etc. They always give so much of themselves. No details spared. I try to absorb as much as I can but I lag behind. I admire how open hearted they are and I hold onto this observation and push away judgement. To be hardened isn’t to be wise; it’s actually the stupidest waste. Midway through one of Alix’s stories, we have to separate to push through different grey doors. It strikes me as odd that we can’t use the same bathroom and continue our conversation over the stalls; especially since they get mistaken for a “young lady” at work and I’m wearing washed out mens jeans like I have generations of patriarchy inside them.
We’re surrounded by people living for the bit. Arm warmers, home done haircuts, shrugging shoulders. Until the music comes on and everyone huddles into the back room bobbing along to the synth. I envy all of them. The bleached, thinly vailed love for it all. Everyone here makes something or wants to be making something: Why else make the effort to be here on a Wednesday? This questionable use of synthesiser somehow matters more than whatever 9am has threatening us. At some point every single one of us glazes over and goes to that chaotic place inside. The nosey part of myself wants to indulge everyone. ‘What do you wish you were making right now?’ Earlier, someone asked me what I do. And I responded with a prescribed quip about my day job. I fear I’m forgetting how to code switch between the person I want to be and the person I need to be. I wish I were writing that short story that was living in me all summer. I never finished it. I still might. Does the intention to create count for anything? Is showing up to this gig part of our creative process or a form of escapism? Where is that line as a creative?
I slip into a kind of belonging in the third person. Our creative process. Quickly spinning out of it when I look down and see I’ve worn a Caroline Polachek shirt to the experimental music night. My loafers shine back the stage lights but their stitching threatens to unravel. I’m such a dork; half dressed for a repressed day job and half dressed to talk in pained sentences to someone with long hair and longer opinions about the Kubrick film they watched at their queer film club. I envy everyone. I envy the ease at which these people touch eachother affectionally but not sexually or perversely.
I envy even the guy wearing socks and sandals with a dress shirt on stage. He dedicates a song to his sister, he says it’s called Dumpster Diva. He moves with so much abandon that it becomes artful. I admire his absurd, joyful commitment to whatever this is. Tour the country with this whimsical nostalgia, I wordlessly urge him while laughing with him (I hope). Spread the word that revolutions don’t have to be all violent, they can be velvet, or silent, or singing. I think about disruptive joy. I think about possibility and impossibility. Limitations flood the car ride home but so too does the hazy moonlight. Stability bears the burden of wasted potential. If. If. If.
My blood pumps purple. I gurgle down the reasons I took the path of least resistance. The stability seems frivolous in the midnight drive back to the suburbs. Why aspire to own property or climb the ladder or join the corporate diversity committee when you can attend an experimental music gig on a Wednesday night? When you could write. When you could commit yourself to art—to the heart—as clumsily but with as much commitment as astronomically possible?
I think about love and how much fight there is in it. There’s nothing passive about adoring and caring. There’s not much passive about passivity either. There’s such effort in not caring and that supposed apathy is so revealing. Partly of how afraid of investment and intimacy we are. And the fear reveals how much we want it. An amorphous loneliness overtakes the moment. I think about how everything is knotted with contradictions. I wonder how much I am my own enemy and hero. I want community but even the staff at my local community centres don’t feel safe there.
I think about how the curse of your twenties is contending with everyone else’s ideas about what you could or should be doing, without any real grasp on what you want to be doing. Some say not to rush to fill the idleness, to make the most, to rot where you are planted. Others will grin with a mouth full of risk calcified into reward.
I think about how HR at work refused the suggestions to include ‘community’ as a core corporate value, and instead included ‘customer’. I buy a coke. I buy books. I buy cat food. I buy a step ladder. I buy time.
“to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of [our] real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” — Simone Weil, The Need For Roots
✺
Now, it’s two weeks later. I’ve let my ideas pool and evaporate. I’m walking to work through the suburbs listening to the latest Fontaines DC single. Fontaines have a history of lighting up many hot spots in my brain, including but not limited to: my lingering youthful angst, my complex relationship to poetry, my even more complicated relationship with masculinity, and my flimsy connection to my Irish ancestry as a second generation immigrant on my mum’s side.
Bree and I ran across Laneway last year to catch the last half of Fontaines set after Phoebe Bridgers. I weaselled us past the hoards of men. When the opening flutter of the bass to I love you started, the girl in front of us pulled out an Irish flag and climbed onto the shoulders of the guy next to her. The song is well known as a love song to Dublin from a man who now lives in London and tour busses. Years before, I had heard about an Irish post-punk band making waves but it was Cecile who insisted I listen to their last album, Skinty Fia when they were set to play our hometown.
I messaged Cecile yesterday and we agreed that Starburster, this new single, manages to do the near impossible; it sounds distinctly new but also remains authentic. Partly due to Grian perpetually singing in his coarse Dulbiner accent and mostly because of the compulsive, cryptic urgency in his song writing. There must be polish but it’s hard to spot, it feels as if the song has burst out of him (as they always do).
“I wanna bite the phone, I wanna bleed the tone
I wanna see you alone, alone, alone, lone
I wanna strait the shark and find me somewhere to park
Like the light when it's dark, it's dark, it's dark, dark
A few stars about make it feel like peace in a way
A complimentary round
Constellation got a twist in it
For a GPO and all the hits in it”
According to the Oxford Dictionary, there are six definitions for ‘starburst’. However, their site is barred by paywalls, so I could only find 4 definitions:
Starburst (noun)
A violent explosion, or the pattern (likened to the shape of a star) supposed to be made by such an explosion.
(typography) A symbol similar to an asterisk, but with additional rays: ✺.
(astronomy) A region of space with an unusually high rate of star formation.
(astronomy) A period in time during which a region of space experiences an unusually high rate of star formation.
The earliest recorded account of the compounding of starburst is from the New-Yorker in 1938. Over thirty years before the individually wrapped candies by the same name were released in America. I can’t find any more context about the New Yorker article. I consider buying a subscription to the Oxford Dictionary with the cruel optimism to find more information. But how much of a nerd do I really have to be? What can an institution tell me that my sky, skin, and kin can’t?
I ate a lot of Starburst the first time I was in London. Stef and I made poorly executed origami hearts out of the wrappers on a flight to Rome in March 2019.
The only time I’ve been to Dublin, I did nothing but sit in dimly lit pubs drinking Guinness and reading a book about a writer detailing his struggles with depression. In an inebriated state, I went to see the gun holes left in the GPO as a badge of honour. I caught the flu and was bedridden for two days waiting for my chest to bust.
✺
Stars form from immense pressure, a kind of space diamond, made of space dust and gas formed into large molecular clouds. Turbulence from deep within these clouds creates knots of higher density.
“When these knots contain sufficient mass that the gas and dust can begin to collapse from gravitational attraction. As it collapses, pressure from gravity causes the material at the center to heat up, creating a protostar. One day, this core becomes hot enough to ignite fusion and a star is born.” — NASA
✺
The bridge of Starburster marks a clearing in the frenetically of the song; the guitars, drums and quick lipped lyrics give way to the swell of strings and the gentle melody of these words:
Hit me for the day For the Light That you suffered To come by Take to my sky Never wanting Only wonder To live out of reach Sloping family Short to tall One to three Swallow the key In their footprints I will follow — Starburster
My breath catches on the line “never wanting only wonder”. I feast on its double meaning. First, the obvious reading of: wanting more than wonder. Never wanting only wonder. Then, if you add a comma, it declares: no more wanting only wonder. Never wanting, only wonder. Something bursts. It might be the glitz of achievement, or stardom, or anything more than the awe at how a few stars can take the dark and make it feel like peace.
The additional suffix ‘er’ in Starburster is unique to the title of the song, except for one random children’s book by the same name. Why make up the word and not call it starburst? The term starburster dubs and/or doxes something or someone as the catalyst; the burster of the star. It’s hard to not give into reading this as a form of internalisation. Perhaps mostly because the first person pronoun ‘I’ is used 23 times in the song.
“I'm gon' hit your business if it's momentary blissness”
— Starburster
Must artistry be doomed to stardom? I think of the 27-club. I look up Grian’s age. He was born 19 July 1994, which makes him 29, a Cancer, and currently in the midst of his first Saturn return. If you don’t know much about astrology, just believe me that this adds to the meaning of Starburster. In short, this is the aforementioned sky, skin, and kin those Oxford fuckers should be worried about.
I read somewhere that Grian wrote the song while having a panic attack on the tube in London. I almost exclusively listened to his solo album on the tube during my trip to london last year. East Coast Bed was one of my top songs on my Spotify Wrapped because of it. Time overlaps and falls away again. I’m left with gently unstoppable nature of extratemporal intimacy. When I close my eyes against the morning sun, I see the kaleidoscopic seats of the Central Line. Grian takes his headphones off and looks up from his phone. He is who I think he is. His weariness gives in to a touch of warmth. Almost pitying me for loving what I’ll never really know. He takes note of my recommendation of a post-punk band from my hometown. Despite everyone on the train pretending not to be watching us, he agrees to record a voice memo for me to send to the band.
I’m brought back to suburban Australia by the sudden awareness of a car reversing down a driveway infront of me as I walk blindly into its sunburst path. They stop and wave me on. Connection is real no matter its conductor. Is art real no matter its form: dreamt or realised? Would I hit someone’s business just for a shot at some bliss no matter how momentary? I restart the song, hoping that this time there will be a but after ‘it may feel bad’. My hope lingers on may. It’s May 3rd. I landed in London last year on the last day of May.
The algorithm suggests an interview with Grian. In it he confirms the song was born from a sense of immobility but marked a new sound and excitement about a new direction for the band. He mentions Blur and the Gorillaz as influences. But according to him, the punching propellent of the song is him embracing the necessary delusions in order to function. “I imagine it as a world within a snowglobe, that you can slip into like a warm bath but in that world is all the madness and all the hysteria and [the song] is about embracing that”.
What delusions do we need to embrace in order to function?
I arrive at work at 8:30 on the dot. Later in the day, my unit manger hands be a sticky note that reads: “Everything will unfold as it should. You are exactly where you’re meant to be.”
With joy,
from Roisin
I love this one so much! Your writing is poetic and heartwarming.