Deep into Autumn

Mostly I graded tests today. I finished putting together a table that had been lying half built by the far window but it's still a little wobbly. I tried to put in a screw to brace it but for some reason the threads wouldn't catch in the wood right, so nothing happened. Outside it's been damp and gray all day and into the night. In the streetlights a fog seems to suggest itself.

Right now I have the song "Winter" on from Goats Head Soup, it's gorgeous. Full of sharp, clear sounds and this great string section that comes in at the end, like the Stones were always able to do from that time, it sounds perfect, unforced. Like it's just touched Phil Spector wall-of-sound but stayed true to guitars and the meanings in words rather than just the emotions. It's full of the feelings of interiors and warmth.

But mostly today I've been thinking about Joy Division and Ian Curtis. I saw Control at the Village East and it was a strange experience. I was expecting a haunted musical genius kind of biopic, but as it was taken from his wife's memoirs it really ignored all the mystique and stripped down the story of Joy Division to this kind of psychological confusion (caused in part by physiologic factors) blooming in the soil of sense of duty, sense of regret, competing definitions of love and a sense that the dreams were somehow bigger than the realities imagined. In a sense, the movie took a band that almost defines mystique, and stripped it down to just another struggle in definitions and ashes of dreams.

Joy Division, for me, was a necessity in high school, one of the bands I would have killed myself without, along with the Smiths, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, a few others probably I should mention. Isolation, foreboding, frustration and these cold drums, that odd always compelling voice. How it would all hold back and then break into a wave of feeling: the Cure from about 1982 on couldn't have existed if it didn't rip off wholeheartedly every lick Joy Division ever played. But unlike the Cure, Joy Division didn't wear that emotion on its collective sleeve, there was no parade, just this kind of paroxysm of feeling, the kind of thing that seemed so real when you had to politely listen to every single body and not reply with any part of yourself. The songs build and reward patience, by the end there's this overwhelming energy in many of the songs, and they're so filled with feelings they seem to rip the songs apart. I think "Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures is my favorite song by them, but "Transmission," "She's Lost Control," "Isolation," and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" are right there. He was only 20 or 21 when he wrote these songs, in the movie they show him quoting from Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold," and I suppose it makes sense he would be attracted to the Romantic poets. Shelley was dead by 30, Byron by 36, Keats youngest still at 26 (with his annis mirabilis in 1818/1819 when he was 23 and 24 years old), Wordsworth's best work was almost all completely done in his youth, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (only Blake, burning with prophecy and mission, continued to improve and grow as an artist into his age). Ian Curtis didn't even make it to the fabled age of 27. He was dead at 23.

When I was a kid I used to think about him killing himself, right before the American tour. I used to imagine it was this amazing world weariness, a sense that the polish of the world had dulled, revealing everything as garish and full of grotesqueries fit only for the night. In a sense I always rebelled against this feeling his suicide seemed to suggest, though I sympathized with it. But this film seems to suggest he died from a feeling of exactly the opposite, a fullness of life that couldn't reconcile his beliefs with his actions, couldn't stand the thought that a gesture wasn't complete in and of itself, that it couldn't somehow continue defining the world long past the point that it was given. Or that at the very least, that gesture couldn't define him by itself, for those the gesture was meant for.

I'd been afraid to see this movie, it's been out for a bit now, but I knew it would dredge up all this stuff I hadn't thought about it in awhile, just by its subject matter. It's probably a bit much to write about now, and it all seems unfocused, my writing. But now I'm starting to think about how I'm supposed to wake up tomorrow, and my thoughts are clouding.


I took this picture walking to work the other day - and I thought of it when I was thinking of the movie right now - at one point he writes about a cloud that marks a cloud. This cloud is full of light.