The rock group the Eels, sing a song that is one of those songs I could put on repeat forever. It was played for me at a friend’s house who lives north of me legitimately in the middle of nowhere. To get to his site from mine I first bicycle to my trading center (15 min), then take a matola to Rumphi (30 min), then walk/hitch a quick ride to the Bwengu turn-off (10-30 min), take a bus to Karonga (3 hrs.), another matola to Chitipa (3 hrs.), and then a hike for roughly 2hrs. or more to his house. I have frequently wondered what Peace Corps’ intentions were for having him be so isolated for a job where you are most likely going to effect the people that are located in your immediate community and area, which for him include relatively few. It brings up for me the weird balance of being in Peace Corps and having the feeling of being overwhelmed by how much there is to be done and how much you could do, while simultaneously being overwhelmed by the acknowledgement of how little you actually will be able to do and accomplish. Maybe that’s when I don’t mind being stuck in the repeat cycle of a song. I feel even when not in a volunteer situation in Malawi, it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of seeing the need and knowing you can’t fix it or even make that much of a sizable dent. And it’s easier to get stuck in a cycle of someone else’s story. Someone else’s story that happens to lull you in and out of a story you ultimately don’t have to worry about it, as you stand only as an outsider and can in fact project, judge, or completely make-up what the story is as you not only have no responsibility towards it, but also don’t have any way of really knowing what it truly is.
Maybe that’s why it feels so good to be stuck in a song, maybe not. I am now reconsidering the aforementioned reasons. Yeah, perhaps it’s satisfying, comfortable, and safe to be rocked in someone else’s story, but on second thought I don’t think that’s what its about. Last Friday I hosted an event at my house for women in my community from three surrounding villages. I had held a training a week or so earlier for 10 women on learning how to use a Rocket Stove, a stove that reduces that amount of firewood women typically use for cooking. At the event the ‘Reforestation Remix,’ women cooked on their Rocket Stoves talking about them to other women and cooking the meal. The women chatted; planted trees, and each completed a tree dance in exchange for four seedlings to take home. I have taught art classes and planted gardens, tried to hold trainings, planted trees, talked to students, but for all of these events and trainings never once have I felt that satisfied with my work, and instead just felt more justified to take a nap in my house followed by making all three boxes of macaroni and cheese sent in a package. But for this event I felt more apart of something that was mobile. More apart of something that could go forward that could be propelled, and I felt propelled even if just a little bit.
I always feel propelled in the songs I love. The songs I repeat are the ones I not only love the most, but are the ones that propel me the most, that launch a part of me, but it’s never clear to where or for what, because the song is not my story. But that makes the launch that much more thrilling and why one has to repeat it, because you don’t know where your going or who will be there, you just know you’re being launched, so you replay it and repeat it in hopes of finally landing, that this time you will be propelled. The best running songs are the ones that continually lead up to a launch, motivating one to keep running, as you are able to construct your own music video that is continually re-inventing where you launch, who, and where you will be launched to and with. There is this specific part in a Chamber Brothers song, that I have always been attached to. It’s sort of in the middle of the song and creates such a gentle and yet powerful launch, it leaves the listener in mid-launch unclear whether their soul has actually left to get tangled in the end of the song and never return. It is at these points in songs where you need other people to confirm the question of ‘has your soul also just jumped ship?’ When this song was on my replay a couple of years back, few people were feeling the launch, but at the time my friend Vanessa did, and that’s all I needed to confirm that no it wasn’t in fact a leaving of soul, just a soul mobilization that occasionally happens. My friend’s boyfriend during my senior year of college was coming in late to see my friend. I told her I would drive her to the airport and pick him up if we could all have 2 am noodles in Chinatown after the pick-up. During the ride home everyone was in a good mood, reunited and filled with greasy noodles and beer. And we couldn’t stop playing the Stevie Wonder version of ‘We Can Work it Out.’ It was one of those moments were as the driver I would slowly pass my hand over the button to go back and hear the song again and peer over my shoulder asking ‘again?’ All passengers would nod and we played the song from Boston to the suburbs, never stopping to breath or break, because we were all being launched and no one wanted to go back to any type of solid ground that would surely never get us anywhere this song might. My friend Margot and I, once thought we were going to die in a storm driving from Boston to New Mexico. When we survived the tidal waves of rain, golf ball-sized hail, and winds that shook our car, we couldn’t’ stop playing the Feist song ‘I Feel it All’, as we could feel it all right then and Feist was going to launch us from this feeling, the feeling we felt so fully and completely. And then there are the countless songs my sister and I can never stop listening to especially driving back from concerts and not being able to let go of the music, or driving through Colorado at 4 in the morning when it’s a comfort to be squeezed in the darkness by mountains that become a part of the song cycle ready to launch, to instigate a departure, a embarking, a take-off to somewhere I probably don’t know, but that will exist in the next song, and you know because of the way you’ve been launched the next song could lead anywhere even to the pockets of unbelievable. And it’s in these pockets where those needs you thought you couldn’t tackle can be tackled, wrestled, fought, and fought for.
