Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.
There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.
The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary).
I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.
For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.
Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:
How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.
Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.
Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.
It’s always difficult to spend the holiday season away from family and friends. You find yourself missing the traditions you’ve long held for this time of year, along with the special events and gatherings you look forward to with such anticipation. Your place in the world shifts and you have to deal with the friction the shift produces. One way is to bring the familiar into your new space—some Christmas tunes, favorite holiday movies, putting up a few recently bought decorations (instead of the beloved ones from the bins in your attic crawl space). Another way is to open yourself to how the holidays might be celebrated in your new place—spending unexpected time with new friends or observing the little changes in honor of the holidays happening around you.
I was thinking about friction this past week when I took a break from my comforting Christmas playlist and turned on Television’s song “Friction” from their album Marque Moon. Like so many forces in life, I started to process how friction can be both good and bad. So like Santa shimmying down the chimney, this week’s newsletter is gonna involve some friction.
In Television’s song “Friction” (from the excellent Marque Moon), Tom Verlaine sings, “You complain of my diction. You give me friction” while cleverly pausing for a noticeable moment between “dic” and “tion.”
Innuendo aside, I think we need more friction. Our world tries so hard to reduce it. Get there faster. Buy it more easily. Watch it whenever you want. Our convenience culture often leaves us feeling disoriented, reaching for something solid to hold onto. The rapid pace of it all can cause us to become desensitized to the richness of all that life has to offer—blinded to what is truly valuable.
Friction can help us slow things down—see things more clearly. It can help make things a little harder so that we’re forced to grow. And it can also set up limits for us—limits that surprisingly make life more enjoyable.
I remember reading this Guardian article around the time I started getting into vinyl. In the article, Jeff Tweedy discusses why the album still matters in an age where you can just as well download individual songs from iTunes. While discussing the album Sukierae that he and his son Spencer released back in 2014, Tweedy says:
I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part. Or I can listen to the second part another time. It’s a double record on vinyl, so there are three breaks like that. I wanted it to have different identities artistically and the album format allows me to do that.
Listening to music on vinyl brings intentionality to the listening experience. There’s more friction compared to streaming an endless playlist on Spotify. You have to pay attention to when the record is finished, get up out of your seat, physically flip it over or change it, go sit back down. Changing the record requires even more friction—you take the record off the turntable, put it back in its sleeve, take a new record out of its sleeve, place it on the turntable, and so on. If you want to keep listening, you have to take all of these steps all over again. The intentionality brings mindfulness.
I also think of watching holiday specials when I was a kid. Each December, we use to pull out our living room hide-a-bed and lie down under it to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. The idea of a holiday special is mostly lost on us today, but we can still add some friction into the mix to bring the “special” back. Rather than binge-watching a show, pick a night and watch one episode weekly. Showing some restraint and delaying satisfaction makes you appreciate it the show a lot more. Like listening to vinyl, it also might help you watch the show more mindfully.
This is true of a lot of things when you think about it. It’s the reason seasons are so cool. The season changes and you have to wait a whole year to see it again. As a result, you appreciate it a lot more when it finally comes around. Limiting yourself to eating out once a month makes that night a whole lot more special than if you eat out every night.
Friction can create more mindfulness and enjoyment for us, but it has an enemy: efficiency. In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes about the dangers of our efficiency-based culture:
Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply. The pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight.
Friction allows us to look deeper, but the cost of it is time. Where do you have time to sacrifice efficiency and gain the benefit of deeper insight?
In the summer of 2023, I took a lot more time when I chose to bike from Wausau to Eau Claire (a journey that ended up being 120 miles) to see a late night concert at the Blue Ox Music Festival. There was certainly a lot more friction for me riding my bike than driving my car. It was a lot harder! But, I gained a great deal from the experience. When I arrived, Them Coulee Boys were singing “Ten Feet Tall,” and that’s just about how I felt.
Entering Eau Claire County
Feeling 10 ft. tall in front of the porta potties
There are so many ways you can add some more friction to your day. And the benefits are many—you get to know yourself better, you grow as a person, and you live with more intention. Ultimately you decide what is important to you rather than letting someone else determine that for you. Life becomes a lot more meaningful and satisfying as a result.
This week I was listening to Francis Quinlan’s song “Another Season,” and I caught the word “friction” in the opening verse. It struck me as a good way to close out the end of another year:
Hey Nothin’ much, just Wrappin’ up another season What do you make of this town? Here I have been taking the long way around Do you, like me, keep closest to the most familiar friction?
Stepping out of a life that has become your normal is always a jolting experience. You almost instantly realize all the basic routines and rituals of day-to-day living that you’ve taken for granted. On a deeper level, you physically leave your people, your support network and the relationships that bring you meaning and significance.
One of Angie’s routines in Wausau was teaching yoga on Sunday mornings. So this past Sunday morning we did some yoga poolside, Angie instructing as the pair of us moved and found breath. Angie prompted to think of a word to serve as a mantra that would set the tone for the week. As I gazed out on the gorgeous Grenadian landscape before me, with its mountainous peaks and valleys, all I could think of was the song, “Lonesome Valley,” from the movie, O Brother, Where are Thou?. In low and rolling voices, The Fairfield Four sing:
You got to go to the lonesome valley You got to go there by yourself Nobody else can go for you You got to go there by yourself
This, of course, is a song about death. “Death”—maybe not the best choice for a mantra. But as we continued to do yoga the song’s refrain played out over and over again in my head: you got to go there by yourself. To be clear, I know that I’m not here by myself. I am married after all and I live with Angie in this new place. But the demands of medical school are intense, and the reality is that the past few weeks I’ve spent much of my time alone while Angie is in class or studying. And Grenada is, in fact, and island, the perfect symbol of how I’ve been feeling: isolated and alone.
But I embrace my solitude for the time its mine to bear.I think that being alone is especially beneficial during times like this when you need to adapt to an unfamiliar environment and new community of people. To be alone heightens your senses, allowing you to more acutely observe all that’s going on around you and inside of you. There’s less conversation filling your thoughts and fewer distractions vying for your attention. Solitude affords you the space you need to grow and acclimate. As an introvert, I benefit from my seasons of solitude and even look forward to them.
Music is a great friend to me when solitude loses its luster and fades to loneliness. I like how Jeff Tweedy describes this impact of music in his book, World Within a Song:
Almost all songs function in a way that consoles the listener with a brief but vital companionship. In essence taking the place of another human in the room—another consciousness filling the void of isolation. It’s a tender relationship regardless of a song’s musical nature. From the bleakest black metal to the sweetest pop confection. The power to embrace the lonely is always at the heart of the bargain.
Adjusting to a new life requires patience. Patience and faith that Angie and I will find our people here, and also meaningful moments with one another. Life gets so much more messy and beautiful when you occupy space with others in an intentional way. Real meaning, I believe, is created in community, when the barriers come down and you see people for who they are and they see you. At some point you need to take the risks and get in the game. Engage with life. As Lucy puts it, you need involvement.
Being alone and being in community both inspire growth in their own way. I know that next week is a new week and one that will bring a new mantra.
Title page from Chapter 2 of Austin Kleon’s book
Show Your Work
I’ve been following Austin Kleon’s work for a while now. I like how he talks about process over product in his book, Show Your Work.
The products of artists we admire and follow are all around us. The process they go through to reach such heights is often a mystery. One reason I like Kleon’s work is that he doesn’t shy away from sharing his process. In fact, sharing his process is kind of his thing.
Lately I’ve been seeing the idea of process, i.e., how artists go about their work and how they find inspiration, crop up everywhere.
In Jeff Tweedy’s book, World Within a Song, he writes about the influence The Beatles Anthology had on his music. I was 15 when the first of the anthology albums was released in 1995. One of the singles for the album was the demo, “Free as a Bird,” a “new” song by the Beatles recorded in 1977. I remember being mesmerized by the song’s video in which you experience the perspective of a bird flying through Beatles history as John Lennon croons about being free.
The Beatles Anthology featured rarities, outtakes, and live performances spanning the Beatles’ career, all providing an insight into their process. Of the anthology, Tweedy writes:
It’s truly hard to overstate how important it was to be given the validation of knowing that even the Beatles struggled, made wrong turns, changed course, and ultimately surrendered to each unsure moment as an invitation to swim in a starlit sky of possibility. I was given permission to sound bad on my way to sounding great by these records. Bad with gusto and an unabashed joyful wonder. No one looks inside and discovers only diamonds and pearls. If art is at least in part an act of discovery, you might as well learn how to enjoy getting lost, too.
My family has a saying that we use when facing difficult times: The struggle is real. Like Tweedy, it’s validating to me to know that other artists, writers, teachers, etc., struggle through their process. It gives me courage and determination to work through my process, with all its imperfections, toward something more beautiful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
