Sifting and Sorting # 6: Peace Extended / David Grubbs
Since Trevor died it has been hard to concentrate. At first I threw myself into work, in the weeks after he died I went ahead with research workshops that I probably should have cancelled, I wrote most of the sample for a book proposal, I cleared his flat along with my brother, I started this project, and more and more. Working was a way not to think. In hindsight it seems I was using up my last reserves. I have always relied on the ability to work in intense bursts to get things done. I tend to swing like a pendulum between periods of inactivity and frenzy, trying to keep the oscillations at a frequency that prevents burn out and allows me to meet my commitments. Sometimes I manage this. But after an initial burst of work I have struggled to switch into gear again.
I am working, working steadily enough, but focus is hard to come by. Suddenly jigsaw puzzles have become very helpful, pointless computer games, audiobooks, things that can keep my mind in place. It’s not that I am constantly thinking about him. For most of my life Trevor has been in his flat, and he hasn’t really been anywhere else, physically or otherwise. He did not call, he rarely wrote to me or Kenza, it was up to us to arrange to see him. Which means that there are few moments that I miss him. I never think, I wish I could tell him this… I wish he was here… I wonder what he would think about… Because Trevor never really held that role in my life.
It is clear to me that things are happening nevertheless. Somewhere un/safely buried in my unconscious there is a whirring. There is something somewhere doing something to me. Sometimes this has meant acutely low mood, other times anxiety and agitation. But mostly it just feels like I am not at full capacity. There is a buzzing, a sort of mental tinnitus just out of the range of perception which means that when I am trying to focus on something I find that I cannot. It is a sort of unsettled feeling, a state that means I do not feel good in my own company. And it is enough to make it hard to work.
On March 18th 2017, 6 weeks short of 6 years before his death, he reflected on his own mental state in a notebook:
THERE HAS BEEN A GAP … A PAUSE…. MORE THAN
A PAUSE… LONGER… OF A DIFFERENT NATURE
I PARTLY UNDERSTAND… THE VOICE… A GAP …
A HIATUS … EXTENDED … POSSIBLY … MUCH READING
MOSTLY NOVELS … ESCAPISM… I FEEL I AM WAITING
RESEARCH…. PONDERING…. WONDERING….. DEEP
AT TIMES….VERY DEEP…. LACK OF ENERGY…
REINFORCE…. RETHINK… RETURN…
REESTABLISH….. REDRAW….. REFLECT…. DELICACY?....
POSSIBILITIES…. RECOVER ….. SWATCHBOOK …..
WAITING FOR WHAT? …. NOT INSPIRATION ….. PEACE
EXTENDED ….
I shouldn’t have been surprised to read things like this in his notebooks. To learn that Trevor was capable of self-reflection he never shared with us. And perhaps he couldn’t verbalise? But in his capitalised and underlined writing, in his faltering notes he describes a sense of uncertainty, such uncertainty that there was a year gap between the previous entry in his notebook and this one. It should not surprise me but it does that he maintained ambition, and could also reflect on his mental state with such acuity. He seemed lost to me, but I found out that he knew he was lost, I didn’t know where he wanted to go, but I find out that he did… to some degree. I always thought him a coward, I think he was in many ways, but holding his attention against this feeling of mental fragility is something I am not sure I am capable of, not now anyway. And that he felt drawn deeper, deeper into thought even without the energy to recover himself. In his notebooks he seems so often to be ontologically at-risk. A state I cannot withstand, and so I prefer puzzles, I prefer work even when I can’t do it.
Trevor played me David Grubbs’ music when I was still at school. There were a couple of albums I listened to a lot. Rickets & Scurvy, which I think I must have made a copy of from him because I don’t seem to have my own. And Seagull and Eagull. Going through Trevor’s CDs I am listening to much more of his music. His songwriting, and his beautiful voice, his shimmering sounds and production. Sounds that feel right for contemplation. I always like the line in the song Transom “Are you ready / for a cold washcloth”. His songs to me feel so close to real thought, and his guitar playing and the resonances and tones he finds are close to the mind. And it is good to listen to this music, but maybe it feels perilous; to do the real work, it shouldn’t be called work.
“It brought it home / It was so unlike home” Grubbs can hold a position in between things, to express things that feel PARTLY UNDERSTOOD. I really only knew a couple of Grubbs’ albums. Right Now I’m listening to Rickets and Scurvy. But he is a busy musician, leafing through the pages of the enormous wallets that now house Trevor’s CDs I find just how many albums he has recorded, both solo and in collaboration. “The worst of it all is waiting / but taking no pleasure in waiting ” I wonder if he knows a bit about the kind of mental state my dad describes in his notebooks sometimes. “First look down below / its your neighbourhood / and how sharp those steeples / and how fucked those peoples”. I wonder how music occupies him, what safety or peril he finds in recording?
It feels hard right now to attend to the world. I have cut back, pruned my commitments. I can only do the things that I must do, and sometimes not until I truly must do them. And sometimes I worry about what there is on the edges of my thought, what is waiting or what is left unfelt, unarticulated. “You have stories to tell / You will tell them”. And in the kind of fragile ponderous spaces created in music like Grubbs’ it feels like there might be a framework for feeling, telling.
“brevity is in the telling / and so goodbye”