A Commonplace Glossary, vol. 1

I am scared of Elliott Smith because when he sings, I hear my own voice. The one I have taught myself not to listen to, the one that tells me that all demons are untamable and that all loves are impossible. I will always be alone, the voice sings. I am deeply unlovable, unfixable, undiscoverable. Everything I touch turns to ash. The voice's rhymes are cruel and beautiful and sung with a calmness that comes from speaking a simple and hard truth. Even when he covers "Thirteen," a sickly-sweet adolescent love ballad in its original form, he transforms it into a desperate, self-pitying plea: "Would you be an outlaw for my love? / If it's so, then let me know / If it's no then I can go / And I won't make you."

Elliott Smith didn't go into decline, didn't disappear into obscurity or mystery. There is no mistaking where his path leads. He stabbed himself in the chest with a knife after an argument with his girlfriend. He left a suicide note written on a Post-It.

His music is a siren song. I know this. I still listen.


"Going Nowhere" from New Moon

I bought Sigur Rós's "Takk" a month after my grandfather died. I loved him very much, and it was the first funeral I ever went to; I didn't know how to begin to think about death. The day I bought it, I was trying to work something out in my mind -- I don't remember exactly anymore, it was a problem at work and I was mired in that state where you know what the problem is but still have no idea how to approach it -- and it was raining gently. I popped the CD into my car stereo and it felt like a part of my brain that had been asleep a long time woke up. As I listened to the first song, more an invocation than a melody, I saw shapes in my mind rotate and connect. As I drove through the rain, I knew exactly how to solve my work problem, but more than that -- I felt a happiness that had been remote, that I had been in danger of forgetting that it existed.

I had found angry music while I was dealing with my grandfather's death. It's easy to find, and some of it is really good. But what I needed was happy music. I think happiness, genuine happiness, is the hardest thing of all to capture in art.

Sigur Rós creates the most joyful music I have ever known. It is wordless. Some of their songs are in their native Icelandic. A few are said to be in English but I can't understand. And a large portion of them are sung in what Jónsi Birgisson, the lead singer, calls Hopelandic: a babble of sounds that approach language, but never fully become it. The songs don't really have titles, either -- there are ones printed in the liner notes, but they feel unnecessary, and their 2002 album ( ) has no song titles at all. Language is only a burden, a set of bulky clothes that only prevent you from experiencing the world as human beings ought to.

It is music I want to dance to with the woman I marry.


"Heima," performed live

I was reading Joseph Campbell on the beach when I decided to believe that if I found ten feathers and gave them to the girl I was chasing, she would fall in love with me. It was not that I decided it would happen, her love linked to feathers; instead, I decided to believe in it, regardless of whether it bore out to be true. My parents are both lapsed Catholics. Belief was outside the bounds of their lessons. We were taught to be kind and generous -- but both of those aren't beliefs. They don't rest on anything unprovable. It was a strange heady feeling, inventing a belief and following it. I kept it secret because I knew how ridiculous it was, but also because it made me special.

Seagull feathers were easy to find on the beach. In fact I picked feathers for this reason; they had no monetary value and yet they're not commonplace. At the same time, I wasn't foolish. I knew that I couldn't use just any ten feathers; they had to each be beautiful, with a long rachis and straight, clean barbs. I wanted to find feathers that would make sense as a gift even without an explanation. I would keep my belief even secret from her. It would ruin the magic to tell it.

It took me the better part of a year to find my ten feathers. I cheated myself a little and discarded some of them along the way, because I could see no end to the chase with the girl with red hair. I couldn't see how she would ever look at me differently; we were friends and though I tried to tug events the way I wished them to go, the beach where everything seemed so simple and clear became more and more distant. I let ten feathers stay a little out of reach for as long as I could.

I gave a feather away, in fact, to a different girl, one who a friend had a crush on but was too shy to ask out by himself. There were three of us who took her out on a date on Valentine's Day: he and I and another friend who hadn't anything to do on the holiday, either. We each brought her a gift. She looked down at the feather in her hand and said, "Oh, a quill," in a warm but polite voice and I knew my quest would never succeed.

Instead, I bought some fishing line and made a mobile from my feathers. I wanted them to seem as if they were floating in mid-air, but this was a difficult effect to achieve when all you have in your dormitory room to suit the purpose is Scotch tape. None of my friends ever asked where I got the feathers from, or why I had mounted them at the center of the ceiling of the room. A few said it looked nice, though.

It was beautiful, in fact, but in a way I did not mean it to be.

I feel lucky that I hatched this belief, though it ended in a sort of dead end. Even now, almost ten years later, I walk down city streets and see grimy pigeon feathers trapped in the cracks of the sidewalk. I go to a park and see a cluster of downy feathers in the grass left behind by geese. And when I return to the beach each year, there are as many seagull feathers there as there always have been. I see rubies everywhere that no one else does.