to retrace your yearnings is to cope

Listen at spoti.fi/30uk4jB • Collab 9 • 12 March 2021

Notes On Notes is a monthly listening exchange series. One collaborator creates a customized playlist, and the other listens and responds with a selection of non-musical pairings. Collaborators don’t know the themes or motivations beforehand, which helps to keep the process focused on discovery and surprise.

“to retrace your yearnings is to cope,” the March 2021 collaboration, features Rhys Ting as playlist curator and Scott Jung as respondent. The response includes pairings that range from a surrealist claymation film to an historical ethnography of care in Canadian Inuit communities. Together, the collaborators prompt us to reflect on the many experiences of despair, yearning, melancholy, and resilience, both past and present.

Playlist by Rhys

From the conversations I’ve had with people over the course of the pandemic, it’s surprised me how many people I know personally began to encounter chronic depression for the very first time in their lives. People whom I thought of as well-adjusted, resilient individuals were being broken down by the world’s events, which manifested in several things: severe ennui, hopelessness in the future, trouble with sleeping and keeping to a daily routine, and even losing interest in maintaining personal relationships and things that used to excite them. I also noticed that people had a very difficult time accepting that these new feelings and symptoms of psychological distress were signs of depression. As someone who has lived experience of depression—thus being able to pick up on a lot of these signs as I encountered them in people around me—it felt disconcertingly like there was a cruel sense of irony in all this.

With all the physical distancing that has taken place in the past year, the space in our lives typically occupied by other people (and being subject to their schedules and persuasions) now seem to be supplanted by the voices in our head, memories, hopes, and dreams. At some point we probably were clamoring for a break from the theme of domesticity, an escape from the clutches of cabin fever and the mundane. Perhaps we decided to more seriously entertain some of those impulses and thoughts that we didn’t feel were suited to the company of an audience. After all, we gave ourselves permission to become slobs, and attend work meetings on Zoom pants-less (if we were able to keep our jobs, that is). Perhaps we asked ourselves if we had a valid point of view about anything at all when the necessity of living life behind a screen turned every human interaction into a performance.

This collection of songs here, while exploring the wide range of emotions many of us experienced during the pandemic, all also assert themselves with a point of view. Looming large here is a sense of yearning, whether it’s for better days to come, or for love—or just to be heard. The Portuguese word “saudade” comes to mind—though the plaintiveness of that word doesn’t really suit this somewhat pointy list of songs. I tend to gravitate to music that has an undercurrent of melancholic tension, which listeners might pick up on. If you’re a music theory nerd, throw any song in Dorian mode at me and I’ll probably like it. I think it’s an incredible gift when music can give voice to the more suppressed parts of ourselves, but also hold a mirror up to society—and for me, these songs work like a charm.

Rhys Ting is a self-described “flâneur-in-orbit” who wishes that didn’t sound so pretentious, but begrudgingly recognizes that’s probably apt too. He used to curate café playlists when he worked as a barista, but after getting his Masters in Public Health he more recently segued into qualitative research in nutrition policy, and hopes to live closer to nature one day.

Listen to the playlist here.

Response by Scott

“To retrace your yearnings is to cope” is not easy listening, and that’s what makes it glorious to me. The slooshy sloshy of a Wednesday washing machine (“Mrs. Bartolozzi”); that drop, drop d-drop, drop feeling (“Anus”); the flic flac habits (“Lime Habit”); the click-clack reading (“Ima Read”); the desiring oh, oh, oh, oh (“Jerrod”). This soundscape lyrically captivates me, making me attentive to the sometimes playful, sometimes angry, sometimes lusty, sometimes melancholic yearning for something, for someone, for anything. It inspires me to think more about my yearning within reverie.

Reverie is sometimes associated with losing oneself in memory or escaping into imagination. But this playlist unsettles reverie’s “softness” by engaging its violence. To me, the music of this playlist invokes oppression, loss, physical pain, unfulfilled desires, lack of care, and the failure of freedom—and yet it does so with dark humor, a resilience by other means. Instead of cleaning up feelings or moving linearly, “to retrace your yearnings is to cope” reminds me of the messiness of grieving. I sense an intentionally curated pessimism that refuses appeals to hope, love, and self-care as an escape from or management of difficult experiences. With these themes in mind, I have chosen the following media that I think echo and complement this excellent playlist.

Joe Brainard (1975) “I Remember”

Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” is a long poem where every new stanza begins with the words “I remember.” The poem is a collection of brief descriptions of objects and feelings, sexual experiences, cringeworthy events, awkward moments, and violent encounters. The poem brings together nostalgia, longing, humor, and intrusive thoughts in a ruminating way. Here’s an excerpt.

Jack Stauber (2020) “OPAL”

This short film tells a story about yearning for another life and the possibility of reverie. Warning: it’s surreal Claymation.

Micki McGee (2013) “Cruel Optimism for the Neurologically Queer”

Sociologist Micki McGee’s article is a persuasive argument against the harmful attachments to personal development that underlie attempts to “cure” autistic people. Her work adopts a “kinder pessimism” in order to reject empty appeals to hope and (self-)care that foreclose the possibility of engaging the present and reimagining the future. I strongly recommend reading Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn for Us” and the late Mel Baggs’s blog as further resources for thinking with autistic activism, disability, and neurodiversity.

Lisa Stevenson (2014) Life Beside Itself

Anthropologist Lisa Stevenson’s ethnography reflects on life and care in the context of the tuberculosis (1940s–1960s) and suicide (1980s–now) epidemics in Canadian Inuit communities. Her research resituates institutional discourses around suicide prevention, raising haunting questions about how to care for others and how to live without a future.

Scott Jung is an anthropology PhD student at University of California Irvine who studies disability and care work in Singapore.