The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
On the wisdom of cool loneliness for Valentine's Day
Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service, 2013
Never in my life have I met anyone who felt music so intensely as my father. He could not help listening to it; when he heard music that pleased him he became excited and there was a contraction in his throat; he sobbed and shed tears. The feelings aroused in him were unreasoning emotion and excitement. Sometimes it excited him against his will and even tormented him, and he would say: que me veut cette musique? (what does that music want of me?) - Tolstoy, C. S., & Maude, A. (1926). Music in Tolstoy’s Life. The Musical Times, 67(1000), 516–518.
A few weeks ago, while circling the driveway of an elementary school, I received a directive from an old friend via text: listen for nostalgia. Another bell tone followed, delivering a link to an interview about a song I had nearly forgotten in the decade since I last heard it. I am not in the habit of listening to music podcasts. Rarely have I memorized lyrics or researched the story behind a song, believing instead in the primacy of learning a song by heart, through its melodic currents and timbre. But I can understand Tolstoy’s question what does that music want of me? If I find myself intrigued by a song, I like to get quiet and listen with my whole body, and then return again and again until the song becomes a friend and I notice myself asking strange questions like what’s happening here? and why does this feel meaningful to me?
I first heard the song “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” as a freshman in college. It opens with three incantatory notes from a synthesized organ (C, Dm, Am) and then begins to layer disarmingly self-conscious lyrics, smeared black ink, your palms are sweaty, I’m barely listening, swelling into a melodious revelation: I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving. The bridge repeatedly chimes where I am, where I am, offering a gentle allowance to accept where we are and have been.
For those of us for whom Washington, DC in the early 2000s was not just a city but the proving ground of our relational lives, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” touched a relatable quality of loneliness, an effervescent tension between wanting to sense our worthiness and dignity on one hand, and the public absurdities and private regrets that are emblematic of a certain chapter of life on the other.
From Hrishikesh Hirway’s recently remastered interview with Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard, the unlikely halves of an indie-electronic duo called The Postal Service, I learned some informative details. Their collaboration began at the fringes of their early twenties, when, living in different cities, broke, and barely acquainted, they began mailing fragments of songs back and forth to each other. Fresh musical layers were decanted in the days between sending and receiving them. Gibbard would walk through his neighborhood at night listening to that day’s delivery through wire headphones; his mind would slide around with Tamborello’s instrumentals until an unexpected image or memory would emerge; then he would pull a notebook out of his pocket and start scribbling. It was a faithful process. They asked another acquaintance, Jenny Lewis, to contribute harmonies, and, after some months, they christened their first and only album Give Up.
Give Up was a good one, as it turned out. It is considered a landmark album for its unique fusion of indie-rock and electronic elements; to the artists’ surprise, it sold more than a million records. Warm vocals stream above experimental sounds in what Tamborello and Gibbard dubbed an “80’s electro-pop revival record.” Even now, the songs feel at once familiar and yet serendipitous. We sense two artists on their way somewhere else, but just available enough to slip into a creative portal meant just for them.
Of the album’s first song, Gibbard explains that his first love had left him to pursue a job in Washington, DC. A few months later, he was passing through on tour with Death Cab for Cutie. It felt strange to be in the vicinity of her new life, so they arranged a reunion at the venue before the show. The sweaty palms were hers; the smeared black ink, a list of grievances she had inscribed on her skin earlier that day lest she forget one in the bewilderment of the moment. Her confidence was foam, easily dissolving into anxiety, and her yearning was thick with the conviction that some mutual ground could be found, something taken could be given back.
I remember the cathartic resonance of chanting I was the one worth leaving with a hundred strangers at The Black Cat in the Spring of 2003. I did not know then about the girl who had stood outside the entrance, heart blazing, nor about the boy’s shifty discomfort as ticket holders passed them — I’m staring at the asphalt wondering what’s buried underneath. And yet I did know the girl. I understood her longing to be heard and her futile bids for validation. And I knew the boy, his disassociation, his numbing. We recognized some part of ourselves in their awkward grappling as we had all, in one ragged moment or another, subjected our hearts to over-exposure or barely listened for fear of what would spill over.
The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.
– Pema Chodron, “Pema Chodron’s Six Kinds of Loneliness”
February is advertised for romance – but love is not a narrow teacher. No matter our age or stage of life, we want to believe in our worthiness to be met. We have all failed at one time or another to meet another. The stories we have told ourselves are not special, yet they merit our healing attention. Rather than narrowing our treatment of love, rather than setting ourselves up for disappointment on the axis of praise or blame or any of the worldly winds, could we reframe loneliness as an invitation to a more generous and wakeful experience of love?
Beloved Buddhist nun and teacher, Pema Chodron, distinguishes hot loneliness: restless and angsty and pregnant with the desire for resolution; from cool loneliness: an awareness of the groundlessness of life wherein we can observe fear-based patterns without stumbling headlong into them. She explores six facets of cool loneliness that, when integrated through practice over time, amount to a revolution in dignified steadiness, a middle way of presence between the traps of grasping and avoidance. They are “less desire,” or the willingness to be lonely without grasping for a fix – as the Zen master Katagirir Roshi often said, “One can be lonely and not be tossed away by it;” “contentment,” a synonym for accepting the texture of the moment as it is rather than grasping to quell the discomfort; “avoiding unnecessary activities,” an invitation to quit flailing around to escape being with ourselves; “complete discipline,” a willingness to come back again and again, naming and noting and bowing to the profound insolvability of life and our place in it; “not wandering the world of desire,” which is an acknowledgment of false refuge and an invitation to cultivate sobriety in our thoughts and actions; and “not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts,” an antidote to the subtle ways we measure ourselves against self-inflicted and perceived expectations.
Let’s be kind, we must remind ourselves, for this is the work of lifetimes. The word “nostalgia” is from the Greek compound nostos (meaning ‘return home’) and algos (meaning ‘pain’). Some memories become eddies; once recalled, we can swirl to make meaning of them. The ache of an unfinished conversation can baffle us not for what happened then, which matters little now, but for what it can reveal about the maturation of love. For we are seekers – we study consciousness through its prisms of knowing and not knowing, of forgetting and remembering. When our attention migrates back to a place where we have surprised, disappointed, or even harmed ourselves, it is calling us to recognize and befriend the hidden forces within us that are subject to swirl in the first place.
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In closing, a small prompt for your consideration: what is a song or a poem or a piece of art or a scene from a movie that stirs your heart to deeper inquiry? What about it draws you closer? Where in your memory does it lead, and how can you more lovingly make sense of or relate to those memories now? What does that music want of you?