Two Approaches to the Abyss

1. Big Blue Funnel

Hussalonia’s two most recent albums are called Domesticoma and Versus Time. Each is a relatively brief collection of pop-influenced songs. Each inhabits and observes some of the great tiresome nightmares of adult human life. Domesticoma is about being happy with your spouse/kids/life, and of course still feeling the screaming urge to run from your house and grind your feet into gasps. Versus Time is about what it feels like when your friend is still dead, and you still think about calling them. When you won’t delete their number from your phone, because that’s where they are, when they aren’t anywhere. And if they aren’t anywhere…?

The abyss.

These can all be abysses:

Death, time, email. Loneliness, crowdedness. Endless drudgery, the end of everything. A phone call’s third ring; we don’t know who it is; we realize we aren’t going to answer it; and we must suffer the guilt of knowing. What if it was your dead friend? It’s probably not even a living friend.

Faces.

Eyes.

The faces and the eyes which hide in the darkness from everyone except us.

Us.

No longer being an “us.”

Hussalonia’s words tend to hit me like a thrown quarter. Have you ever seen one of those giant funnels? You notch a coin into a special place at the rim, and then give it a push. The specific curvature compels the coin to continue rolling, and gradually accelerating, for many minutes. It’s fascinating; people often say the word “physics.” You sort of can’t believe it’s still going, that it hasn’t fallen over. But then of course it’s still going; that’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s all it can do. By the time you decide maybe you’d rather still have that quarter, it’s gone too far; you’d have to lean over the funnel, stretch all the way out, and grab it, and that feels… impossible. Maybe it’s the taboo against touching public objects.

I’ve only ever seen those giant funnels at two places: a science museum, and a mall. I’ve seen way more of them at malls. I’ve been to way more malls than I have museums.

A mall is a place you can go to confront or evade the abyss.

We seem to like putting money into the abyss. Wells, fountains, pits, and funnels. That is a good place for some money to go. It feels right. It doesn’t feel like you’re feeding something, or even paying for anything. It just feels… good.

You might have worried about how to spend that quarter. But now…? What’s left to worry about? It’s over.

2. I speak, I speak to my cat

Hussalonia Versus Time by Hussalonia

I’m sitting here listening to the last song on Versus Time, which is called “I Was Loved By You.” It is, to my imperfect knowledge, the longest track Hussalonia has ever released, at exactly twenty minutes and zero zero seconds. Hussalonia’s songs tend to be about a minute and a half long, rarely exceeding two minutes. The songs swiftly click into place, embed a melody in your breath, and say whatever they say as concisely and impactfully as possible. I know Hussalonia must get tired of hearing their songs described as “clever,” so I didn’t say clever. They are inventive whipcracks, but the words that used to positively describe someone who could put words in an order that delivers maximum impact have all been corroded in recent decades. A lot of language is being corroded, but then a lot of language is being polished, and anyway there’s plenty of language to go around so why sweat it?

Hussalonia sings: I speak, I speak to my cat. She looks at me like I’m mad. “Your vocabulary unnecessarily complicates things.” And she says this with a flick of her tail.

Followed by about 18 minutes of wordless mutating sound that investigate that point. This song is one way to approach the abyss. It lists various concrete interactions, which slowly grow in complexity and abstraction, periodically punctuated by the assertion that “I’ve been loved by you.” Then the singer faces the cat, who says, “flick.” This is usually when a Hussalonia song would end; I get the feeling that the writer of these songs often thinks, “That’s enough,” often preemptively. Don’t carry on too long.

But then this song. The first time I heard it, I was so unsettled after about 5 minutes that I had to stop it. I came into this album expecting brevity, and it left me with a steady breeze. I came in wanting words, sharp words, funny and insightful and relevant words. I wanted to learn new parts to sing along with. But then this.

One of the ways to approach the abyss is to sigh, gaze outward, and lose yourself for a while. Depression can feel like this. Even basic interactions feel meaningless, let alone greater concepts, and not even an assertion of value-as-love-as-value can ground you. And then… drifting.

Beauty often emerges out of this drifting. More often, dissonance and discomfort. This song contains both, but tends toward beauty.

3. Calmly thinking about chaos

Domesticoma by Hussalonia

Domesticoma ends with a different approach to the abyss. After the song “Avaunt!” cries out and then whispers, “What in the world could the world want?” After it asserts repeatedly that, whatever the world wants, it can’t be worth the bother. “I survive in the present tense. I’ve arrived, but from whence?”

These questions are answered by the noise that unfurls before the closing track, “Leaning Into Chaos.” This is one of my favorite songs in a long time. The energy, wistful harmonized ooohs, and its premise are all thrumming vividly inside me. But before all that, guitars cry out in reverb torrential anguish, nearly 30 seconds of starving loss and questioning. What could the world want that’s worth wanting? There is no answer to this, and here an abyss immediately opens. That yawning chasm which is so weary of our questions, which consumes them without digesting, without producing anything but emptiness. The abyss.

The abyss has been the subject of a great swath of my reading over the last decade. I didn’t mean for it to be; apparently it comes up a lot. I won’t mention which books I’ve read, because you’ll either think I’m pretentious or prosaic, depending on whether you haven’t or have read the same books. But if I don’t tell you I’ve read some books, you might get the terrible impression that these thoughts have emerged from me wholesale, rather than being in constant dialogue with a chorus of voices from throughout history. I’d like to talk to you about the books I’ve read, but every author’s name is a bomb waiting to go off in the minds of the judgmental present-day human. There’s really no good way to talk about having read some books these days. You’re either a jack-off or a dunce, and nobody gives a moment’s consideration to the possibility of respect in either direction.

They talk about the abyss staring into you, if you look at it. That’s a good phrase, but let’s clarify it: when you think for a while about the abyss, you find that your reflection has opened an abyss inside you. You’ve opened a franchise of The Abyss in your own personal neighborhood of thought. And the abyss is like McDonald’s; it is everywhere, and you shouldn’t eat it, but you will eventually probably eat it because it’s, again, literally impossible to avoid. And then once you do, it lives inside you forever, never decaying, never nourishing, a void that occupies space.

The cousin of abyss is chaos. We may use these phrases interchangeably, or to attempt to describe that same gaping infuriating indefiniteness. The future is chaos. You start trying to answer these questions, and a toxic cloud of what might be starts choking you. Anything could happen. Anything! Holy shit, this isn’t a joke, you will suddenly realize again, literally almost literally capital-a Anything. Anything is an abyss.

4. A snare to unstick

This is what’s happening at the beginning of “Leaning Into Chaos.” The guitars are screaming Why, and No, and non-verbal abyssal language. It is the dissonant counterpart to the singing tumble of “I Was Loved By You.” It is the same feeling, regarded with a different attitude. And it threatens to swallow your hours.

But! This is what I love so much about this song. This is the kernel I’ve been trying to write my way toward. Because it’s not wrong to regard the abyss; “I Was Loved By You” is a completely valid human response, and you can’t be afraid to just stand at the edge and look into the mists for a while. But! But. If you tend that way, if that sort of thinking tends to lead you down dark, unfruitful paths, you’ve got to learn to catch yourself and turn aside.

That’s when the drums come in. An assertive drum fill rattles those wailing guitars into silence, and then into regimented participation: the drums direct that energy somewhere more constructive. After asking “What could the world want?” the singer comes out of the abyss with classic depressive-style thinking (and I identify personally with this sort of thinking, so mostly I’m talking about my own experience, your depression may be different, you may not get depressed, it’s okay okay okay), and he sings “I used to be explosive, I used to be on fire,” which is the sort of thing we can tend to think when feeling bad about ourselves and the world. We look backward toward the glorious superior past, toward the self we were who is no longer, and we give them all the credit. This is what those howling sounds are saying. It’s not just the world that’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.

The next line, however, displays exactly the power of Hussalonia. For the singer croons, “I used to consume myself with desire.” He acknowledges that the explosive fire of whatever youth is dangerous, that it mostly eats itself. That desire is an abyss we can worship. To which we are encouraged to sacrifice ourselves.

Matt Barber Hussalonia by Hussalonia

In another song, the wonderful “Never Be Famous”, he sings this: “I know the dreams of young Americans have short wicks that make for good show. But they’re not brilliant, they’re just burning brilliantly. There’s a difference, don’t you know?” And here, also, about fire: “Oh baby, please surrender. Let’s go quietly. We’ll hold our questions, we’ll hold our fire; you don’t have to explain a thing.”

5. Acceptance

Acceptance. One of the things I’ve worked hard to learn over the last year is how to be accepting. Of myself, of the past, of how things, in general, are. Accepting, while also working toward the best version possible. Hussalonia’s singer seems to wrestle with this as often as I do, and has helped me understand how to think about it constructively. “You’ll never be famous, you’ll never be a millionaire.” God damn does it hurt to be raised in millennial America and then hear this in a pop song. But the sentiment that “there’s a few of us who love what you do, and so you do,” and that it can be enough. It is enough to have a positive effect within our sphere, however large or small. It is, truly, all we can do.

This is not defeatist thinking! It is the opposite of defeatist. Here is what I learned: we think that establishing an ideal life will drive us toward that life. What most often happens is that it just drives us to despair. There is an abyss between the Ideal and the Real. It is an uncrossable distance that will swallow your happiness forever. Not because you cannot achieve great things, but because setting up an Ideal will simply prevent you from achieving great Real things.

Why is this? Because you cannot reverse engineer from an Ideal to your life. You cannot, without enormous resources and luck, decide to be A Famous Singer if you do not have an exceptional singing voice, financial independence, a will so strong it could rightly be called a delusion, widespread promotion, industry connections, any number of other factors which would be disheartening to elaborate, and finally a fantastic degree of luck. Some combination of these things (except in extremely rare cases, which depend even more upon luck) may possibly result in your gaining some fame as a singer.

But how many people decide They Want To Be A Singer without possessing many, if any, of these traits? They like The Ideal Of Being A Singer, they like thinking about what they think it would be like, but they don’t have any way of actually becoming a Famous Singer.

What happens? I went down that road. You can pour all of your time and energy into Becoming A Famous Singer, and you will probably make some degree of progress in that direction, which will unfortunately reinforce your hope. What tends to happen, though, is that you begin to feel that you will never achieve your dream. No matter what you do, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Why isn’t anyone listening? How do I get better? What do I do next, when there’s no clear line between Where I Am and Where I Want To Be?

This is how we get Writers who never write. Artists who have made no art to speak of. Identity reinforcement in place of action. This is a position of despair. Every action you are able to take only highlights how far away that action is from manifesting your dream. No pleasure can be derived. It is never enough. It will never be enough. As long as you are Not Famous, when your goal is to Be Famous, you are categorically a failure. And you begin to drift, into that abyss, that why me, why not me, why…?

Isn’t that silly?

6. Forward from now / Backward from never

You can’t reverse-engineer an Ideal into your Real Life. You have to forward-engineer your existing Real into the next version of your Real Life, and so on. You will accomplish your goals if they are based on your actual possibilities. And this momentum can carry you through to further goals and their fulfillment.

You get a lot more done if you do what you are actually capable of. You get better if you practice, and you practice if you can actually do it.

I’m not talking about The Real World that cynics address. This isn’t cynicism. The cynics say The Real World is only a realm of crushed dreams; this is because they once had Big Dreams, those dreams didn’t pan out, and they protected themselves by deciding that all dreams must die. There’s no way they had the wrong dream, or that they could establish a new dream based on what they learned. It’s just… the abyss takes all.

I say that crushed dreams are only the norm when our dreams are so disconnected from what’s really possible.

I like this idea: Mostly practice your strengths. I spent a decade working on what I considered my weaknesses, and felt understandably futile. You make a lot more progress working on something that already comes somewhat naturally to you than you do struggling against a completely foreign action. If you’re as good at making songs as Hussalonia is, you do it because it’s what you do, and a few people love it, and you’d be worse off if you didn’t. Even as you wrestle with whether or not to continue.

Hussalonia talks about this idea frequently. “Leaning Into Chaos” says, “It’s better to have a troubled mind that’s well-behaved than to be in trouble, dreaming of being saved.” This is so good! There is so much I want to say about this entire song. Please listen to it, and say some of the things to yourself.

7. Paying with wonder

Let’s close with this:

The abyss takes plenty without our consent. But it will definitely take what we give it.

Our pennies can circle and be swallowed like dreams.

Hours can yawn into years without protest.

Or we can spend those same few precious minutes staring not into the funnel, but singing tiny truths as best we can.

Which abyss would you prefer?