Anna Tivel // Memphis

Hello! I am returning, once again, tail tucked, to this little blog, after another six month absence. I am coming up for air after finishing, among other things, a first draft of a new novel project, which has consumed every breath of creative air in my life for some time. Now, I am feeling buoyant and lightheaded, not unlike the chorus to this song. It’s one of those songs which never really lets you settle in. It’s dark and then it’s light, it’s mysterious, then boastful, peaceful, then uneasy. This is maybe my favorite thing about it. How uncontainable it is.

I recently read this Nabokov short story called A Letter That Never Reached Russia, and there’s a passage that I’ve been thinking about a lot:

“Listen, I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”

Songs have always been, for me, this kind of happiness. Or rather, containers for this kind of happiness. Immortal and shared between all of us. Ever expanding to hold all the love we pour into them.

This song comes from a release of B-sides from Anna Tivel’s magnificent Animal Poems. You can buy it here.