Barrie is the musical project of Barrie Lindsay, a New York based musician and producer. I discovered her music after the release of her 2019 debut album, "Happy To Be Here." At the time I was completing my graduate school internship, working in a clinic with folks with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities.
One client and I spent a lot of time listening to music. He loved traditional Chinese flute music. The flute music was our home base, our consistent thing we listened to, but I shared a lot of music with him, and he told me about other CDs he listened to. We listened to music together and explored his inner life as we did so. He had a remarkably rich inner life. He was also the quietest person at a clinic. You never know what someone is doing or thinking until you ask him. I asked him, and he had a lot to say. Most people at the clinic, clinicians included, apparently never asked him.
My favorite song from her first album is called "Hutch." I remember playing the song for this particular client. The piano on Hutch reminds me of Sufjan Steven's song "Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream," especially the second half of the song when Sufjan slows it down, leans into the piano and horns. Both songs share ascending piano, layered vocals, and something vibe-like, something hard for me to name. Resonance that I cannot specify. I'm listening to Sufjan right now, the transition about 3 minutes in is so excellent, so interesting; this little bridge linking the two halves of the song.
Part II of Sufjan's song is so beautiful. The lyrics are so significant for me, perhaps the vocal melody even more important:
"And I cried myself to sleep last night
Barrie released another album in late 2022 called "Barbara." Pitchfork reviewed it on March 31st, 2022. I didn't add it to my Syncd playlist until November 26th, 2022.
Truthfully there is only one song on the album that really leaps out at me: "Jenny." The rest of it sounds good but it fades into the background too easily for me.
Here are the lyrics:
"[Verse 1]
Jenny dropped under the water
Been waiting, pressed my head into her collar
Devotion, I don't know
Emotion, high to low
Yeah I don't know
[Chorus]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
Never had to hold myself true to someone
[Verse 2]
Jenny, let me punch her shoulder
Jenny, I'm only the opener
Met her at the show, she goes too
Man, I hate guitar, except with you
[Chorus]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
Nеver had to hold myself true to somеone
Jenny, did you love me in July?
Jenny, could you love me if you tried
[Chrous]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
(Jenny, I don't know where to love from when my time comes)
Never had to hold myself true to someone
(Never had to hold myself true to someone when I'm said and done)
Jenny, did you love me in July?
(Do you love m? Do you love me?
Do you love me? do you love me now?)
Jenny, could you love me if you tried
(Do you love m? Do you love me?
Do you love me? do you love me now?)"
The song, for me, is defined by and driven by the chorus. The chorus, of course, repeats. But every time it repeats with an addition, a change, something new.
Initially we get just the two lines: "Jenny, I don't know where to love from. Never had to hold myself true to someone."
An important admission, an important question. Where do we love from? The heart... whatever that is.
The second time we get two additional lyrics: "Jenny, did you love me in July? Jenny, could you love me if you tried?
Ah, a temporal marker. Summer love. "Jenny, did you love me in July?" A question of effort: ... if you tried?
In one way love has nothing to do with effort. It strikes us. Trying to make love occur is a fool's errand.
In another way love has everything to do with effort. The flame must be discovered, but effort must maintain it.
There is a small instrumental bridge between the second and third iteration of the chorus. The third iteration is far richer than it has been so far: layered vocals, background vocals singing (sorta like) in a round, renewed inflections of passion in Barrie's voice.
As I have thought about this song I have been reminded of a very early memory, when a teacher showed us in Kindergarten how to sing in a round. We sang "row, row, row your boat" in a round. I remember it being totally mind blowing to my small body.
I have also been reminded of the time I went to Compline at St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. Every Sunday night there is a singing event, a form of prayer, in which folks in monastic garb sing and chant in deeply harmonic and melodious ways. I remember feeling the power of the space, the echoing of voices in the cavernous church. I thought about what it must have been like when early humans first discovered harmony, first understood that voices could interact, first realized that a cave would change the quality of a voice.
Above all I am struck by the frank admission of this song and the vulnerable question it poses. "I don't know where to love from... Never had to hold myself true to someone..."
In some ways it is an odd question, Where do we/I love from? From is a term that has both spatial and causal meanings. I am from Maryland. This is a spatial/geographical sense of "from." I have recently been writing about the relationship between prediction and judgment. I have been claiming that judgment is something that must be undertaken from a "1st-personal" place; prediction generally comes from a "3rd-personal" place. These are terms that I got "from" Eugene Gendlin and his involvement in the phenomenological tradition. This is not a spatial "from," but a psychological or mental "from."
Where do ideas "come from?" We ask, "where'd you get that idea?" Ideas never come from space the way that food comes from the ground or I come from Maryland.
When talking about "where we love from" we don't mean a physical place, but a metaphorical place: the inner space of experience.
We talk about how things feel "crowded" inside of us, or how we feel "spacious." When I go to work I want to feel spacious, I strive to be aligned with Rilke's claim about solitude: that we should be able to walk inside ourselves for miles without encountering another.
In the world of Focusing, an embodied form of psychotherapy I work with, we talk about "close process" as opposed to "distant process." Sometimes people know that something upset them: "When my dad said that to me last week I was livid..." But then when they come to talk to me they can't recall the feelings, nothing is there... The experience has gone away or become distant somehow.
With the right kind of effort an experience or feeling can be invited; we can reconstitute, reexamine the feeling, bring it back to life.
Where to love from?
I love from the place in me that is neither too close nor too far. I love by being present. But what is presence? It is not spatial or physical presence. It is presence in inner space, closeness with the things that are at hand.
The "from" question raises the "source" question. Things come from other things. Living bodies come out of other living bodies. Where do living bodies come from? No one knows how to answer this question. A book like Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature tries to answer this question, but in many ways reveals that we simply don't know.
Source in some absolute sense seems hard or impossible to know. Where did all the extant things come from? God is our name for the source, or the whole.
But there is an experience of being closer or further from the source. The source is not God in some absolute sense. But it is a sense of being close to the place that fresh words come from.
Sometimes when we talk we just recycle old phrases, old ideas, we repeat familiar stories. And then other times when we speak we find we are saying new things, we surprise ourselves, old friends and familiar people surprise us.
New things happen.
Why do new things happen and where do new things come from? This is an especially difficult question when we are asking it in the non-spatial sense, like Barrie asks of Jenny.
"Jenny, I don't know where to love from" is a statement or question about the source of invisible things like love or fear or experiences generally.
The experience of being close to the source is the experience of real embodiment. There are ways of interacting with and being present with/in our bodies that can lead to new things. Gendlin calls this being with the "murky edge."
The "from" question could be crudely answered with the concept of the unconscious. But I prefer this notion of the murky edge. There are edges in awareness, "places" we can sense in which we sorta understand something, can say certain things about a problem or situation; but we can also sense that there are things we aren't saying, that don't fit.
When we learn to attend to and stay with that murky edge we find that new things come up. Plato's Meno is an interesting demonstration of how learning arises from staying with these unclear but felt places.
Love is about knowing how to stay in those murky spaces in which we don't yet understand but want to understand. "The big middle," as my therapist once called it. Staying present in the big middle is the opposite of being overwhelmed by something or letting it go totally out of mind.
Love is about particularity, perhaps of a person, but also of a flower or mug or period of time.
Love is revelatory. It shows us what we are and what other people are.
Love and presence seem in some ways to be identical.
I have the sense of a leap. A circularity. A bedrock.
Love is. We learn that it is by experiencing it. We experience it when someone can offer us presence, listening, patience, and real understanding.
Reality is unspeakable and the most true and potentially meaningful statement is "It is what it is..."
The Midnight's song "Bend" comes to mind: "Everything will always be exactly how its gonna be. Though I seem to worry every single day. This prodigal turns home again and morning comes and in the end I see that new sun shining on your face."
The sun is.
Love is.
New things come. They come "from" our ability to stay present at the murky edge of our understanding. But that "from" is quite strange.
When we stay at the murky edge we stand in front of a door. We know things come out of that door.
But we cannot go through that door and see what is on the other side.
We just know that things come, and everything that comes comes from somewhere.
Some thing comes, from some where, out of some place... Something like that... These are some of the most important phrases I am aware of.
So, I don't know the answer, but I admire Barrie's frankness, her willingness to pose a question through an admission:
"Jenny, I don't know where to love from..."
I think I do know where to love from. Or, at least, I find myself capable of love.
But it is a practice: something that must be repeated and returned to.
Love is a practice of returning, over and over, to that mysterious "door" I find inside myself where new things seem to "come from."
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