The poor thing in the road, its eyes still glistening / The cold wet of your nose, the Earth from a distance - Hozier, “Abstract (Psychopomp)”
I’m lucky that one of my favorite artists from my tweens, Hozier, has remained popular in opinion and relevance since my youth. He came out with his third album Fall of 2023, the season in which I moved to New York. Now, I still walk the same streets of Queens that were once unfamiliar to me with these once-unfamiliar songs.
Of course, there is a profound sense of personal and romantic loss throughout this album — it is by Hozier, after all. Ultimately, though, because it needs to be more than the aforementioned, Unreal, Unearth is a journey through Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Somewhere inside me is a reading group drawing a throughline between The Divine Comedy, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but I digress. Hozier’s album is similarly a journey through the dark night of the soul via a metaphor about the afterlife that takes us through the circles of Hell.
I walked the streets by my campus listening to these songs during my own Dark Night of the Soul this Spring. At the time, one of my lifelines was this course I was taking on comics. It was drawing for writers, and as I am a visual artist and a writer, the course was right up my alley. Furthermore, as a self-taught visual artist, the instructor’s emphasis on connecting with the practice through story rather than technique resonated with me deeply. I always struggle to make my images do something, just as I struggle to make my fictional characters do something. Signification has no weight without action.
The songs on this album are always doing something. Lovers are contracting cancer, dawn is breaking, people are sleeping — bodies always in motion or activity.
“Abstract (Psychopomp)” does not have a title that makes one thing of motion: isn’t motion incredibly concrete and determined? However you break up a distance or slice it into however many dimensions, there is only a point A and a point B to bounce between. But this song, more so than any others on the album, is the one that most suggests a narrative. Hozier compares the end of a relationship with a mystery person to story of how he and this person found a dead animal by the side of the road, possibly because they ran the creature over.
Of course, now, the title has meaning: that this tiny story within the relationship can go on to serve as a metaphor for the demise of the relationship as a whole. This is how stories create meaning: by creating relationships between abstracts/macrocosms and specifics/microcosms.
A microcosm that is important to me: the Hallway of Extinction at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
You will see that the Hallway of Extinction is not, indeed, called the Hallway of Extinction. It is the Life in Crisis: the Schad Gallery of Diversity. On the walls are taxidermies and models of endangered and extinct species. Somewhere along the way, I forgot its name and replaced it with something much weightier.
In the bowls of the exhibit, in the bat cave, I had my second kiss. My high school boyfriend and I went to the ROM when we started dating — I had an early curfew and my dad forbid the boy to come over and me to go to his home. We met mostly in public, inevitably making out in places that I’m too embarrassed to name. Except this one.
I don’t remember much of that relationship, but I do remember that, at least at the beginning, I thought he was exceptionally kind. I thought this in the way that manic pixie dream girls think their indie love interests are kind. Read: I was sixteen and insecure and was being idolized and sexualized in ways I didn’t understand. And a moment in this relationship, in my life, that I remember fondly is how, on this date, at this tender time of my life, I stopped before the Gallery. I told him that we couldn’t go in there; I was scared. The exhibit had always terrorized me with existential dread. But, to get to the dinosaurs, we needed to go through it. The words had scarcely left my lips then this boy grabbed my hand and took off down the hall, taking me with him.
I know the memory doesn’t go like this, but in my dreams, he is always tugging at my hand, we’re accelerating to the end of life itself, the animals whizzing past. And suddenly I am in the dark, my mouth is moving, breath is on my face, and my heart is thumping like I just scaled the Great Chain of Being itself because I felt that I had, that I had to feel that way to be in that moment.
I would return to the ROM right after my university boyfriend and I broke up. He was sweet, he was gentle, and he was not the Big One. At least, I didn’t feel that at the time, although I wouldn’t have articulated it that way. I was about to leave for a semester abroad in France, and I wanted more to have someone to mourn over in Dijon than I wanted to return to the relationship itself.
But I wrote a letter to him at the end of the Great Chain of Being that I had just ran through three years after I did so with my high school boyfriend. At the top, I found myself breathing softly, the sound of it cushioning me in the dark that was now cold.
I haven’t been to the Hall of Extinction since.
The closest I’ve come to the Hallway of Extinction was on a recent trip to the American Museum of Natural History when my cousin and his partner were visiting. I had never been, though I’d fallen in love with the museum before I’d ever laid eyes on it, having read and loved Wonderstruck as a tweenager — a few years before the high school boyfriend.
I think to call it a hallway doesn’t do this exhibit injustice. It’s a whole wing dedicated to all kinds and varieties of life on Earth. Floating in the center of the two floors is, what at least appeared to me at the time, a sperm whale. Life sized. Or, at least, close-to. When you are at either end of the replica, you can almost touch its nuzzle and its tale. When you are looking at it from above, it is as if a storm cloud has eclipsed the dim sun.
I wonder if clouds are bigger than sperm whales, or if sperm whales can be sometimes bigger than clouds. If condensation needs to reach a heavier critical mass than a sperm whale in order to make a cloud.
This time, I was too high to run. I could not rush up this Great Chain of Being, even though it’s more of a web in this case. And I thought of the other times I had been in and among this amount of varied life. All the times I had been around all the life forms made possible by this Earth.
This time, I did not want to run through it or rush it. Because I was not a being of rushing or conquering. I was a being of being. All life all unfolding around me. I was a singular epicentre, not the epicentre or ultimate moment.
I unfolded a memory in this drawing for my Drawing for Writers class. It was based on the prompt, “What is your worst fear?” Before my last relationship, maybe I would have tried to draw the Hallway of Extinction. I can see how I would draw it now, the panels panning from a black dot within a white square through the Hallway of Extinction, to a black dot within a within a black square. From somethingness to nothingness to somethingness.
Now, my worst fear is not the Hallway of Extinction. Maybe because I find no beauty in discovering the truth of my existence on my own. Maybe the discovery of the facticity of other people is where I find the courage to believe in the facticity of my own experience.
So my worst fear is not the end of myself, therefore the end of everything. My worst fear is the end of everything therefore the end of myself. In my nightmares, I always blink off like a lamp.
My worst fear looks more like all the stars winking out in the night sky than the Big Bang itself.
So my worst fear is this: sitting next to the one you love on a park bench late at night. There is the lapping of water in your ears. And you close your eyes to find their eyes open, staring blankly into the dark. Your shoulder brushes theirs and something like static runs through you. It is the radio static of the Big Bang. Turns out, you do not need a special NASA telescope to hear it. It was right there all along.
I’m telling you all this because I’ve had a somewhat fraught relationship with writing recently. And I’ve determined that fear is a part of it. Maybe it’s neurodivergence, maybe it’s trauma, but I have this nagging feeling that I’m somehow not good enough at communicating my internal realities. That I’m not good enough at making them concrete to Do The Thing. And this fear stops me from approaching my Substack because it is writing made to share with all of you. I worry that I don’t have enough concrete things to say.
Let me unfold a little, let me try to get a little more concrete: I am thinking about the ways in which the microcosm informs the macrocosm, and about how this is the mechanism through which stories make meaning. And how stories are humans’ chief meaning-making devices.
I am choosing to think of significance not like a climb or an explosion, but an unfolding.
Xx
Take care.