A Lot Of Sorrow

We were in Montreal a couple of years ago. My sense of time is a mess, but I think it was 2019. There were no masks, I remember that much. And at the MAC I watched for the better part of an hour some of a video of the American band the National singing their song “Sorrow” over and over. It’s a collaboration with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. In 2013 the band had set up at the MoMA in New York and they began a performance that eventually lasted for over six hours That’s 108 near-repetitions of the same three minutes and thirty-odd seconds. The video recording of that event has been doing the circuit and it’s pretty marvellous stuff.

Standing there for those 50 minutes or so, watching the band launch into their song again and again while trying not to flag (both them and me), was an experience that felt mildly transformative, however corny that sounds, and there are few enough of those moments in a lifetime that I think they should all be pinned to the board. 

It slowed time, is what seemed to happen, which then allowed me to inspect more or less the same instant many times over: my experience of it, my reaction to it, my physical discomfort during it, my wandering mind. It spoke also, I think, to our society’s engagement with, and reliance on, repetitive labour and also, most plainly, to the act of creation, and to physical stamina. By the end, it felt that the song had been implanted more or less permanently in my head. It felt sculptural somehow, as if I could run my hands over it, and it felt organic too, as if its meaning might continue to grow.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to also argue that in hindsight this deeply sad song, and its extended performance, can offer some solace at this difficult time. For me, it is evidence that we can outlast this goddamn pandemic, these hundreds of mournful days that seem to be attached to each other in an endless loop. We will come out of it changed, sure, but not necessarily worn down or degraded. We are, after all, much more than a few billion hot brake pads set uselessly against time’s spinning wheel.

But I go on too much, I repeat myself (as usual). All I really want to say is that a few months down the road, or whenever we finally get a grip on things, it seems likely that a weird and enduring sort of elation at having made it through will take hold, as well as an expanded understanding of life’s possibilities. A positive ending, then, and an evolution, even though every day, and every song, going back for years now, has seemed to remain pretty much the same.