bon iver – Houghton STAR

This New Year, I didn’t want party blowers or noisemakers or confetti. I didn’t want countdowns or parties. I wanted real quiet, real rest, real time to intentionally think, reflect, and acknowledge the ending of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. I wanted to dwell in the transition, in the momentary suspension, in the weightless limbo, in the passage from one year to the next. I wanted to neatly gather its pages—its moments, musings, feelings—and lay my hand on top of the stack, the year in its entirety, and sigh a long, contented sigh. Bind it in reflection and in prayer, longing to be engaged in my living, aware of my being, and conscious of its changing and directing—intolerant of a passive blur of a life.

There I was, chanting choice and carrying a banner for individual agency, convinced of my ability to accept, reject, create or reform my character; my personhood.

Then I started thinking about my year: the humbling, the self-confrontation of weaknesses, the uncertainties. And though anyone who is familiar with me knows that my approach to life is of the smell-the-roses-wind-blown variety, this year challenged me. It challenged my flexibility, my control. It was a year of travel, of transitions. Those have a way of confronting and changing you. My coming and going quietly, gradually, altered me and I am still processing how that is.

A semester in Tanzania expanded the classroom walls, took biology to villages, to reserves; took lecture to living. In Ruaha Game Park, this sense of smallness, of humility, was absolute. Driving through the savannah on the way back to the lodge, Bon Iver’s “Holocene” playing in my ears (“And at once I knew I was not magnificent/…and I could see for miles and miles and miles”), I started to sense the bigness of the landscape and the smallness of me—nature’s power and my weakness. The savannah just seemed even more immense than it had minutes before: miles and miles and miles of dry grass and bush, Acacias and enormous Baobabs, stretched, reached, out my window and beyond, bowing to mountains in the distance—their peaks, so far that their greens gave way to blues, were an outline of the endless scene that spread out before me. And I felt small. I thought, “here, I’m a minority. Here, I stumble over language. Here, my thinking and my values are often not the norm. I look different, act differently, and think differently.” On the game drive earlier that day, perched on top of the truck (which we affectionately, and inexplicably, called The Aardvark), we passed a bull elephant—an angry one. He trumpeted, he tore at leaves and branches, and he stomped his feet. His power was visible and incredible. If he had carried out his charges I, almost eye-to-eye level with him, would have been totally helpless. My lack of control was stark—nature did not, does not, and should not bend at my will. May I come to terms with my smallness, I told myself. May I let it breed humility in me. And may it change my perspective—one shaped by the West, the great believer in power, in independence, in control, in the accumulation of wealth and in the fostering of safety, security, comfort, and luxury: the West who makes nature bend at its will; the West who, in its industriousness, efficiency, and power—forgets its smallness and loses touch with the reality, and beauty, of vulnerability. “Too much power, too little/knowledge,” Wendell Berry writes. And I think he is right…there is some truth, some value, in being a minority—in being okay with smallness.

Humility and a willingness to relinquish control: these, I’m realizing, need to be repeated in my head and practiced in my living. They are especially necessary attitudes to carry into the field of international development I’m moving towards, a field that is constantly contested: a field that is a battleground for cynicism.

Development—this season of life—feels like walking on water.

And so, recognizing the limit of my reason, my critical thinking, my abilities, my knowing, I throw my legs over the boat. I step on to a sea. I’m tiny, and things are about to get risky, messy, and uncomfortable. Trusting that I have a role to play in God’s redemptive plan, unfolding since The Garden, I move towards Jesus, His arms outstretched, His lips moving, saying, “Yes, come.”

A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought Justin Vernon was talented or simply creative. This struck me as an interesting and stupid question. Aren’t they synonymous? In lieu of comparing Webster’s definition (you all have iPhones, look it up yourself), I’ll say, after some reflection, I don’t think they are quite the same.

Either under his moniker Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) or with a number of different side projects, Justin Vernon has been a name in indie-alternative music since 2007. Among his best forays is his Volcano Choir collaboration with the WI based post-rock group “Collections of Colonies of Bees.” Their album Unmap was well received in 2009, and it was only a year after this success that the group began writing for the recent August release of Repave.

Though Vernon discourages the comparison, Repave is just another Bon Iver album. Of course, saying that it’s just another Bon Iver album is like saying that it’s just another Alex Glover SPOT song. It’s just another wildly original and captivating work of genius. Far from criticizing, I note the similarity between Repave and Bon Iver only to emphasize the indelible, pervasive vocals. Vernon’s soaring falsetto and chanting refrains stand out, no matter the venue. Not only does it sound the same, but, like Vernon’s last Bon Iver album, Repave is lyrically inscrutable. Even if you manage to make out a line here and there you will likely be perplexed with what you find. Consider the end of the song “Keel”, where Vernon moans out the lines, “Not before, I was in front, of the pekid fountain, The whole time.” Pekid isn’t even a word. At one point in “Comrade” he squeal-yells the words “Terra forming.” No, you’re not missing something; the words just don’t make any sense.

In a generous mood, Keats might say that Vernon has latched on to some serious negative capability. That is, he is effectively communicating without necessarily making himself understood. Vernon’s writing –like Eliot’s Four Quartets and beat era poetry—pillages words for their aesthetic leverage while caring little for any sort of categorical communication. It is hard to quantify this achievement. It’s not that his songs are about nothing. They are simply about things that usually go unsaid either because we don’t know how to say them or nobody is listening. You can point to them and say, yes, exactly, this guy gets it. You can sing along with him. But beyond that your explanations are bound to go awry.

While the vocal delivery and mystical “songwriting” is similar to Bon Iver, Repave does fall short of delivering the breadth of experience found in Vernon’s other work. This is an abstract criticism for an abstract work, but let me try to explain. Part of what makes Bon Iver’s first album so great is that each track sets itself apart from the others. The pieces of “For Emma, Forever Ago” are self-contained as individual expressions webbed loosely together in notions of isolation, dejection, and longing. They are thematically related but stand on their own as subtle modulations of tone and delivery. Bon Iver’s second album maintains this variety but imbues everything with a full-bodied, anthem-rock atmosphere. As a whole, the album is more confident and assertive. Volcano Choir’s Repave goes one step too far in this direction. The album throbs irrepressibly onwards without providing necessary space for reflection or development. Instead of delving a range of emotions and responses, Repave presents a limited, authoritative tone. It is too sure of itself, and, as a result, it is monotonous.

In answer to my friend’s question, I would say that Justin Vernon is creative. I’m not at a loss to explain how he made this album. In other words, his talent as a musician or songwriter doesn’t blow me away. I know he used computers, digital effects, lots of angst, and a hefty dose of spontaneously overflowing powerful emotions. He is one of many artists that could do this. But what sets him apart is not what his work means, but how it means. Not how does he make the work, but how does he make it work. That’s the headscratcher.