#I could bring up his whole discography and annotate the whole thing

[thelastattempt]

You always read so much into Louis’ lyrics and I’ve tried but I don’t get it. They seem so lazy to me.

Okay. I’ve held onto this ask for nearly two weeks now and I wasn’t going to answer it because it’s offensive. But I’m feeling salty today. So.

*wheels out whiteboard*

Exhibit A:

Through my cigarette, a shadow of you sticks to me to the carpet, try to ignore it, something about the way the light catches the mirror in my brain, it gives me shade.

Is that enough imagery for you? Enough metaphor?

Example 2:

Conversation is currency, shapes become a language, square eyes and sunglasses, finding faces in the trees

Is this straightforward and boring? Is this just too simple? Sorry, my bad, onto the next one.

Item 3:

It’s an old curse, dreamers diving head first, broken beaks and dead birds, can’t get through the glass.

Yeah. Super lazy this one. Really.

Anon, these are just the lyrics I wrote from memory, sat here mulling over the absurdness of this ask. I haven’t even mentioned ‘on my way to 27’ or ‘building mountains, hoping that they’ll turn to gold’ or the onomatopoeia or any of the very real language devices that are used regularly.

Louis’ songwriting is so incredibly layered and complicated; there are multiple interpretations from all different fans and the ability to give so much to so many is a talent in and of itself. Lyrically complex and lyrically confusing are not the same thing. It takes a real artist to be able to simplify the roaring emotions we all feel, it takes tangible restraint to say that actually, sometimes it doesn’t need to be opaque because the rawest form is enough. It takes something special to punch me in the heart with ‘you tell me ‘take it easy’, but it’s easier to say, wish I didn’t need so much of you, I hate to say but I do.’

It’s clearly all lost on you and I think that’s a little sad.

#TLDR; I’m sad for you #lazy it is not #I could write essays to memorialise your absolute idiocy #I could bring up his whole discography and annotate the whole thing #but… that’s no point cause you don’t get it anon #and there’s so much music out there so I suggest you find something else #and leave the people that do get it alone #thanks #asked and answered #Louis and songwriting #Louis Tomlinson

[jinruihokankeikaku]

"Communicating Doors" by The Extra Lens (John S. Darnielle and Franklin Bruno)

A somewhat close reading that got a bit out of hand, because I couldn't find any interpretations of this song online. First, the song in question -

Campaign down from Atlanta Five-hour drive to the coast...

So here's our establishing shot. We establish the setting - somewhere on the Atlantic or Gulf coast in the Deep South - Jacksonville, Destin, Pensacola, Mobile, Panama City, and Charleston/Folly/Sullivan's Island are all possibilities. But what really stands out about this line, and sets the tone for the song as a whole, is the usage of "campaign" - a protracted venture to establish political or military control. The narrator is on a mission. They're struggling against some kind of opposing force.

...brought whatever we thought we'd need To pierce the skin of a ghost.

So the extreme ambiguity here is deliberate; it's a device JD uses fairly often, usually to comic (or at least tragicomic) effect. The narrator's deflecting, ensconcing the truth in what seems at first a slightly awkward metaphor (do ghosts even have skin?) to avoid the shame or embarrassment of saying it in so many words (despite the fact that he seems to assume we already know what he's referring to). So what exactly is the narrator referring to here? This becomes...slightly more clear as the story develops, but here we get an important hint both as to whatever "whatever" may be, and as to the object of the narrator's campaign.

In JD's oeuvre, ghosts show up quite often indeed, and this isn't even the only time they appear to be less-ghostly than they seem - for example, in "The Young Thousands", "ghosts...are prepared to take on substance...[and] have been learning how to breathe," and in the unreleased "We Shall All Be Healed (Rose Quarter Drifting)" a ghost is referred to as having once been able to "bite" the narrator. An outtake from Get Lonely, "Keeping House", establishes this as explicitly and as matter-of-factly as anything, and several times over - "Cursing the moment that saw him draw breath / The ghost on your doorstep is starving to death.... [S]oaked wet with rain...he clutches his stomach / And howls at the pain.... [T]he ghost on your doorstep has to eat / Same as you." This example makes it clear that the ghost in question is a bodily thing, and that the narrator and his newly introduced cohort(?) mean to do it bodily harm.

What makes a ghost a ghost, then, if it's still breathing, still hungry, still contained within fragile skin? A few vague ideas come to mind, but as the narrative presses forward, a more clearly defined notion of ghostliness begins to take form.

Left your car at the hotel, rode up seventeen floors And checked ourselves into separate rooms With communicating doors.

So, there's the titular refrain. Before we unpack the really interesting part - that is to say, the character of the relationship between our narrator and his companion - it's probably important to establish what the term "communicating doors" could be referring to. I had a vague idea, but I wanted confirmation, so I searched the Web - and was rather surprised to find little in the way of architectural jargon, and a whole lot in the way of articles on a 1994 stage play of the same title, written by Alan Ayckbourn, which - without derailing this post even further - seems to be a sex-comedy slash farce slash thriller, set - perhaps notably - in a hotel suite that travels through time. Now, to be clear, I have no idea if John Darnielle and/or Franklin Bruno had even heard of this production, and it would be a stretch further still to suggest that they were inspired by it - it premiered in England and seems to have received little recognition beyond three sentences on Wikipedia and a number of (mixed) reviews. However, the play predates the song by over 25 years, and is the first thing that shows up when one enters "communicating doors" into one's search engine so, like, make of that what you will.

Incidentally, the term "communicating door(s)" doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page of its own, or even a dictionary entry. However, a trip to the StackExchange "English" forum proved that I was not the only one asking this question! There were several answers presented, with the common consensus seeming to be that a communicating door is any door between two rooms, among which rooms neither was a corridor, antechamber, hallway, or other common/shared space. They're sharing a suite and a car, but they're staying in separate rooms. This ghost-hunting partnership is strictly business, I guess...

....and that brings us back to the question of what the deal with ghosts is. Our protagonists (deuteragonists?) want to harm it physically, which is something that - if the rest of JD's body of work is to be believed, can be done to a ghost. The ghost's not dead. It's not spiritual, divine, or even especially ephemeral. If we assume that its description precludes its being a literal lingering mortal soul, we might need, then, to return to other ghosts that haunt the discography of them Goats et alia. A brief overview of the mentions of ghosts in the Kyle Barbour's The Annotated Mountain Goats, which covers the vast majority of John Darnielle's public songwriting between the early 90's and the mid-2010's, suggests that ghosts are typically - but not always - difficult or painful to interact with, and in many cases are actively malevolent. They haunt not only former / temporary domiciles (see "Genesis 3:23", "We Shall All Be Healed", "The Young Thousands"), and doorways (communicating or no) (besides the song currently on the dissection tray, see "Keeping House") but also dreams and traumatic memories, sometimes even in "armies....numbers far too high to measure" (see Tallahassee's "Idylls of the King" and All Eternals Deck's "Outer Scorpion Squadron"). The common thread here is, of course, liminality: an old apartment, a hotel suite, an illicitly infiltrated childhood home, and the depths of troubled sleep are all points of transition, places one has left or is soon to be leaving. Ghosts - living, breathing, and hungrily biting as they may be - are remains, artefacts, vestiges lifted out of time. With that in mind, let's return to our narrator's campaign.

Lay on top of the covers, turn the fan up to full Chase a memory around my head - silver satin, and wool. Close the bar at the harbor, say goodnight in the hall Smash the lock with a midnight knock - and the rest I don't recall.

That seems to have escalated rather quickly. The narrator tries to cool off, both literally and figuratively, because it gets hot down here. Once alone, he continue his pursuit of "a memory" which is, if not identical to the "ghost" in question, almost certainly a sort of synecdoche for it. After an unspecified length of time in futile pursuit, he comes up with only a few disjointed shocks of fabric. Sheets, perhaps, which might seem like ghosts from a great distance- you see where I'm going with this. He comes up empty-handed, give or take, and reunites with his companion at a bar down by the Harbor (this is totally me projecting, but I want to believe that this reinforces my theory that it could be Charleston, a city known for having one of those). They stay there - presumably arming themselves for the hunt - until they are politely asked to not stay there anymore and leave without any quarrel whatsoever, I'm sure. They make it back to their suite more or less intact, return to their respective rooms from the hall (which is to say, through strictly non-communicating doors), whereupon - true to JD-narratorial-form, he recalls only "smashing the lock" on the titular doors before we fade to black by way of Franklin Bruno's delightfully jaunty instrumental bridge. (And...scene.)

When our narrator's anterograde amnesia abates, we return with a final verse and another establishing shot, perhaps from a balcony 17 stories above the harbor:

Stones rise out of the water; water eats at the stones. I know people who dig up graves Just to label the bones. All that poison we swallowed, seeping out through the pores And floating over the transoms Of communicating doors.

The particular significance of the water, and the stones rising out of it, is of course open to any number of interpretations, or none at all. However, I do think it's worth noting that the opening line in this verse is the only line in the song to describe the natural world. It's stated directly and impersonally, as though the curtains have pulled back to expose something primal and eternal. On this brief threshold between oblivion and wakefulness, the narrator is experiencing a moment of enlightenment and/or disillusionment. He witnesses the Earth eating itself from high above, and then returns abruptly to his internal monologue (though in this verse, of course, he could as well be addressing his companion as could he the listener).

The narrator's return from liminal clarity, the passing of the moment at which the veil between the ghosts and the rest of us is "pierced", is evidenced by his abrupt change in tone in the following line. He re-asserts is subjectivity twice, here, in one line - first by stating for the record that he "knows people" (of which people he is not one), establishing a degree of separation between himself and what he's about to say, and second by returning to his original evasive metaphorical conceit - which conceit is, of course, now totally transparent to the listener. These guys he happens to know "...dig up graves / Just to label the bones." The fact that he's not, of course, just referring to some guys he happens to know, is evidenced by the fact that the two (marginally) distinct euphemisms he uses - "piercing the skin of a ghost" and "digging up graves" are both idiomatic stand-ins for the same process - that of "chasing down [memories]", of reaching bodily into the past. The only difference here is that, in the final verse, he admits that he knows why "people" do this - something he'd been hitherto unable or unwilling to do. He knows the motivations of the people he's referring to - and he provides no evidence, because he doesn't need to. Both he and the person he's now addressing, presumably from within the same room, know what he's talking about.

Sometimes it becomes necessary - or, at the very least, comes to feel necessary to label the past, to classify it, because a memory without context is a frightening, saddening, and confusing thing. A memory without context is a hungry ghost, "scanning the hallways nightly....searching for a sign." And just as the rising tide, over millennia, eats away at stone, the things one doesn't understand about one's own past add up, eroding - first imperceptibly, then catastrophically - the terra firma of one's identity in the present.

"But," - to borrow a quote from "Going to Marrakesh" another, earlier Darnielle-Bruno collaboration - "it's not right, and it's not nice / to try to kill the same thing twice." As our narrator and his companion are sweating out the poison, imagining that all that's toxic within themselves drifting away, over the transom, across the threshold to another place and time - the question of the ghost's whereabouts remains unanswered. As is the case with so many of John S. Darnielle's stories, we, the listeners, don't know what happens next. We don't know what ghosts yet haunt our narrator. The narrator probably doesn't either. So it goes.

~~~

#john darnielle #the extra lens #communicating doors #tmg