sometimes it feels like we only go backwards, baby

There is beauty in every emotion, even the bad. No matter how helpless you can feel before them. It all amounts to a realization of your humanity, of who and how you are. They may resist what you want to be, what you want them be, but as they slip from your grip, inching deeper inside you, crystalizing and evaporating and clarifying and distorting in equal measure, they can only be what you and they are.

It is what it is.

We may recoil from the bad ones, from their immense weight, finding them over and again to be embedded in the everyday as we try to avoid them, but they’re important. They are an aspect of you, of your capacity to feel. Without them, we would have no notion of the spectacle of the good emotions, their significance, their definition of what is, what feels, right. We find balance in our world, we find what is supposed to be beautiful in what is not and this makes them significant. They define us, how we react to and within the world. How we shape a memory, the present, and a future.

In a sense, this is blank idealism, a hopeful reconstitution of what makes us feel ordinary so that we feel less ordinary about it. Within it, we never feel like these are things we are ok with, we’re never likely to think that this will add to the sheen of what makes us happy. It is almost impossible to conceive it that way. They are, in the end, as much us as any other thoughtful motion or intellectual insight or conscious recollection, and as us we cannot separate ourselves from their ominous bearing. We can only see from within, not from without, even as we strive to move through them, to see an other side we implicitly know is there, no matter how distant, impossibly vague.

It’s funny, then, how buried in ourselves, we can still find means to understand ourselves in different mediums; how states of mind open up certain works-of-art—namely music—to a more robust significance, how they can better explain being in a few verses and a catchy chorus than I can in 600-odd words. I guess, this is the other side of emotion; that, without it, we cannot always sympathize or empathize with what a musician or artist or writer is trying to transmit.

I would not say it’s twee as being eye-opening, as having some curtain parted for revelation to shine in, but in moments of being so caught up in yourself that there is only yourself, to hear, observe, be party to something that mirrors an aspect of you is to be suddenly less isolated. You can see that something constructive or meaningful can come out of anything. Someone gets it.

Tame Impala aptly sing, ‘it feels like I only go backwards, baby. | Every part of me says, go ahead.’ This is the way these emotions feel. Stagnating, reversing, even as something better, at least different, waits ahead if only you’d reach for it. Perfectly, the song itself rolls in a blissful melody, searching, wondering, but knowingly so, lost waiting for a reciprocation of affection the singer knows is not, probably will not be, forthcoming. He can only be hopeful, tricking himself destructively into not going anywhere, into going backwards.

It is by any measurement a stunning song, poignant and searching in its simplicity. Pop music always does it best. It, like any great truly sad song, sees exactly the inherent beauty in difficult emotion, bringing forth a capacity to love through its pleading, desperate lyrics. We can only long if we feel distance in the first place, if there is a need for us to reach for something better, even as we recognize that we are feeling this helpless longing—‘oh no, not again.’

There is clarity in opposites. An—our—identity in an other. To fully grasp anything is to know its antonym in all its inverse associative logic, emotions and art included.