Photo by Richard Dykes on Unsplash
Written by Seven Autumns.
I don’t know if I was nineteen or twenty when I first typed his name into an ad-less YouTube search. Some unknown Irish singer I was sure I had heard before, some time in my teens. I was fifteen years old with a stack of DVDs stashed under my bed. Ah yes, the first season of The L Word and ‘The Blower's Daughter’ were what moved me then. I was still scared to discover the fluidity of life, yet here I found myself growing infatuated with this messed up, brilliant fucking talent whose raw bruises matched my own teen-spirit. Years later on, I finally understood the words he sang because I, too, had become infatuated with someone, a beautiful soul, or so I thought then.
I know there are those who claim the Irish are all poets and drunks; Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan’s live performance of ‘I Remember’, recorded at St. Luke’s Church in London, for the BBC’s Four Sessions, seemed somehow to confirm this idea in me, blasting away on my old Dell laptop in 2010 and clawing at my broken karma. Through shreds of agony, Rice hammers on an acoustic that turns electric and fingerpicks his orchestration of an inner flame that belies what at first appears to be the singer’s detachment. I did not even understand that kind of pain until I found myself lost and broken in my own life, drunk on the floor and wailing away at his and my own self-inflicted wounds, turning like broken hinges in a chilling breeze.
While unable to escape the questions of my past, I summoned to mind the possibility of a feminine return, or so the phantasm appeared to me. My love for this beauty, who to my eyes did not appear to have aged at all, existed outside of time as would, for example, a sperm that does not remember anything at all. Yet I nevertheless felt an urge to explode just as Damien does in his performance, racing with angst towards the climax. What later appeared to me as only the remains of what could have been left me feeling wounded. I, as the tormentor of myself, or I, as the victim of a love that had haunted my soul for almost a decade. The sucker punch feeling I was left with was foolish; a broken screen, a bottle falling to the floor. I needed to wash down the feeling I had after trying unsuccessfully to call you.
I watched and listened to Damien Rice as not only as a fan but as corrupted flesh, unworthy of such attentions in my own right. I am but the judgment of a heart that later wanted nothing more than to offer itself up to the nails of a crucifixion, and this, too, I beheld in the sad tale of Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan’s farewell. This was, and still is, a tale of absurd mortality: Freud’s psychoanalytic conclusions concerning love or sex, a far cry from the black woe, or mental disorders. This was a melody found in the darkness of Greek tragedies.
Had no one yet bothered to really look at the unrequited distortion that had been brought out by another being’s narcissistic flesh? As I listened to Lisa’s introduction to the first verse, accompanied by the simple fingerpicking of Damien’s rusty brown guitar, I, too, experienced her remembrance of seeing a beautiful creature for the first time. Hers, Lisa, was in the rain, standing with wet hair. Although not in the rain, mine, too, was touched by water—in the humidity of the Arabian heat. Dampness clung to my cheeks as my heart dropped into my stomach and I suddenly remembered my place as one-half of two souls lost.
The angel and the devil are what this song relates to. Lisa’s angelic voice, Damien’s fucked up anguish, the same raw torment in his voice that I later found in myself. Damien on stage, and me, on the streets of Sydney, ironically in the pouring rain. While the two performers broke each other on that stage, in that fucking brutal orchestration of their parts, I was twenty-one and broke my hand, circumstances made possible by my state of liquid insanity as poured inside me at three in the morning. The bus stop sign did not welcome me with open arms. That is, to say the least. Because all I wanted was to “hear what you have to say about me, hear if you are going to live without me, I want to hear, what you want. What the hell do you want?” My friend took my phone away, to keep me from calling again. Two hours later, I had a cast on my hand.
This small-scale atrocity exhibition placed one party, me, the unfamiliar, in a foreign land, opposite the other, a magician who could disappear and reappear when they so pleased. I could not force or demand much, for I understood they did not understand the force of Corpus callosum, which amounts to knowing the rendition of the familiarity with each other and executing as the totality of one another. My forgotten love, not wasted, just gone now even as I remember how Lisa recalled seeing her love’s “head around the door.” I’m not going to lie, cuz, like hers, my head too stopped working for days, weeks, months, and years. A song split into two pieces: a soul divided into two seeds.
Maybe the other party to my own obsession has forgotten since it has been over fourteen years since I first asked about the weather as we faced each other on a bumpy field that appeared to offer itself up as the basis for the reciprocal determination of déjà vu. Did you not “taxied out of a storm” before I left, only to deceive me? Was I not worth it?
Lisa begins wailing, in the video, as did I, on my own. Our unearthly performance, mine fused to hers, suggested flood and fire, blood and wasted promises. She reminded me of my own difficulty of being. What is the protocol for interacting with such an obscene goddess, in full awareness of what we have done? Aware that I was close to my execution, as was Lisa’s. Like a sacrificial pawn, axed as Damien’s rage acknowledged mine but not hers. Years later, his existentialism would be the reason for her departure.
Two twisted souls dressed up as divine lovers who complete each other without knowing it, and yet they keep their emotions back because they cannot bear to admit their co-dependence. Is it cultural differences that sacrifice our love in the end? Is it the scorn that one is invited to inflict upon the other person? How do you remember December, the first time they both saw each other? However, one was too afraid; one was fearful that the other would leave and cheat, which ultimately cheated my soul, my dreams; my Oedipal complex tore me to bits just like Rice’s cries. Why am I alone now, and why has my pack abandoned me? This unearthly performance is the only thing that stayed true to its endless core. You only ever hear about the changes of life, yet when you experience them it falls short of what you have been taught and what you expected. It felt to me like an allusion to my own difficulty at accepting the premise of two souls who complete each other without knowing it, while the whole time holding back those feelings because they could never bring themselves to admit it. Or the scorn that one seems invited to inflict upon the other person?
Do you even remember December?
Damien did. The first time, they both saw each other, although one was too afraid, worried that the other would leave and cheat. A meniscal tear that eventually tore them both to bits. As his cries echo in the background of my YouTube viewing, the beat-box of lashes felt just like every time we ever met. Where are the wolves that perform inside of me, just as Damien performed besides Lisa? Why am I alone now, and why has my pack abandoned me? Why am I celibate by the light of a flame that still burns within? All those years distorted and crushed by his denial: Damien’s confusion is still my confusion. Lisa’s love and abandonment, or did he let her go?, as in my own life I failed to let go the one I adored the most, the one who now adores me the least, oh scorn, oh porn, my sanity never could afford to cover the cost of removing this sickening stain.
In the video Lisa, half-prepares the aural innocence. Damien leads us over the edge to destruction. My fond memories are intertwined with Lisa’s, and my heart fell apart alongside Damien’s.
“I want you here tonight, I want you here ’cuz I can’t believe what I found.”
The eternal divine essence. That is what I believed in too.
“Nothing is taking me down, down, down.” Lisa once had hope, as did I. This dirty world, one last attempt, one last cry for salvation. Damien could not bear it; for him, it became black, and he found himself in the grave of psychosis. Only those who are dead can relate- but then there was you. And we break out of the whatever allowed us to remain when Damien begins to sing, also breaking the heart of those who had once loved, every time he collapses into his own falsified prayers. Lisa’s last words, “except you, my love,” as if knowing that Damien was about to cross the edge into a frenzy of schizophrenic attacks, or multiple-personality disorders that would eventually pull them apart, or in her own words, Lisa was simply fired.
“Come all ye loss and dive into moss,” he sings, sincere but forced. I know how the whiteness of purity can fall into a sunburnt atrocity. Oh, scorn, oh porn, my sanity never covered the cost of the unrequited stain. No, a synthetic insanity took its place, a type of performance. Damien’s chaos and crescendo reaches me as the paradox of my own true nature, all my symptoms, my delusions. Did I ever pass this test? Is this torment that you see or hear just a Spinozist misunderstanding, or the manifestation of a feminine grotesque: the lies of a man who led me on for the sake of securing sexual favors for eternity. I would have come back. I still would.
“God will forgive me, but I, I whip myself with scorn, scorn.” He kills her, in a sense. He kills her innocence, rust turning into stone. I pray for your happiness, pray for your forgiveness, and I pray to see your face again with all the latitude given me by my existence. I pray for all this and more, but like Damien, my sins awake me at night, and “I want to hear what you have to say about me, hear if you’re gonna live without me.”
And you did. You moved on and then came back. You moved on again, and still came back.
“I want to hear what you want. I remember December.” Has Damien left Lisa captive or freed her from his own Cirque de madness. I had so much love to give, but suicide became my only resolution—a way out.
As Lisa stands back, her hands on her stomach, her readily apparent aches are matched by Damien’s screams. So many lies, so much hate towards the weak. Why did you lie?
“And I want to hear what you have to say about me
Hear if you're gonna live without me
I want to hear what you want.”
We argued from the last year of our teens to almost our thirties. There were glimpses of love, of hate, but they were overshadowed by your own guilty conscience. You were scared, scared of this demon turning you into something you knew you were, but did not want to accept. You finally did, though, but not with me. Sociocultural conditions found the best of you, yet you always forget, we share the same blood. Was it not your grandmother? Was it not the same roots of Persia or the Arabian land that connected us or connect us still? You will never escape it, for confusion and chaos will never let us be.
Damien knows it as he tries to push Lisa away by almost destroying his instrument, attacking his guitar but without bleeding hands, and attacking his mind; I moved you out of my way because my fucked-up mind would otherwise have wasted me for good.
Lisa screams at the glissando effects that Damien pulls, and you still do not understand why he banishes her? The cello violates the scene in the background of too little too late. They rip each other to bits, lyrically, vocally, and all we hear in the end is an angel’s pure pain. Damien reaches all but full insanity, a vibrato incarnation of Freud’s death drive, while Lisa falls into some symbolic unconsciousness of martyrdom. Damien banishes her with his frayed tremolo. What is underneath this flesh, if not bones? Skeletons that withhold their emotional overdrive. Was this true love? Believe me, it was; still is. ‘I Remember’ is split into two flames, maybe thirty-three, maybe thirty-three. If we ever see each other again, I cannot bear to hear your wails, or those simple glimpses; do not stare at the ground. Believe in our collective sins. Or believe in our collective karma without ever obtaining the one that you loved. Was it a relationship of a platonic, artistic attachment? Damien let her go and he holds on to those everlasting regrets of losing her. But losing what? Her voice, her body, her presence or her empathy towards such a man who battled with so many demons? No one really knows besides Damien and Lisa, just as no one really knows what happened to us besides you and me, or so I thought, and sometimes continue to think. Until today I sometimes sit through the almost ten-minute performance and continue to think to myself:
“What the hell do you want?”
Damien Rice’s I Remember (Live)’
Miniature Malekpour is a PhD scholar-at the Australian National University and an Artist. She writes under the pen-name Seven Autumns for experimental/fictional prose. She is currently a contributing writer for Diabolique Magazine.