Angel Olsen – Aisles EP

When rid of all accoutrement and pretence, we’re all, at the end of the day, flesh, muscle, bone, and the unknowable quirk of chemistry that first spawned consciousness. It’s a quirk that has, on the one hand, allowed us to communicate with one another, while on the other, endowed us with the sort of idiosyncrasies that mean that, unless we evolve to become some sort of one-world one-consciousness slice-of-gaia type civilisation, all communication will forever be no more than an exercise in approximation: the inadequate meeting of mind-maps. 

It has meant that we’re doomed to spending nights on rooftops, resting backwards on the pinking palms of our hands, looking up at cloudy skies, wondering silently what it means – this dense, cosmic loneliness – while saying out loud, I’m so happy to be here with you. To the eternal servant of the mind, it’s a narrative that begins life dead in the water, generated by the entirely hypothetical persona of this external-facing humanoid he projects to placate his never-really-pleased always-really-me real persona. In reality, the eternal servant of the mind isn’t really anywhere with anyone but himself. In reality, the mind really is the most terrible of masters.

In the stories of this servant to the noodle, Other People™  – nameless, faceless – are to be feared at all times. The best life is a tortoise’s, every challenge in a long, uneventful life faced with the winning strategy of disappearing into one’s shell, blind to all harm. Alone in the dark, there’s nothing to fear but aloneness and darkness themselves; alone in the dark, the dishevelled loon fears nothing but fear itself, muttering one-audience stories about fighting them on the beaches, the valleys, the mountaintops, and the paddy fields from which their rice is stolen.