anatomy of an obsession
bob dylan, elliott smith, and oedipus rex
I guess everyone has one really shitty semester in college. For me it was first semester junior year. I don’t know if it was burnout or a low-grade depression or just the long nights at the school newspaper fucking up my circadian rhythms, but I couldn’t open an email or text anyone back—that sort of dread. In my Don Quixote seminar one day I convinced myself that my throat was closing up and I was going to die, but everything I googled pointed to “anxiety.” Everything anyone said grated me. I remember snapping at someone at this photoshoot I had to oversee for the newspaper, and then I felt bad about it for days, thinking, Is this who I am?
That was the context for my Dylan obsession. I’ll never forget how it came on: I was hungover in bed the morning after the end-of-semester newspaper party at my apartment, and Will got up to get dressed, and the jangling of his belt buckle pierced my skull, and I thought, Oh, mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
For the next year, I listened to almost nothing but Dylan. Blonde on Blonde bathed winter subway rides in a shimmery euphoria. I spent an absurd amount of money to see him live, and I can’t remember if his singing was any good or if I was just so mystified by his presence that I tricked myself into enjoying it.
I dragged Will to a Dylan show this summer, and the moment Bob opened his mouth to sing, we started to laugh. With each screeching harmonica solo, we clutched our armrests and stifled our giggles. The old people in the audience stared ahead, dead-eyed. The people our age just murmured and laughed. It was like watching a screening of The Room, so bad it’s good. Talk about disillusionment.
I was on an Elliott Smith kick this weekend. I really didn’t mean to be, but YouTube kept suggesting these brutal videos of his concerts. I wound up reading a 2004 article in The Believer (RIP) about writer Gina Gionfriddo’s trip from Rhode Island to New York City for a memorial vigil following Smith’s death. She talks about the way that people lampooned the metalheads who died at the Station nightclub fire, then describes her “own musical fanship and the nagging sense of shame that accompanies it.” Loving a musician to the point that it subsumes your entire identity is, in another word, cringe.
Of course it is. I cringe at others and I cringe at myself. In high school, a teacher suggested that I write about the Beatles for the school newspaper, and I was so embarrassed about the obviousness of my obsession1—I only named my blog after them—that I swore off listening to them for years. In 2015, a woman standing near me at a Jeff Mangum concert yelled, “Neutral Milk Hotel was the first band that changed my life,” and I was so embarrassed on her behalf that I still remember her comment, eight years later. I love Elliott Smith as much as the next guy, but damn if Phoebe Bridgers’ infatuation doesn’t make me cringe.
But this weekend, I couldn’t help myself. I went down the rabbit hole that everyone goes down, inspecting Smith’s autopsy as if I alone could figure out whether he was murdered or killed himself. I wonder why I so desperately wanted to believe that he didn’t do it. Beyond the obvious (but alluring) misogyny of blaming the girlfriend, it is almost too difficult to believe that someone could hurt himself so badly, in such a brutal way. That there was no escape from all that sadness. That “we love you” was not a good enough reason not to do it.
There’s this passage I love in Oedipus (and please forgive me for quoting fucking Oedipus). From Jocasta, per Ian Johnston’s translation:
Why should a man whose life seems ruled by chance
live in fear—a man who never looks ahead,
who has no certain vision of his future?
It's best to live haphazardly, as best one can.
Do not worry you will wed your mother.
It's true that in their dreams a lot of men
have slept with their own mothers, but someone
who ignores all this bears life more easily.Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate intrusive thoughts from actual desires. That’s why we read tragedies and listen to these suicidal songs. Who hasn’t fended off some fleeting incestuous notion? Who hasn’t stood at the edge of a train platform and thought how easy it would be to jump?
But Oedipus did sleep with his mother. Elliott Smith did stab himself twice in the chest. In a life ruled by chance, we need to live with the doubt that our thoughts might become reality: that others might hurt us, or that we might hurt others, or that we might hurt ourselves. It’s best to live haphazardly. Even when your worries are impossible to ignore.
I drink out of a Nalgene instead of a Hydroflask because I can put a plastic bottle down on a wooden table without feeling that it is incorrect. I nearly lost my mind when I saw that scene in The Artist where the clink of a glass precipitates this crescendo of chaos. I stave off that feeling by putting my cup down just right. 1 or 2 times is OK, but 3 or 4 is no good, but 5 works. It used to exasperate my mother. She would say, “There are an infinite number of points on the edge of a glass, and you’ll never be able to put it down perfectly.” Will finds it endearing, thank god. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Adam O’Fallon Price, who also has OCD, writes in The Paris Review that the intensity of his adolescent devotion to music was “a counterpart—a harmony” to his disorder. I don’t make music, but I do obsess over music, and I think, in some ways, that the Milton Glaser Dylan portrait hanging on my wall is no different from the time I spend opening and closing the medicine cabinet or flickering the light switches. There is a sense of control in having listened to every song Bob Dylan has ever recorded. There is comfort in knowing that I cannot repeat strange silent incantations in my head while yelling the words to “Idiot Wind.” And there’s a shame in each of these things, too, but maybe there shouldn’t be.
“Rabid fanship,” Gionfriddo writes, “will always be mostly a one-way transaction…like prayer.” With no god to pray to, I obsess. I wouldn’t know how to live any other way.
“Your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange, making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay.”