by Justin Teoh
A couple of lines from the 2000 film “Yi Yi” addressed that ever since cinema was invented, we would have lived three times as long, because movies give us twice from what we get from daily life. Songs, then, tell of many lives. Like a museum guide for your childhood self, another replaces another in holding your hand towards mental pictures you might like, then one of them shows a part of the world that just stops you in your tracks; and for a moment in the vast span of Time, you hold on a little longer before the need for replays would make it overstay its own welcome.
“Chance” was one of those songs that did it for me, and for the longest time I keep coming back to it at least once every fortnight, playing it in full length and reliving everything. In the last hours of 2019, I was about to write on Facebook on how it was the ending soundtrack of the past decade. Angel Olsen sings “I’m leaving once again / Making my own plans,” and when the instrumentals burst, I am reminded of that starry scene in “La La Land” where Emma Stone’s character fast-forwards a fever dream with Ryan Gosling’s, about what could have been. I am reminded how it is actually easier done than said to jump right into adulthood, living like characters in noir films. I am also reminded of the mundane, the sheltered childhood. At one Chinese New Year celebration, perhaps one night in 2010, I drank quote-unquote grape juice not knowing it was soft alcohol, and in a drunken haze I watched as the moon followed its way back home with me to the other side of the Penang Bridge. I am reminded that that same moon has always been there, but as we grow we sink our gaze further down to the earth. Nostalgia sounds soapy on paper, but it is my way of talking through present moments to make better inferences for the future.
I wound up not writing the review, partly because I wanted to tend to my headspace and savor the song a while longer, without thinking it needed more justice than it has already done itself; and also partly because 2020 sounded like a satisfying numerological gift. Perhaps, I thought, it was best to wait to chronologize everything till then, see if pseudo cosmic intuitions off the Internet aligned nicely. I was having dinner at a hawker centre when the speculation of World War 3 proved otherwise. The air felt tighter, and I knew it wasn’t just me when it actually did with the virus. I’m convinced that life bares out its own constants, the sum of their parts show up as news at times when we choose not to believe it, and not when we least expect it, because its warning is so subtle that we know it’s there but we shrug it off thinking that it doesn’t affect us.
I think about whether the modern philosophers, artists, critics, and academics have seen enough to be genuinely unfazed by 2020. My fingers probe through the touchscreen, sift through Facebook profiles, articulate tweets, long lists of works and achievements. At the back of my head, I know that I will always be a student, but in identifying the ingredients of a person who wins at life, I refuse to believe that cracking the great histories of the world would always be followed by a lifestyle in an ivory tower, where all the knowledge is left to roam up and down within its wide, enveloping perimeters, but never cross out of it. Then again, I don’t see why the remaining vast majority of people should be blamed for not knowing any better. Wisdom takes time, maybe even more if we have to trim out the pretenses, but we all reach it at some point. It’s in your grandparents, the cool uncle that would give unsolicited advice when you were a kid, people who knew stoicism without even knowing what that word means, people who lost it all.
Each time I pick my pieces out and reconstruct them back together I get a lesson in body language. Without needing words, people almost seem to say: it’s awkward, it’ll take so much time, this is weird as hell… but no, I don’t exactly know what to study in college or university. I get savior’s complex, but it’s far more damaging if I misconstrue performative-ness from hesitance, silence from past trauma, if I judge something as traumatic when it wasn’t trauma to them. So I continue to stare blankly at my ceiling fan, daydreaming of options they could use to help themselves without me having to step in unwelcomed. My frustration is the same as Olsen’s “If we got to know each other / How rare is that?”; is it not right to be willing to see things as bigger and grander than ourselves and search for the values that hold true to us?
Meditation begets meditation begets rabbit holes. In the end, I decided that I will not do absolutely anything. In the end, I think that’s something in itself. You are your own best medicine. If you are meant to walk your path and that I walk mine, I would find new goals to aim towards instead of introspecting endlessly in one place. I will be selfish for once, but understand that you can do the same. In idleness, opportunity comes at knocking at your door, or it could be the other way around. I guess my point is that you never know, and when it does come it’s best to face it without pre-existing internal compulsions or external constraints. To set high expectations for someone or something is to set yourself up for self-sabotage, and maybe that’s why I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore.
Every song ever written is a love song. They aren’t always entrancing, however, as much as they could be encouraging. For that reason I come back to “Chance”. I respect an artist who could nail a track that is five minutes or longer, anything shorter than that lacks potential for a proper sendoff, especially given the events of the past decade (and the extra year). Olsen sings: “Forever’s just so far / Why don’t you say you’re with me now / With all of your heart?” When that last line fades into an unfinished whisper, the song sprawls at full length one more time, rewinding the time machine reluctantly before it’s stored away. But that’s why it’s a celebratory song, albeit a sentimental one. It is the sound of knowing that you are incapable of being inhuman, that filling the gap by giving yourself mercy can and should be acknowledged. That, in the span of your lifetime, all the various songs you have listened up to this point are altogether one grand song worth replaying and reliving.
A chance taken is a miracle towards the next step forward. The wide universe will thank you and you will know it when you notice again that the moon follows you. I ask that if you take a chance, I hope it’s good. I took my chance here, and I hope it’s good.