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‘“Many Things I, I Musn’t Say”: Approaching the Mystery and Uncertainty of Xiu Xiu’s “Plays The Music of Twin Peaks”’, by Tiarney Miekus
There were strange things happening, and without any decent coherency events could have taken place in any order. I was feeling nauseated and unsettled and couldn’t sleep without waking five or six times a night; a homeless man came running after me, waving his dick and trying to spurt his urine on my shoes; I later saw the same man sitting on curb-side furniture, shaking violently, crying profusely; after waking up at 3am I heard beautiful and rhythmic opera-like music with a strong female tenor, which I still can’t confirm I actually heard, and as the music played I began imagining figures opening my door and shooting my boyfriend and I in our sleep; two days later a woman came to my counter at work and drew a child-like picture of a gun to my head and while I looked at the picture, she mimed shooting up the hotel lobby; I began listening to Tony Conrad and was reworking lyrics for a song that sampled Conrad’s ‘Four Violins’, lyrics that enacted the final point of individual fracture amid an environment of oppression, when I heard the announcement of Conrad’s death; I started reading Persuasion to do a ‘body count’ on the novel’s numerous deaths and even though I knew a quick Google would provide my answers, I felt morally indebted to take on this task myself; I gave up this ambition to number death and re-opened W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to another Conrad, Joseph Conrad, whose life story prompts a meditation on the violence and oppression of colonisation, particularly of the barbarities in the Belgian Congo, a horror that time has eventually obscured; I watched as Sebald peeled away our geographical, historical and psychological landscapes, with each layer revealing what, for Sebald, sits at the bottom of everything: a little more horror, a little more death.
I was starting to feel estranged, sensitive and moody, so I knew I had to keep my wits about me, lest I end up bed-ridden and incapacitated like Sebald’s poor narrator who endures certain—but unidentifiable—“ailments of the spirit and of the body”. The stranger these episodes became the more concrete they felt, while the normal things, like shopping and driving, seemed like odd quotidian fixtures. It was life by the rules of mystery, and yet it wasn’t a typical thriller, with hatted investigators and magnifying glasses, promising resolution. It was a strangeness that had become a silent fixture in my day-to-day.
