A Dance to the Music of Time — “Here’s Where the Story Ends”

The Song: “Here’s Where the Story Ends”
from the 1990 album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic by the Sundays
reached #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart

High matter thou enjoin’st me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
To human sense the invisible exploits
Of warring spirits?

— Paradise Lost (V. 563-566)

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading “Paradise Lost”. Well, re-reading it, actually: I first read it for a class back in Year 4 — man, that was such a long time ago — but never got past the Creation; a combination of not wanting to read about the tragic Fall of Man and inherent laziness meant that it’d always remained an unfinished project for me. (Apologies to Julian, who undeniably delivered the best brace of courses that spring semester.) The thing is, though, “Paradise Lost” is such a hard read: Milton’s words twist and turn on the page, running through multiple lines and stopping in the most infuriating of places; meanwhile, his syntax is so convoluted that by the time you reach the end of a sentence, you’ll have already forgotten what the subject was. I’ve made progress, of course, but very so often I have to lift my eyes off the page, try and picture in my mind just what on Earth (or Heaven, or Hell) Milton is trying to depict — before giving up, sighing deeply, and pushing on to the next incomprehensible sentence.

A lot of my life these days seems to be revolving around the opacity of communication. I recently interviewed a very famous academic for work, and although he did eventually did provide me with enough material to write an article on him, he insisted on surrounding his useful answers with diatribes and tangents of completely unnecessary detail, all while I (and the photographer) fidgeted on the couch in despair for upwards of 90 minutes. I’ve also been trying to type up my trip to Spain and France last September, but everything I saw and heard and smelt and tasted over there seems ineffable, defying all my attempts to describe it (which is why it will be a miracle if I make my original publication timeframe of August). And talking of France, my verbal communication skills seem to have collapsed ever since I came back from that trip: my German is stuck, my Chinese is regressing, and even English feels like it’s slipping out of my grasp these days. I’ve always been terrible at talking, of course, but this feels different. This feels like whole data banks going missing just when I need them most.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Point is, I was so starved of words (and swamped with work) that I genuinely considered ending my annual 2 April streak, putting the blog on hiatus, and concentrating on work and possible emigration instead. I just couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t a self-pitying rant that would take ages to write and even longer to read. Plus, my curiosity for pop music seems to have died out: fine as their songs are, I can’t relate to Chappell Roan or Doechii, and I just didn’t want to pontificate about artists I hardly knew anything about. I’d done that for years, but it felt a little ooky now. But if there’s one thing that’s also consistent about me, it’s that I refuse to let a good thing die — and so we come, in a very roundabout way, to the Sundays’ masterful jangle pop hit “Here’s Where the Story Ends”.

The couple at the heart of the Sundays must have thought a lot about words. Lead singer and lyricist Harriet Wheeler was a lit major in university, while her partner David Gavurin studied Romance languages — both subjects preoccupied with communication, preoccupied with how people express their thoughts out loud. Perhaps that’s why, despite a career that spanned almost a decade, they only had only two hours of material to show for it — sophomore album Blind took them two-and-a-half years to complete, Static and Silence took five more. Perfectionism ran through their songwriting: they were always tinkering around with the music and the words, which meant that audience demand would always be taking a backseat to actually saying what they meant. (“We can’t write to deadline. You can’t force a whole load of songs out quickly,” said Gavurin in 1993, and you can just imagine the “whatever” shrug that came along with it.)

The result of their perfectionism is some seriously pretty music. “Here’s Where the Story Ends” is a simple song — there’s only a guitar, bass and a bit of tambourine accompanying the vocals — and it makes for a very clean and understated sound. You can pick out every instrument that’s being played, and yet none of it feels like they’re jostling for dominance, trying to grab your attention. Instead, they all shine and sparkle as part of a harmonious whole: the acoustic guitar bubbles away like a mountain brook, while the bass thrums quietly, unobtrusively in the background. That’s a key factor in its prettiness: the only thing that can be remotely described as loud is Harriet Wheeler’s voice, and even then she sounds so innocent, so gentle. In the Stereogum article that first led me to this song, Tom Breihan describes this song as “bookstore music”, and even though I don’t really know what that description means, this fits perfectly against your average bookstore’s quiet serenity.

But for a song that’s bright and clear in terms of its music, there’s so much obscurity at play, too. The lyrics are in English, yes, but just what Wheeler is trying to say is frustratingly vague. Throughout “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, she sings about heartbreak and regret and self-loathing and many other things besides — or at least, I think she’s singing about those things. It’s hard to tell when your average sentence is something about how “the memories of your shed make me turn red, surprise, surprise, surprise”. Why those memories? What shed? What surprise? It’s so opaque, it might as well be the Voynich manuscript.

The result of all this ambiguity is that I usually find myself distracted when I listen to it: yes the music is pretty and the vocalist is amazing, but I keep on getting sidetracked by the lyrics as I try to decipher what she really means. Despite its prettiness, I don’t really know how to feel about this song: is there something behind all? I can spot the self-loathing behind the innocence, hear the anguish behind the carefree vocals, but every time I try to pinpoint the exact feelings behind this song it dissipates into twee little couplets. Most of the songs I like, I like because there’s a clear-cut character with clear-cut emotions you can empathise with: they tell you what they feel, and be it hyperdetailed Swiftian heartbreak or the most vacuous crap, you come out of the song with a sense of clarity, of finality. I don’t get that with “Here’s Where the Story Ends”.

But is it wise to think too much of her lyrics anyway? If you pull back, this is really just the ramblings of someone in her mid-twenties — an unusually erudite someone, perhaps, but still a someone who’s just suffered from a breakup and is probably randomly spitballing sentences and phrases here and there. You’d probably pat this person on the back, but you’d refrain from taking anything they said too seriously. (Also, Wheeler being a lit major takes me back to how half the lit majors at my uni would write random half-sentences and then think they’d just written the most profound shit on earth.) “Crazy I know, places I go make me feel so tired” sounds lovely, yes, but it’s such a reading comprehension exercise that it probably doesn’t mean anything. As it is with John Milton, so too is the urge to give up here strong: perhaps a song is just a song, and we should leave it at that…

… and yet try as I might, I keep on coming back to the mystery of the Sundays. There is something in Harriet Wheeler’s voice which makes me wonder why; her way of speaking in riddles just makes me more determined to solve them, to piece together the clues. I know I just said that the lyrics could mean nothing, but thinking more about it, is it likely that someone this much of a perfectionist would allow her lyrics to come across as meaningless babble? It feels like there’s a deeper wisdom just lying in wait, something behind the innocence that might just be unlocked. Despite her tongue-tied nature, I remain curious about what she has to say.

And here’s the thing: I think she might be curious about what she has to say as well. She’s speaking so obtusely not because she wants to, but because like us, she’s confused by the whole tempest of feelings inside her — the story may have ended, but the moral’s unclear. She imagines so many people looking down at her, paying attention to her every word, and her face turns red; all she can think about is how “the only thing I ever really wanted to say was wrong, was wrong, was wrong”. She probably wants nothing more than to put a lid on the relationship, and to tell others that she’s put a lid on the relationship, but that Prufrockian fear of misrepresenting yourself is real. So she dances around the subject, trying to come up with a definitive encapsulation, and yet failing all the time.

That’s the whole thing about communication: you can try your damnedest, and still you can be no closer to saying what you really want to say. Despite (or perhaps because of) our best intentions, our deepest thoughts can still be out of reach, totally inexpressible, always shot through with the fear of being misinterpreted. I think of Wheeler and Gavurin, sitting in their garden shed (they’re English, they must have a garden shed), trying to come up with good songs that would bear out their vision, while exhausted and wary of their newfound fame. I think of John Milton, muttering the lines of “Paradise Lost” to a scribe in his cottage; someone who wanted more than anything to “justify the ways of God to men”, yet ended up inadvertently making God an unsympathetic jerk and Satan a sexy Byronic hero. And I am reminded of me, sitting in the shadows of yet another café, staring gloomily at the slowly-blinking cursor on the screen; or perhaps of the many times in the past year where I said something random in an attempt to keep a conversation going, and instead brought it to a crashing halt.

Which brings me back to the issue of these posts: should I even try to continue writing these, when no words can adequately capture how I feel towards certain things? There are other people out there who write blogposts on songs much more eloquently than I do, and who have a much better idea of what they’re talking about. The 2 April tradition is really just a self-imposed thing — I’d happened to release my pieces on “Here Is the News” and “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” on the same date, and I only made it an outright thing last year. As Harriet Wheeler points out, the temptation to just give up and see it all as a futile endeavour is strong: she opts to “cynically say the world is that way/ Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise…”, and at the end of that line she lets the music rise and drown out her vocals, apparently resigned to let the world wash over her. She says nothing more in the song, except to repeat the title twice, and bring the song to a close, subdued and resigned.

Is this, then, where the story ends?

Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve
To glorify the Maker, and infer
Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
Thy hearing, such commission from above
I have received, to answer thy desire…

— Paradise Lost (VII. 115-119)

Here’s the thing about “Paradise Lost”: it’s a very beautiful poem. Yes, Milton’s syntax is more tortuous than thumbscrews, and the Christian part of me still takes no pleasure in reading about the Fall, but every so often there’s a sentence that makes me pause in my tracks and go back, just to read it one more time. This is a poem filled with light, and colour, and rich evocative imagery, and yet more light; it’s left such a huge mark on Western culture, from Mary Shelley to Philip Pullman, from Se7en to The Rings of Power. Just the other day, I photographed a passage from it (you’ll see what it is in a bit) and sent it to my partner. I rarely do that sort of thing, and yet John Milton made me do it.

I feel the same way about “Here’s Where the Story Ends”. As with last year’s piece, I had trouble deciding on which one I wanted to talk about until quite recently: I mentioned last year my draft for ABC’s “The Look of Love”, still my favourite song of all time, but I also seriously thought about writing on the Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold” and even “APT.”, which would definitely have attracted more attention than this one ever will. (Such a delightful song. Such untrammelled joy.)

But there was always something that led me back to the Sundays, some quiet power within its prettiness that made it worth digging into. We can discuss all we like about what the whole thing means, but the music, the voice, even those quirky turns of phrase, all make for an absolutely gorgeous song. Remember the “bookstore music” description from earlier? That’s a descriptor that encapsulates this song perfectly: it’s almost impossible to hate bookstores, and Wheeler’s own sketches of outside life — of crowds of people pushing past you in the street, of clandestine rendezvous in the garden shed — are so succinctly evoked that the imagery flashes in front of your eyes in an instant. You can’t help but be taken in.

And ultimately, I wonder whether the prognosis for Wheeler’s narrator is so dire after all. Sure, she retreats to her own little world at the end of the song, but she retreats into it content: she turns from saying it was “a terrible year” to saying that it was a “colourful” one “which makes me smile inside”, and if that’s not progress what is? The moment she realises that, the guitars behind her seem to sparkle just a little bit more, as if backing her up on her new discovery — the pretty song just gets prettier. Perhaps the fact that she says little towards the end of the song isn’t a recognition of the futility of her own communications; it’s an awareness that she’s said what she had to say, and is content to let the world blend with it, wash over it, carry it along. It’s not an easy peace (“Here’s Where the Story Ends” is only track 2 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, throughout which she can’t stop relitigating her thoughts, again and again) but at this stage she’s happy with the things she’s said, and she knows where it belongs: in the wide open world.

It’s in the same way that I think about my posts on here. I write completely different stuff from Harriet Wheeler (for one thing, I don’t think anybody would accuse my travel blogs of being incomprehensible poetry), but I’m not writing so that everybody can see what a learned/cultured/well-travelled person I am. I write because I like writing, have liked it since the age of five. I write because there are things that capture me every day, things so amazing that my autistic brain can’t comprehend all of it in one go and needs a 3000-word essay to untangle it. (Last year I learned that 2 April is apparently World Autism Awareness Day, which is a very nice coincidence, even if my variation of it doesn’t get in the way of my life much.) And I write because one of the fundamental tenets of my life is “anything that’s good deserves to be shared”, because things that are beautiful should not be hidden under a rock, but brought out for praise, criticism, or just plain discourse, so that I, too, can hear what people have to say about it. The sharing of joy is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

I’m not one for cynicism — you’ll never find me saying “the world is that way”, much less shouting “SURPRISE” four times in a row and then never following up. But I do appreciate how Harriet Wheeler, and the Sundays as a whole, teaches me how beautiful communication can be, in and of its own: our words might come out a jumble, but we’ve done our best with it, and who knows if it carries some accidental (or even deliberate) nugget of wisdom? I don’t know how long it’ll take me to complete that travel journal — and in any case, it might be the last one I publish for some time — and I don’t know if I’ll write another piece for 2 April ever again. But I feel confident in saying that as long as I’m alive and functional, and WordPress has space for me, I’ll keep writing down my thoughts, and sharing things that are as beautiful as “Here’s Where the Story Ends”. They are little souvenirs of my colourful years, and in turn they have perhaps engendered some small prettiness in the world around me. For that alone, I am already grateful.

Now hear me relate my story,
Which perhaps thou hast not heard;
And day is yet not spent; till then thou seest
How subtly to detain thee I devise…
For while I sit with thee, I seem in Heaven
And sweet thy discourse is to my ear.

— Paradise Lost (VIII. 204-211, slightly adapted, underlines mine)

(Cover by Rough Trade Records; “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, performed by the Sundays and written by David Gavurin and Harriet Wheeler, is utilised here for criticism and review.)