No lovers, no drugs. No lovers, no drugs. And it’s painful not to touch, yeah it’s painful not to touch. Corona, your crush. Corona, too much. And it’s painful not to touch, yeah it’s painful not to touch. I went to the mountain to be. I wanted her, she wanted me. Returned to the desert to see. Now I’m back in this prison with me. You love her, too much. She loves you, not enough. And it’s painful not to touch, yeah it’s painful not to touch.
“No Lovers, No Drugs” is a music video meditation on the aesthetics of asceticism. It is an offering of art as abstract chaplaincy–made to comfort and accompany us through this touchless time. The one who finds the Holy Grail is the one who asks, “What are you going through?”¹ With this song I am asking (and answering): What does our long loneliness look, feel, and sound like? What are we going through? I offer a simple chorus: it’s painful not to touch. I believe that music can rehabilitate us back to presence and connection, and that our solitude can be sung in solidarity. …
By Lindsay Sanwald
Composed on October 18th, 2020 for “Climate of Unknowing,” a Harvard Divinity School class taught by Terry Tempest Williams & Dr. Diane Moore.
It’s hard being a time traveler. Everyone calls me First Generation. It’s an odd name, considering all the others who came before me. My oldest knowns crossed the sea on a ship called Faith close to 400 years ago. This is a true story.
My parents: the Acrobat and the Secretary. He worked as a lifeguard in his youth. She almost drowned three times in hers: thin ice, ocean, high school pool. She ended up drowning herself in drink. Ours is a plague of loneliness. …
By Lindsay Sanwald
An early draft of a larger endeavor, about my past, this present, our future…
The day I cremated my father, I rode the front row of the Cyclone. This is not a metaphor. After witnessing him burn from my living room couch, I got on the F Train to Coney Island, waited in line to sit upfront, and took the roller coaster plunge alone. I like to ride grief into great celebration–a legacy I inherited from an Acrobat.
I was in Brooklyn, my father’s body was in Fort Lauderdale. I had already said my proper living “goodbye” alongside a hospital bed a few months earlier. This type of goodbye is rare and holy. I’ve known a couple. It’s a farewell with an infinite echo, the kind you say in extreme living awareness, knowing full well that it is likely the last time you will ever see one another again. …
A Harvard Divinity School homework assignment for a class taught by Terry Tempest Williams: “Visit the Museum of Natural History. Find an object. Tell a story about beauty and brokenness.”
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I had a heaven hangover as I wandered these halls last Thursday. A kind of bliss exhaustion from being intellectually overfed all the sweets my mind tooth craves. I arrived at the museum right after a rousing philosophy lecture preached by Brother Cornel West together with his teacher Roberto Unger. Their animated discourse danced around this question: How should I live my life? We were explicitly told that the posited answers would not be positive feel-good stories, that the hopscotch from the IS to the OUGHT is a fallacious game. Professor Unger pointed instead to three basic human “flaws”: first, that we will die; second, that we are groundless and unable to agree upon any established framework of our existence; and finally, that we are insatiable, with an endless appetite for the infinite. Flaws?, …
By Idgy Dean
Making songs and making drinks follow the same mechanics — it’s dealing with spirits, gathering people in nocturnal seance, hands on the table, hands in automatic action, playing perfect ratios and percussive sounds; din of voices, dens of darkness, most memorable loss of memory, that place we go to fall in love with strangers, to fall out of time; strumming, beating, pouring everything inside of you into the mouths of others, feeding a communal prayer to feel more or less alive.
As much as my aspiring rock star ego longs for the “making it” victory of never having to work behind a bar ever again, the truth is, I have a deep affinity and reverence for this hustle. To my great surprise, I’ve come to appreciate and enjoy the job even more since becoming sober. I relinquished the vice of drinking 18 months ago today, my decision coinciding with the total solar eclipse. This epic earth episode served as a fitting symbol to personally confront that which was obscuring my own celestial light — an insidious instinct beyond my control that likes to play hide and seek with my own oblivion. …
