(die on a hilltop.. eyeing the crows. waiting for your lids to close… but you want to watch as they peck your flesh.. Ironic that they go for the eyes first…)
So begins the journey through the liner notes of Pearl Jam’s third album, Vitalogy. Released in 1994 (on my birthday, as I discovered today while reading the Wikipedia page), it was somewhat of a departure from the angry, thrashy, quintessentially grungey Pearl Jam albums that had gone before it. After the dizzying success of their second album Vs., front man Eddie Vedder set about creating a concept album exploring themes of life, death and understanding of the self.
Kids these days don’t understand the experience of buying an album and listening to every track, in order, over and over, until it becomes a part of you. Not just the singles, but the album tracks, the deep cuts and obscure gems. If you grew up a Pearl Jam fan in the 90s, you will know that some of their best work was never played on the radio. The Vitalogy song book took this one step further, with excerpts from the book Vitalogy – An Encyclopedia of Health and Home, by EH Ruddock, MD., as well as various scribblings by Vedder himself. The booklet was more than just lyrics, giving deeper insights into each song as well as the album as a whole.
As someone who has spent way too much time pondering the paradox of self-awareness, Vitalogy struck me at my core. My constant awareness of my own mortality, combined with Vitalogy‘s eclectic exploration of emotion, storytelling, mantra, Vedder’s soaring baritone and lots of visceral bass lines and wailing guitar, cemented the album as my all-time favourite.
I have spent a large part of the past decade trying to find a way to live with intense anxiety and get my figurative feet under me so that I can actually enjoy my existence and feel like I have some kind of influence over where my life goes. I still feel, always, like death is stalking me and any moment could be my last. Apparently this is not normal. Lots of other people live as though reaching the age of 70 is a given, 80 and even 90 a definite possibility. For the most part, people in my family live into their 80s, even with serious health conditions. I can’t bring myself to look that far ahead.
But… if you could guarantee me another 30 years, with the trade-off being the certainty that there was nothing beyond that, I wouldn’t take it. That minuscule chance that there might be something else, something more, a trapdoor in the sun that leads to a kind of immortality… I just can’t let go of it.
As I start to organise the many parts of my trauma and realise that they all boil down to one source, a new calm is entering my life. It feels foreign, almost otherworldly, and it’s hard to trust it. Fear has been my normal state for as long as I can remember, and moments without it were at first unsettling. I had come to believe that my fear was the only thing standing in the way of death. I’m finally starting to sit with the calm and let it grow roots. It feels like an ending, as well as a beginning.
Recent discoveries suggest that time is not linear. I have always felt that time is less like a platform game and more like a puff of dust, at the whims of chaos and entropy. A moment and an eternity are basically the same thing. Neither exists until we think about them.
Vitalogy‘s penultimate track is called Immortality, and it’s meaning has been hotly debated by fans for decades, with possible links to Kurt Cobain, the genocide of Native Americans, even the Holocaust. To me it speaks of the infinite number of ways that we humans live and die every day, as tiny parts of ourselves, as individuals, as communities, as a species. On the same page of the song book as the lyrics to Immortality is a short poem, the author uncredited, presumably written by Vedder.
I waited all day.
you waited all day..
but you left before sunset..
and I just wanted to tell you
the moment was beautiful.
Just wanted to dance to bad music
drive bad cars..
watch bad TV..
should have stayed for the sunset…
if not for me.
For no matter what life is, what time is, what death is, without each other in those moments where we feel those unexplainable feelings, we have nothing.
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