On such a winter’s day
My youngest son has decided that, for now, he will be Bjork. He has imbued her with superpowers and makes strange loud noises in his bedroom. He portrays her as a cross between Elsa from Frozen and…well, Bjork. He kind of nailed it.
He imagines Bjork singing to enemies at night, scary phantoms dissipating in the strength of Bjork’s voice. His Bjork character also has a magic wand to channel what he has decided are her “purple fire powers.”
I went through a Bjork phase recently myself, after the host of one of my favorite podcasts wrote a beautiful essay on the relationship between bodybuilding, obsession, and pain, using “Pagan Poetry” to tie the threads together. Vespertine has long been my favorite Bjork album because of the way it conjures warmth in the center of an ice castle — it’s her Elsa album. She takes something sleek and cold and remote and makes it pulsate with the rhythm and heat of a hidden heart, one you can literally hear in the album’s opening moments.
My son’s introduction was more incidental. I put “Pluto” on an old mix for my wife that we were playing in the car. “Daddy — who is that lady screaming? Can you play the lady screaming again? Can I be the lady screaming tonight?” And so it began.
Parents model the world for their kids, sometimes in intentional cultivation and sometimes through the children’s osmosis of their surroundings. I’m more sold on the importance of that osmosis, the structure of the child’s culture, than I am on a parent’s conscious attempt to shape it. (Case in point: my son doesn’t like any other Bjork songs.) In any battle between what is said and what goes unsaid, children have a knack for internalizing the unspoken. But maybe this is a moot distinction: parents shape a child’s world with every choice momentous and minor. I play a song accidentally and watch it lodge into my sons’ minds for years.
But it’s the outside world writ large that will provide the frame. How will my son remember this time, if he remembers it at all? He is just on the cusp of making his permanent memories. He may remember playing as Bjork, especially if he revisits her music someday. Media can provide a bridge back to these early memories, as future understanding of a song or a movie fills in the gaps of past experience. Listening to Bjork at six will spark a vague sense of Bjork having been there at three, even if there aren’t any specific recollections.
For me that phenomenon is tied most strongly to the omnipresent oldies radio of the 1980s, now cordoned off in playlists and the occasional unwieldy “albums of all time” list with a Baby Boom slant. My own childhood has a retroactive sepia coloring from the folk-hippie axis of the West Coast, a place my mother never lived as far as I know, but whose music she made an important feature of the domestic soundtrack. Some of it was perfectly pitched to my impulses to spout gibberish around the house — gliddy gloop gloopy, nibby nobby noopy, la la la low low. This music seems, for the most part, to have worked for only one generational transmission; it is lost to my children, who never took to any of it beyond one song, “California Dreamin’.”
The Mamas and the Papas were something like my own personal Bjork, a group absorbed from the periphery of music drifting through the house that managed to take hold and grow into its own place in my imagination. I always associated Cass Elliot with my mother, whom she slightly resembled, or anyway resembled more than any other celebrity I was aware of at the time. We had a vinyl copy of one of the Mamas and the Papas greatest hits albums. Looking at the photos on the sleeve had the uncanny effect of looking at a family portrait of relatives you rarely visit. So many album covers and photos of the band grouped them casually in a nondescript patch of nature, on an unremarkable hillside or against foliage that brought out the auburn in Elliot’s hair, Mom’s color, too.
Mama Cass didn’t sound like other singers, either, an authoritative alto. Harmonies were often crammed into the left or right stereo channel to give the effect of the men and women singing at each other from across a room. You could listen in headphones in one ear and isolate her, the way she was always leading the song from the sideline. “California Dreamin’” is one of those songs that transports me, not to the winter the narrator describes or to the perpetual summer of his dream — Mom’s dream, maybe — of California, but to the autumn of their photo shoots, apple-picking excursions or walks in the woods, the air a little damp, the sky gloomy. We’ve had that weather recently. It suits the tense interregnum of our political moment, the uneasy quiet of the eye of a hurricane or a tenuous ceasefire. Here we are, as if in a dream, waiting for something else to happen, sensing something even more awful still on the way.
All the more need for Vespertine. Its first line is a disarming call for the lifeline of human connection:
“Through the warmthest cord of care / Your love was sent to me / I’m not sure what to do with it / Or where to put it.”
And the music follows suit: Bjork’s voice, always on a knife’s edge between seductive and alienating — always pushing out and pulling back in until it becomes a kind of dance — is a snaking tendril piercing through a dull drone. The song blossoms: we’re inside the castle, the hidden place, and we stay there for the next hour, kindling a little purple flame. It’s a cocoon, a space for solitude in the presence of another, the examination of a delicate thread between a me and a you. It is ostensibly an album about a lover, painstakingly sketching out sacred territory in which you explore and ultimately decide whether more than one person can inhabit this single interiority. It is a negotiation, an education. It’s fun. It’s scary.
But right now I hear everything as a parent, which means I also hear everything as a child. Parenthood is, among many other things, a reckoning with the inconvenient totality of your past. The early stages of parenthood were a period of disorienting intimacy. With your first child, you build a new life with only a vague image in your mind. If you’re lucky you might have a model, but more likely you learn how to build as you go.
I wonder if Elsa had a model in her mind when she built her castle. Had she spent her whole life dreaming it? Was she communing with the tundra, reacting to it in real time like a jazz musician, a few ideas in mind but letting the moment take over? How did she choose this turret or that one, and how did she manage those interior spaces at the same time?
I can’t imagine how bored Elsa must have been after she finished singing “Let It Go,” though, once the castle was complete. She never figured out how to imbue the place with warmth; it was only her sister’s cord of care that changed everything.
We’ve become a bit unstuck from time, just after it had finally started to regiment itself again. The youngest is three now, the oldest is in school, though not really. We’re just kind of sitting here; the castle’s built. We’re together, at least. What choices are we making now? We know that even if it feels that we’re not making the choices, they’re being made nonetheless, shaping our little Bjork’s world. To him, we’re responsible for everything; every experience of the world is filtered through forces that he assumes we control to some degree. Every day he asks whether it is winter. We tell him winter comes when it comes. And then the next day he asks us if it has come yet, as though we have a say in it. I remember once, before things got bad, we left him with a babysitter and he screamed as we left the house: “You need to protect me from feeling sad!” And of course sadness is one of many things that parents can’t protect their children from, even if sometimes they can nurture happiness.
The cold is creeping in, sooner than I thought it would. I love this part of the year, when the chill never extinguishes internal warmth. There is a frisson of pleasure in the interplay, the incipient conflict that never quite arrives. You feel like you do have control, of the heat in your own body, it hasn’t been drained from you yet. You can kindle that fire in yourself; if you’re lucky you can gather others around the embers and pool your little pockets of warmth. This time reminds me not so much of the time after we had our first son, but after we had the second one. It was a sensitive and sad time — we were already a “we,” so we needed to figure out how to be in this relationship all together without starting from scratch. That is part of what makes this time so unsettling — there is a sense of starting over, but not from scratch. We are still our “we,” and, though we can pretend otherwise, our only real power is care — even if we don’t always know what to do with it, or where it belongs.
