The sound of the unlocking and the lift away
First post on Bon Iver, Haruki Murakami and the portals into grace
So I have no idea where this project might take me - and I have other things I could be getting on with. However, the invitation to engage with Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project, Haruki Murakami’s novels and the 10 potential portals that, together, offer as invitations into a deeply embodied experience of grace is one that for the moment feels like a developmental opportunity. One that I’d love to see move beyond myself into a co-creative space.
As I say, I have no idea how to go beyond composing a few Substack rambles, but, should grace decide to get involved, perhaps the creative beauty of both Justin and Haruki might draw us all deeper in. And who knows what might happen then,
Ten portals into embodied grace. The very concept creates a visceral reaction in me, I’ve personally unpacked them as part of a several-year-journey-of-discovery; sitting with the music and novels - both created in relatively obscure genius - asking myself WTF does all this mean?
And somehow in the last six months with the (apparently) final Bon Iver album SABLE/fABLE and the most recent Murakami novel The City and It’s Uncertain Walls I’ve begun to piece some stuff together. And to be deeply enchanted by the piecing.
Portal one - The Portal of Solitude and Loss
It’s hard to find it when you knew it / When your money’s gone / And you’re drunk as hell…
Bon Iver | re: Stacks
(click the link to hear the song)
Music, as the title suggests, plays an important role in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
That song can make me feel so terribly lonely. I can’t really explain it… the chords… the smell of jet fuel… I hadn’t even been thinking of her, and suddenly there she was.
Toru | Norwegian Wood (Murakami)
Both of these beautifully delicate artistic gifts offer themselves as possible entry points into experiencing grief through accessing memory. The sort of memory that allows our past to suddenly ambush our present. That kinda moment - I’m sure that everyone has been there.
I know I have.
In Norwegian Wood, it’s a song that awakens memory; in Re: Stacks, it’s the ache of recounting what’s been lost — not just a person, but a part of the self.
For any of us who use a Developmentalist framework to make meaning this to my mind, to a great degree articulates the move from Socialised to Self-Authoring, digging as it does into the place where the narrative others handed us (our past, our roles, our expectations) starts to fall away, but no new form has yet arrived to give us respite from a sense of deconstructive pain.
Every time I listen to the song or re-read the novel I find myself confronting a question: How do I live when the frame of meaning has collapsed, and memory is all that remains?
As I write this I find my emotions considering the matter of what memory might I have that still find me uninvited? Hasn’t fully opened itself up to my searching. And if it did, what might it want from me?
Let me share another window that opened up. It’s one that raises for me the possibility that Justin might be catching a vision - maybe seeing the possibility of experiencing a different developmental state.
This is not the sound of a new man or a crispy realisation / It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away…
Bon Iver | re:Stacks
Back in Norwegian Wood Toru is in a complicated relationship with Naoko, the -girlfriend of his dead-by-suicide best friend Kizuki.
It’s like I’m split in two…says Naoko; One of me is inside watching… and the other one’s outside pretending.
In the same way as Re: Stacks is not about offering crispy realisation, but about discovering partial clarity through pain I’m sensing that Naoko is beautifully expressing the vulnerable in-between-ness of connection and isolation. Physically together; emotionally exiled.
And then a redemptive portal momentarily opens up.
What happens when people open their hearts? ponders Toru, glimpsing but unable to fully articulate the nuances of what he sees. They get better.
It lacks nuance for sure, AND it gives hope to the soul.
In the space where language falters, where what’s felt can’t quite be said this couple, still, I’d suggest, in early experience of Self-Authoring meaning making, catch glimpses of what it might mean to be Construct-Aware. And in the glimpses they recognise that identity is fragile, fluid, and found amid the trauma of living in the both/.and.
There’s a lot more to explore in both re:Stacks and in Norwegian Wood - but this project is an emerging thing for me and I’ve no idea really where it wants to go yet. So I may or may not go back to it. Meanwhile all ideas and suggestions are welcome.
in friendships
Ian