We once got stood up at the ballet.
We’d been seeing someone for a while and, together or separately, decided we wanted to go to the ballet. It wasn’t a special occasion - just something to do. It would be new, different. The idea probably came about as a joke and, as jokes are wont to do, got somehow serious or significant over time. So, we checked the calendar, picked a performance, and got good seats - not too close, but not too far - a couple months in advance. We then almost entirely forgot that this was something we had planned on doing. A week or so out, they reminded us and, at the same time, mentioned that they had something to take care of prior - a family thing or maybe it had to do with work, we can’t recall - so they’d meet us there. We said we could go with them to the prior thing - whatever it was - but no, don’t worry about it, it’s whatever. It’s nothing. Better to enjoy your morning and we’ll meet there. They’d see us outside half an hour before curtain, but - just in case - we each took our own ticket.
On the day, we stood around outside. We were early. The venue was busy with people in nice clothes and we stood a little ways off to the side. They were soon late. They had messaged earlier in the day, in the morning, saying they were looking forward to the ballet or maybe just making jokes about ballerinas, but hadn’t responded to our messages since. No reply when we asked if they were on their way, if they were close, if they were still coming. They were probably stressed out, rushing, so we stopped messaging, kept waiting.
Eventually, tired of standing around, we went ahead to our seat. The concert hall was very pretty, modern and serious with high ceilings. It was already mostly full by the time we entered. We found our row, precariously stepped over and around and between the legs of those already sitting, apologized and smiled, apologized and smiled, and sat. We flipped through the program, took in and listened to the sound of all the other people, checked our phone, and shifted about awkwardly to see if they were coming through any of the various doors on either side of and behind us. They weren’t. They weren’t any of the many people filing in increasingly almost late.
The orchestra tuned, the crowd seemed to get louder. We checked our phone. We looked back at the program we weren’t interested in reading. The lights dimmed. We checked our phone. The seat next to us stayed empty. It was, as far as we could see, the only empty seat in the first twenty or so rows. No one asked if they could use it for their coat or purse. The hall got still. We checked our phone and, the ballet starting, glanced around a final time at all the now perfectly shut doors. We turned off our phone.
Worried first then upset and incredulous, but the ballet was immediately beautiful. The music was impossibly full, complete. The dancers moving everywhere, perfect and deliberate. We kept, though, looking to our left at the empty seat and trying to sort through what had kept that seat empty. Had something awful happened or, maybe worse, had nothing awful happened at all. Did they change their mind. Were they hurt. Did they aim to hurt. Were they now in the lobby, waiting for intermission. Did something happen to someone other than them. Was something wrong with us that we hadn’t recognized. The mood of the ballet, of the music, shifted organically from happy to sad and more nuanced versions of each. It was always seemingly working somehow with and against what we were thinking and feeling about the person who didn’t show. Was this absence a statement of a kind. Was it nothing. Were we disappointed or maybe relieved, maybe even pleased that a certain suspicion was rendered valid. Whatever was happening in the concert hall was constantly clashing and competing with what was happening in our mind.
We thought about leaving. We should call someone, their roomates, to see if they’re OK. Or, fuck them, fuck them, we should just enjoy this. This pleasure didn’t need to hang on company. We could appreciate it alone. Better. We would appreciate it better alone. Why wouldn’t they let us know they weren’t coming. Why, even, remind us that it was happening or mention it this morning. Whatever had happened wasn’t meant to happen, didn’t have to happen. Had we though even wanted to be here ourselves. Didn’t we think about bailing. We were overreacting. We were underreacting. Better not to react. Act, but how to act when just sitting there. Watch. Listen. We weren’t distracted, but too focused on too much.
The ballet went exactly as it should have. It unfolded, as far as we could tell, as it had to and would.
We wanted to leave, but wanted not to disturb everyone else by leaving. We wanted to turn on our phone, but wanted not to turn it on and find excuses or no notice at all. We watched and listened to everything happening in front of and around us, but also thought and felt everything about circumstances outside and away from us.
At the intermission, we called them. They didn’t answer. We left a message. We called friends who might have seen or heard something. They hadn’t. We looked around at doors, tried to spy their posture or features or face in the crowd. We thought about leaving, thought very much about leaving, but unexpectedly missed our chance. Folks had already returned to their seats, the lights quickly dimmed again, and the performance resumed.
Whatever concern or worry we felt initially tipped over into convoluted kind of angry self-pity or pathetic rage. There was no cause for this, no explanation that made sense. We tried to trace causes, examine things said or done in the previous week, but to no avail. The ballet stayed beautiful and we tried not to wonder whether the person who ought to have been next to us would have loved or hated it. Exhausted with imagining what happened earlier, we ran through what we might do later. The ballet continued. We should go to their place directly or ignore them entirely. We should be nonchalant. We should be irate. We should be honest that this wasn’t surprising. We should admit that we maybe wanted this to happen. We should confess that we wanted to share this with them.
We didn’t have experience being stood up at the ballet. How ought one be during or after that. The music, all this time, sounded more like it was discovered rather than written. It was as if these notes married to these movements had always been. It all struck us as inevitable. The ballet, its music and its dancers, was movement and feeling without chance or precarity. And our life then? A fucking mess of both. Noisy with discomfiting possibility. The performance and our experience of the performance were irreconcilably paired and disjointed and simultaneous.
We’re not sure if we applauded at the end or stood for the standing ovation. We should have, but maybe didn’t. It was a beautiful performance and somehow unmarred by our awful, total anxiety and unbalanced heart. Or, well, is that right? Was it maybe - as we now sometimes wonder - that the beauty of the performance was partly a product of the frantic, coiling unpleasantness of our thoughts. Or, still more troubling, whether we loved all those awful and sharp feelings summoned up by the person who stood us up as much or much more than the ballerinas stepping quickly and lightly around and across the stage. We don’t know whether what we saw or didn’t see that day was more important or felt. We’re not sure exactly how to tease apart the admixture of everything going on as we sat in that seat next to an empty seat. And still can’t help trying to tease it apart all the same when the memory, unbidden, crops up.
“Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power that grips the individual, and yet [they] cannot tear [themselves] free from it and do not want to,” Kierkegaard once wrote somewhere in a notebook that he maybe never intended anyone to read. We’re not sure if he’s right or if he even means to be, but he doesn’t seem wrong.
We don’t, thankfully, have a wealth of conflicted, anxious experiences. The above, though, is one. And the above is what immediately came to mind as we listened to Tim Hecker’s new album, No Highs. We couldn’t think of how else to describe the way it so fully captures the unusual and rare torsion between desire and fear, beauty and concern. Listening to Hecker’s No Highs feels like being stood up at the ballet. It is a dense, complex, fraught, and gorgeous experience.
Unlike most instrumental and experimental music, No Highs doesn’t feel disembodied or merely cerebral. It doesn’t feel, that is, like some ethereal soundscape - but rather very grounded, real. This is, at least in part, because Hecker’s compositions here bring electronic instruments and traditional ones together. Inhumanly constant notes loop and eerie, foreboding synth swells angle up against - depending on the song - phrases and parts from a pedal steel (played by Joe Grass), bass clarinet (played by Victor Alibert), saxophone (played by Colin Stetson), and french horn (played by Pietro Amato). The mixed instrumentation works to lose or throw you when listening, but never for too long. Whenever we seemed to drift off too far afield, we got brought back and grounded again by small, incidental material sounds - scrapes, crackles, and all the other accidents that come from people imperfectly navigating tangible, worldly stuff. Lingering synth pads seem to stretch on and on only to be punctuated by a blurt of saxophone, an interruption of horns.
The album seems to have been composed with soft focus in mind. It demands your attention and lets it go by turns. Paying close attention is sometimes rewarded - as you hear phrases developed, reprised - but sometimes spurned - as themes or whole parts are interrupted abruptly or subtly. It all somehow feels purposive and contingent. It all sounds exactly as it has to, but also could have sounded otherwise. Bringing mutually opposed matters together extends to the feeling of listening. It all sounds disastrously hopeful or hopefully disastrous. It’s very pretty and very disquieting. For better or worse, it feels like a gift and an injury at once.
Folks sometimes talk about Hecker’s songs as if they’re sculptures, but they’re far closer to rooms. Each track feels like a space deliberately designed for a host of possibilities. It feels permanent, fixed, yet open. As we listened to No Highs, we felt like we were witnessing and experiencing something artfully perfected and - simultaneously - being prompted to feel the variable worries, concerns, fears, hopes, and desires that accompany everything that isn’t art and isn’t perfect and is somehow always elsewhere or otherwise than it’s supposed to be.
"disastrously hopeful or hopefully disastrous - We should be nonchalant. We should be irate - Bringing mutually opposed matters together extends to the feeling of ...... " everything in between as well
Pas de dénoument? How Hitchcockian of you!