26SEP2020

My grandfather died this year. He had dementia. While dementia wasn't the official cause of his death - think it was kidney failure or something - I have since been really infatuated with it, trying to understand it, to see what it would be like. A physical ailment is easy to imagine - if your hand is broken it's broken and it makes sense how that affects your day to day life. A mental illness is different. It's almost like something doesn't compile about the world, or at least that's my interpretation of it. The only mental illness I have is idiot syndrome, chronic since birth.

 

I have wanted to understand his struggles since I heard of it. I couldn't be there to see him perish in such a state but my dad could, and from what I gathered he had almost lost touch with reality, referring to the past as his present, calling for his wife who had been dead for close to five years at the time. It had to be fuelled by morbid curiosity - maybe one day I would be reduced to such a state, and I wanted to understand how it would be so I could somehow prepare myself for it.

 

This thought set itself in the back of my mind, rarely showing its face as I began to live my life normally.

This happened until I tuned into the latest episode of "Let's Argue" by Anthony Fantano, the Internet's Busiest Music NerdTM, where they discuss Everywhere At The End of Time and whether it is good at communicating its ideas when you go into it blind. Fantano mentions that the album is about dementia and the state of one's mind as they progress through the different stages of it.

I then knew I had to give it a listen.

 

I look it up on YouTube and see it is a 6 hour 30 minute project. A little difficult to listen to in one sitting.

Looking up on Bandcamp I find The Caretaker's latest release, Everywhere An Empty Bliss, a much more digestible ~50 minute listen. I give it a listen, albeit while playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 so not with the most attention paid to the music itself.

 

A while later I'm sitting on my desk, with some trepidation at the thought of starting with the large project.

The first 3 stages went by fairly mundanely, and I didn't think much of it at the time, mostly that it was unnerving but I couldn't tell why. I put it down due to time constraints and thought I should get to the later stages in time.

It took me a week to get through it just because a part of me simply didn't want to experience what the album had to offer, and partially because other music kept grabbing me instead.

 

I was presented with the opportunity to drive solo to New Plymouth to deliver a car and come back home with another, and this was the perfect opportunity to give the album another listen, from front to back. While that plot was mutated by it turning into a family outing instead of a solo mission, I still wanted to listen to it.

 

As we started off from home, Stage 1 was interesting. Mostly full instrumentation with some crackling and rare cutoffs displaying the loss of some memory.

Stage 2 was when things started to get weird.

Stage 3 I regret to inform the people I slept through due to road drowsiness. I woke up about a minute before Stage 4 started.

Stage 4 is where the album grew its patented discomfort onto me. I was struggling to remember what the past stages had sounded like, and the erratic instrumentation was doing me no favours to try to remember what it was like. While I ultimately remembered what the first song was in Stage 1, that feeling of not being able to remember what some music I was listening to 90 minutes ago was incredibly painful. It made me empathise with actual dementia patients, and thus my grandfather, on how it would feel not to be able to remember your own identity for days, weeks, months on end.

This feeling resonated into Stage 5 as the discomfort kept growing and growing until I just surrendered to it. I didn't see anything but suffering as I was led to more and more pain in this experience. I had given up the ability to remember more than just the first bit of the first song. My brain kept trying to fill this void with other music, from memory and from what my family was playing on the stereo, but part of me kept imagining my grandfather in a state where he couldn't do the same to deal with his own suffering.

By the time Stage 6 rolled in I had nothing left in me. I just let the emptiness of the last hour of the record wash over me. I couldn't tell when a song in the album ended and when one began.

The last 5 minutes to me were the patient finally letting go and no longer attempting to live, and their passing. The patient dies, after a long struggle with trying to keep up with the degradation of the organ that lets them parse the world.

I think about crying when I put it like that but I'd be forcing it. The truth is I don't want to feel that ever. Even crying about it would be experiencing how I was feeling listening to the album. I just don't want any of it. I don't want to think about how my grandfather felt anymore. I don't want to envision my parents or myself in such a position. I never want to see any bit of this experience in my personal life. It's a terrifying proposition to me, that one day music, something very dear to my heart and has literally kept me alive at times, will no longer be within my grasp, unable to be parsed by my broken brain.

 

I'm eternally grateful for The Caretaker for releasing this album but this is the only project I will henceforth swear never to listen to ever again.

I'm deleting it from my phone.

Maybe even deleting from my computer.

I'm afraid of revisiting Everywhere, An Empty Bliss.

Maybe I won't.

Maybe I will.

What a terrifying album.

I'm going back to the comfort of Daughters and Cannibal Corpse.