Groove
When we talk about a song having a groove, an entrancing repetition, it’s generally pleasurable. Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control Again has a groove but not in a fun way. The percussion and instrumentation lock into a repeating spiral that is cold, arid, compelling, compulsive, obsessive and centripetal. While the lyrics talk about a woman losing control again, the drums and bass line feel like they are doing their damnedest to hold it together. The tension builds, never resolving, until everything just… ends. The song is a black hole from which light, hope, life – and certainly not sound – cannot escape. Or a record capturing a needle on its periphery and channelling it to its centre via its groove.
The word “groove” meant a furrow or a ditch (it comes from the same root as “grave”). In the 19th century it came to mean a routine – a rut of behaviour. The song suggests that although “she expressed herself in many different ways”, things end up the same. “She” was a woman that Joy Division singer Ian Curtis met when he worked as an occupational resettlement officer in Macclesfield in the late 1970s. “She” had epilepsy and would come in looking for work and then have a seizure. Eventually she stopped coming in and Curtis discovered that she had died during one such seizure.
Curtis himself began having epileptic seizures – occasionally on stage. Joy Division’s heavy touring schedule, the medication prescribed to try to control his seizures, and his chaotic personal life (a young family and a torrid affair) all took their toll. The night before Joy Division were to leave on their inaugural American tour, Curtis took his own life.
Albert Camus wrote about suicide but did not die by his own hand. His 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, states early on: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” The essay is often pretentious and prolix but it is not morbid. Thoreau said that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” but if Camus was ever desperate, he was certainly not quiet. A fiction writer, a public intellectual, a member of the French Resistance, and a prodigious shagger – Camus lived a life.
The Myth of Sisyphus starts from the premise that life is fundamentally absurd and meaningless – “the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting point”. If there is no point to life, then why continue with it? To let the needle skip the groove, the essay ends with Camus considering Sisyphus – a human in Greek myth who angered the gods by cheating death and who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill and watch it fall back to where it started, to recommence his labours. Sisyphus is stuck, continually creating a furrow as he pushes his boulder towards the crown of the hill. For Camus, Sisyphus is an Absurd hero. His labours achieve nothing. His existence is without purposes. But for Camus, Sisyphus is still a hero. Camus imagines him taking joy in his labour, accepting the fundamental absurdity of his existence and yet continuing: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus’ description is reminiscent of the Zen koan: “Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water”.
I suffer from occasional yet clinical depression. What keeps me going during these episodes is not the conviction that my life is meaningful or that I am part of a larger plan. What keeps me going (and, during particularly vicious episodes, alive) are chores. Yes, I may feel as though there is no difference between living and dying but someone has to make the school lunches. And that someone is me. “But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.”
We dig our furrows. We lock into our grooves. They trap us. They sustain us. There is no escape nor should there be. But we can, perhaps, move from groove to groove.