Loss is a human constant, but for each person it occurs each time as if it were the first.
So, even if they are, like all the new and old thinking, about loss, it is most often in the mode of trauma-of the sudden blow that renders the lost object or the lost self unreachable, and fixes attention on the shape of its absence. Many of his songs are short and fast-paced, but most of all they tend to focus on the flash of a moment when something changes or a revelation falls into place they shine a spotlight on that ineffable sensation and then short out before it has a chance to fade. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Most art by its nature has an elegiac element, in the way it mimics memory, and in its awareness that to try to represent the world is inevitably to miss some of it too, to feel truth slipping out of grasp, running between the fingers and evaporating.Īs the prolific songwriter who performs (whether solo or with partners) as the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle battles back against that slippage with a host of strategies I might categorize as surprise attacks. (Oct.“All the new thinking is about loss,” Robert Hass wrote in his classic 1979 poem Meditation at Lagunitas.
Through it all the Trace looms, a monumental symbol for a supple novel. He tracks back through the branching series of choices that led to his disfiguring injury, the creation of the game, and the couple’s tragic end. When one young couple’s attempt to find the Trace Italian in real life leads them to a fatal “terminus” in the desert, Sean revisits his own dark history. The appeal lies in decoding the landscape, scanning for “little details” that reveal a larger pattern and might eventually allow players to figure out the impenetrable safe harbor. Lying in the hospital recovering from a gruesome wound, Sean conceives of a mail-based strategy game in a “fury of assembly,” building out an “idle little dream in a small dead space.” In the game’s scenario, players head across an apocalyptic landscape in search of sanctuary at the Trace Italian, a star-shaped fort on the “wasted Kansas plain.” With each successive choice, players find themselves further along a “path than can belong only to them.” Darnielle doles out just enough information about the game to give it texture without stripping it of its mystery.
In his incantatory debut, Darnielle (of the indie band the Mountain Goats) captures the allure and danger of being in thrall to a mythic vision.
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