There are times when you need to take a walk at one a.m., and there are times when you need to do it nearly every day for a month in the dead of late autumn. In the unexplainable dance between the universe and the human psyche, sometimes we have compulsions to do strange shit. And as long as it’s a harmless sort of strange, I feel it’s always best to give in. In other words, since life has no itinerary, you might as well follow the spiritual directions you do get, even if it means you almost freeze your fingers off.
Personally, I have come much closer than I’d like to losing a digit or two, and for the precise reason I mentioned above: walking around in the middle of the night, in an Oberlin, Ohio November that seemed bent on spearheading the next ice age. Many nights, I would finish whatever work I had and attempt to fall asleep, laying on my back for an hour before declaring to my roommate—who was, always, gracefully awake: “Alright, fuck it, I’m going on a walk.” I don’t know why this was the insomnia cure that occurred to me. It seems antithetical, in retrospect, but I was compelled to walk, and so I did.
After putting on as many layers as possible—sweatpants over jeans, a sweater I’d “borrowed” from a much taller friend—I would venture outside. Sensation: regret, then stubborn endurance. Sensation: “It’s so quiet.” Even on a college campus, at this hour on a weekday, the most you could count on hearing was the click of a distant lighter, and then the wind. I am, unfortunately, not a person who can revel in absolute silence. Thus, sensation: “Earbuds. Now. Play anything.”
If this night-walk was the same as any other, I would select Ruins, a Grouper record that I’d stumbled upon the previous spring. I felt it resembled the flat, still environment I’d found myself embedded in. It is a breathtakingly minimal album, with three-quarters of its tracks relying only on piano and hushed vocals. As such, it was perfect for this circumstance: stimulating to the barest degree, just enough to accompany me on my journey.
As “Made of Metal” faded in, I would determine an initial direction, most often through Tappan Square, which is an unfailingly idyllic place, even in the dark. The branches arching over the main path appear as a gateway to something semi-fantastical, an appropriate form for the start of a walk. The sound of a single repeating drum over field noise, “Made of Metal” is just as fitting, a fanfare deconstructed to herald the gentlest of arrivals.
As I passed the center of the square, “Clearing” would click into focus. One of the more complete and organized tracks on Ruins, it captures a very specific feeling that I have never quite been able to describe. Sensation: the clarity after a long sadness. Sensation: raw, inexact acceptance. There is something penetrating about how simple “Clearing” is, and each listen is a reminder that the emotional fabric of the song is a part of me, to such an extent that I cannot access it in a pure form.
Liz Harris—the human artist behind Grouper—does not write sweeping, operatic melodies. “Clearing” is proof of this: Harris sings stepwise, never straying far from the tonic, and her piano accompaniment is a mere reflection. The song’s lyrics are just as direct, though they are sometimes inaudible. Attempting to parse the text of any Grouper song is, I imagine, similar to reading fragments of Sappho. Inaccessible lines amplify what you can hear in the foreground, and when you arrive at a refrain, it is all the more devastating: “Maybe you were right when you said I’ve never been in love.” Padding across the asphalt of Route 58, I would need to steady myself. Sensation: “Have I ever been in love?”
Watching as I passed facades and unlit shop windows, I’d have to resist looking for an answer I knew I couldn’t find. Instead, I would bury my hands deeper in my pockets and wrap Ruins tighter around my chest.
As I took a turn by the auto shop, “Call Across Rooms” would begin. Though my attention was always intense during these walks, “Call Across Rooms” never held much power for me. I didn’t appreciate the song until I read its lyrics, which would be right at home in a poetry anthology:
Harris’ calm delivery of the line “Scatter the glass in the hallway” creates a crushing contrast, a feeling that might have destroyed me had I accessed it in my era of walking. As it was, I accepted “Call Across Rooms” as a obsidian-like fragment of harmony and shadow.
I’d then reach the most poorly-lit portion of my route, a cross-street of tight-knit houses and seemingly nocturnal neighborhood cats. “Labyrinth,” the next track on Ruins, was an appropriate partner for this recurring instance, and not only because I could never be quite sure where I was going. An instrumental, “Labyrinth” consists of a near-repeated piano phrase, played in extreme rubato, as if Harris’ heartbeat was her guiding light. And she may have needed one: the song was, apparently, recorded during a power outage (1). A microwave beeps to life at the close of the track, and you can imagine that Harris might have continued playing forever if not for this interruption.
Returning to incandescence, I’d settle alongside “Lighthouse,” a song that depends on slow-moving groups of three. As I passed the conservatory, with its incongruous white-and-silver buildings, Harris would sing, “We move in circles of light.” Grouper’s lyrics—like all good lyrics—conjure up complex images, but they are unique in that they resemble abstract visual art more than they resemble real life. This is, perhaps, a product of the fact that I always listen to Ruins in the darkness, where one must accept a certain level of abstraction. No matter what, “Lighthouse” makes those circles of light hover above and within my head. Sensation: disparate beacons.
Then “Holofernes,” another instrumental, would lead me past Peters’ observatory tower and Finney Chapel’s heavy concrete steps. I’m still unsure what connection Harris was drafting between her lydian-mode piano shapes and the titular biblical figure, but “Holofernes” is an apt bridge to “Holding,” which has always felt to me like a reprise of “Clearing,” if only in terms of its emotional timbre. The final stretch of my walk would be punctuated by lines like, “I hear you calling and I want to come / Run straight into the valleys of your arms and disappear there,” and longing—for what, I did not know—would swell within me, framed by waves of gentle exhaustion.
If my timing was right—it usually was, by simple happenstance—I would return to the doorway of my dorm building as Harris sang, “There’s nothing left to hold to.” Maybe that’s what I needed to hear, again and again and again during that period. Where Harris was lamenting her loss, I was reveling in mine. Sensation: loss of anxiety, loss of excess energy.
Climbing the stairs and opening my door, I’d greet my roommate, and if there was nothing left to let hold onto—there usually wasn’t—I would fall onto my cheap twin-XL mattress with Ruins’ final track, the eleven-minute “Made of Air,” whispering me away. Sensation: Grouper sketching the rune for sleep along the base of my neck. Sensation: no need to explain, no need for anything.
[1. Gordon, Jeremy (August 14, 2014). "Grouper Announces New Album Ruins". Pitchfork]