Love As Attention: Listening to Adrianne Lenker at the End of the World
by Claire Hinkley
“I feel like a fool,” sings Adrianne Lenker on the third track of her most recent album, Bright Future. “Walking downhill with the dogs.”
Something in the rawness of this moment has caught me off guard, and I have come unlatched. Though I’ve loved and listened to Lenker and her band Big Thief for nearly a decade, this walk through the park on my lunch break is the first time I am listening through the newest album. As it always does, her music pulls me in.
Clouds hang dark on the western horizon, but for now, the sky overhead is clear. A breeze passes across my face. I turn up the volume again, one more click.
“Heart out of sight,” sings Lenker. “Body and mind fistfight.”
I just saw an ex. That’s why I’m crying, I guess. We haven’t seen each other or even spoken in two years. He was in Salem for work; we said we would get coffee.
“We could be friends. You could love me through and through,” sings Lenker into my ear as I pass through a grove of oak trees, their grey bark craggy and creased with moss. “If I were him, would you be my family too?”
Four years ago, he and I drove from our hometown in Minnesota to Oregon together. (Lenker, too, is from Minnesota). We moved into a purple ADU behind a small house in northeast Portland. Despite certain warning signs, like how he had previously broken up with me and how it was becoming increasingly difficult to communicate, I felt that a cross-country move spoke to the quality and longevity of our relationship. This meant something. We went to IKEA together and bought a TARVA pine bedframe. I had never lived with a partner before.
“We could grow old,” sings Lenker. “You could come in from the cold.”
Two months after we moved to Portland, things began to fall apart. He was distracted, distant. An argument culminated in his professing that he didn’t know if he wanted to be with me anymore. I remember feeling a sickening rush of déjà vu. We fought again, just before I left town for a month, and nothing was resolved. By the time I came back to Portland, he had changed his mind again (yes, he did want to be together!), but I was done. We didn’t speak for two years. He moved back in with an old roommate. I went to graduate school.
“Oh, what more can I possibly say?” asks Lenker, and my heart clenches. “So if you wanna go I say baby okay, okay.”
And then today, abruptly, he was here, in this new city where I live with my new partner, a city in which he does not belong. He sat waiting for me on a bench in the state capitol hallway, wearing a suit and looking exactly like everyone else filling the hallway, the lobbyists and the attorneys and the senators and their staff. I walked towards him, beginning to separate. We hugged. I had forgotten that he is very tall, and how my head fits low against his ribcage, just below his heart.
We walked to a coffee shop and ordered – he paid, said his company would cover it. We sat at a table with uneven legs. A silver stud glinted in each of his earlobes. Lines of grey streaked his beard, where before there were none. My body hummed. We talked, and it was both strange and comfortable, right and wrong. Various possible lives flashed strangely into focus before me. What had been, could have been, and what is. A gulf opened, widened in the air between us. I stared across it.
Then my break ended, and I had to go back to the office. We hugged again, said we would keep in touch. Back at my desk under the fluorescent lights, I shivered uncontrollably.
“You and I both know there is nothing more to say,” sings Lenker in the track, “Sadness as a Gift.” “You could write me someday and I think you will / we could see the sadness as a gift and still feel too heavy to hold.”
I hadn’t known what else to do and so I left the office again at my lunch break and started walking. It hadn’t been a conscious choice to put on Lenker’s music; maybe my body felt drawn to it, some grounding substance. Her music has always done this to me. Big Thief’s first album, Masterpiece, came out in 2016, the year I moved to rural northern Japan to teach English. I was twenty-three and very alone, and I listened to that album again and again on the tinny speakers in my kitchen. The raw joy and devastation and communion of it brought me to my knees on the buckled linoleum, filled me with some sustenance I could not name.
Here, again, Lenker is capturing something that I do not yet have words for, maybe do not even understand. I’d walked away from the coffee shop that morning trembling like there was a bird in my chest, like something flowing over. Now, walking through the park, I am trembling, still. I am over my ex; also, I’m not sure what it means to be over someone. I’m not sure we ever stop loving people we have once loved.
I understand that this—my own discrete little story of dating someone, and then no longer dating them—is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Every day we are inundated with new fresh horrors until it feels like the end of the world. Democracy is falling, fascism spreading, wildfires raging, people are being murdered and deported and displaced. Tragedy collapses on top of tragedy. It is too much to comprehend, too much to hold. That’s part of the strategy, of course, to provoke outrage again and again until we exhaust ourselves and can no longer engage. The question I keep asking myself, that I hear my friends asking again and again in response to all of this, is what are we supposed to do?
I walk a little faster, turn sharply and descend towards a milky creek that is flowing quickly towards the river. The smell of moisture and loam and cedar kicks up from beneath my feet. Lenker begins singing something swaying and eerie and almost magnetic, and I listen closely, trying to parse her lyrics, catch each one.
It’s the track “Evol.” Her lyrics bend and upend words, turning them backwards and inside out. “Love spells evol backwards people / words back words backwards are lethal,” Lenker sings. Listening as I walk along the bank of the creek, I feel she is finding a way to express something ineffable. We—as writers, songwriters, people generally—try to convey our experiences, want to be understood. But so often, language falls flat. Our experience expands beyond the dimension of the words we can access, and is unique, individual, sometimes inexpressibly so. Music can layer another dimension to the attempt, tune and chord progression and rhythm adding meaning beyond lyrics, but we are still constricted, fundamentally. How, then, can we communicate?
In this track, it feels like Lenker is shattering one of the boundaries around meaning. She breaks the language, because the language is insufficient, and in the breaking manages to capture what otherwise escapes us. It reminds me of what my friend, a writer who explores fire and ecology and violence, once said to me, that she wants to write shatter. How else can we convey an experience that broke something within us? How else can we talk about an experience that does not line up neatly, waiting to be described using rule-bound grammar and vocabulary and sentences, which are necessarily structured by design? It feels like Lenker is playing with this here, shattering words and using the sounds and the letters to sing about heartbreak. “Kiss spells ssik, the vacuum feeding / words hold words hold words from meaning,” she sings. How do we speak when words themselves are inadequate?
I turn up a slight hill that is covered in rhododendron bushes, which will erupt into bloom in the spring. I feel emptied out, calmer. The trees catch the light, ridges in their bark holding moss and shadow together.
A few weeks later, I meet a group of my closest friends in Portland. We hike in Forest Park, go out dancing at night, then devour platters of dumplings in the early hours of the morning. The next day we sleep late, sit for hours around the fireplace in the living room, cold rain falling outside the window. I notice my body, how calm it feels, and how safe.
At one point, my friend M picks up a guitar and plays a few chords from the beginning of the song “Free Treasure.” She makes eye contact with me, thinking I must know it, because we have sung many of Lenker’s songs together over the years. By now, I have listened to the album enough times that I do not have to look at the lyrics. We sing together on the couch, our other friends nestled beside us.
It feels like we are singing about the current moment, singing the love of our friendship into existence. We have all known one another for a dozen years, more, now. We have been with each other through all of it, wild adventure and heartbreak and death and now, a new chapter; M. and I have both recently become engaged.
“Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” we sing, and M. harmonizes with me, her voice clear and strong over the crackling fire, the rain drumming against the window.
Later in the evening, I mention to my friends how I’d run into my ex recently, and how it brought an upswell of sadness I hadn’t expected. I don’t want to shift the mood of the weekend, but the sadness has lingered with me for longer than I would have guessed. I assume they will find it incongruent, dissonant, that I was so affected, but they don’t.
“That makes sense,” one of my friends says. Another nods. “Of course you felt sad.”
Something eases inside me.
We talk about love on and off throughout the weekend. At one point, one friend asks M. and I what we hope for our futures with our partners. M pauses, thoughtful.
“One definition of love I like,” she says slowly, “is John Muir Law’s. That love is sustained, compassionate attention.”
I think of the song we were playing together earlier, which is still running through my head. In the chorus, Lenker sings, “You show me understanding / patience and pleasure / time and attention / love without measure.”
I like this idea that love is an intentional kind of attention; that anything we can turn our kind attention towards becomes a beloved. It is a free treasure, both precious and abundant. Something that all else comes back to, radical in every sense.
My friends depart; we scatter across the country; regular life resumes. Push back outward, re-engage with what else is happening. It feels impossible not to, right now. Before everyone leaves, we talk about what we can do. Both part and answer to that question, maybe, is the question, to what do we pay attention?
Several years ago, before the pandemic, I read Jenny Odell’s manifesto on the significance of our attention in her book How to Do Nothing. She argues, persuasively, that our attention is the most valuable thing we possess. It is so highly sought after because it can be commodified by corporations looking to turn a profit, but ultimately, we are in control of it, for we can choose what we will pay attention to. Choose to turn away from the advertisement, stop the doomscroll, consume something independent—or better yet, create something yourself—and we can begin to topple the institutions that are reliant on our consumption.
Listening to Bright Future, I hear an argument for where we might turn our attention. Lenker sings about friendship, nature, and love. What else do we have but one another, right now? Attention as love, as free treasure. Attention as slowing down to take in the moths and dragonflies, the wind across your back. Attention as resilience, as resistance. We can choose where we turn our attention, and choosing to turn it towards cultivating relationships leads to connection and mutual aid and community. Choosing to turn it towards noticing the environment around us, towards beauty, leads to gratitude and to care and back to ourselves. And choosing to turn it towards creation, rather than consumption, could lead us towards resistance, towards dreaming a better future.
Yes, there is corruption and climate disaster and genocide on the news, and meanwhile, the frogs are singing outside the window in the early morning before the dawn. Mass firings, stock market chaos, institutions falling, hard fought progress being undone, and meanwhile, the crocuses have dropped their white bellflowers; and meanwhile, the moss is green and heavy with water again. It doesn’t mean that things are okay. But I think it might mean that, too.
Two months later, on a weekend in mid-April, my partner and I and three of our friends drive to the central Oregon coast. We sleep in a ramshackle cottage, perched on the steep edge of a hill overlooking the sea. In the afternoon, we drive up a forest service road to a trailhead, then hike through blooming salmonberry and uncurling sword fern and Douglas fir to a small, sheltered glen. On the moss, half-circled by basalt walls, bleeding hearts and wild iris and daisies under the trees, my partner and I get married.
The friends with us are old and dear. One of them was in my band in college and used to live with my partner and got ordained for this occasion. Another is my partner’s oldest friend; their friendship spans over two decades. He and his wife, the third friend, were with us five months ago in a different forest, the day my partner asked me to marry him. Their presence alone brings me to tears.
My partner and I read what we’ve written to each other. “Knowing you,” he says to me, kneeling on moss beside me, the ocean a distant blur between the hills and the sunlight dappled on his face and hands, “has been the foundation for understanding what love can and should be in my life.”
I read him the John Muir Laws quote about love being sustained, compassionate attention. “That is how I feel you treating me, and how I see you living your whole life,” I tell him, trying to hold my voice steady. “I want to give that to you, for the rest of mine.”
In the days afterwards, I don’t really have words. I am made mute by the enormity of the love that surrounds us, spills out of me. It takes many forms, and spans time, crosses borders. I feel it run through me, tidal.
“To the ocean of your love, I am a river,” Lenker sings.
I’m now listening to the album again, walking through downtown Salem back to my car after work. It’s a warm afternoon, but the breeze is cool and brisk. I am trying to shake off the workday and the news and return to my body. The songs oscillate between hope and despair, bliss and anguish and reverence. Taken as a whole, the album brings me back, seems to capture some truth about this existence.
“The honey hills and the frosted sun / Bluer than the ocean, bluer than the ocean,” sings Lenker on one of the last tracks of the album. “Why do the leaves turn yellow and fall? And who absorbs it all? Who absorbs it all?”
I am only grateful.
In an interview, I heard Lenker talk about the title of this album. Bright Future, she said, can have two meanings. Bright can mean positive, like, things are looking up, but then, explosions are also bright. Destruction, calamity, can be blinding. But even that is not the end, for new growth, a better future, can be imagined after destruction. I am reminded of purple fireweed growing in the Oregon forest after a wildfire. I am reminded of the early days of the pandemic, when the world seemed to slow down—the skies and roads quieted and the smog cleared and people (some people) had more time and space and we began to imagine something better. In south Minneapolis, where I was still living, we protested, and the streets filled with people and art and love. For a time, it felt like things could really change. For a time, they did.
Lenker is reminding us of this opportunity. The future is bright. It begins with where we decide to turn our attention, for our attention, or love, is our power. It is free, and it is a treasure, and it is what allows us to create and build and imagine. Even sadness and grief—itself proof of love not gone but rather transformed—is something for which we can be grateful. And when language fails, we have one another, and this planet, in this moment.
Quarter Notes Magazine 