Tuesday, 11 November 2008

• Currently Fumbling Towards Ecstasy By Sarah McLachlan see related

  Pop culture autobiography #412

  Sarah McLachlan, "Possession"
  
  In 1994, I was in 11th grade. Alternative rock dominated MTV and radio, and I hated it. My musical tastes, then as now, matched my perception of myself. These days, I'm into alt country and classic rock, and indie rock insofar as it affirms life and doesn't take itself too seriously. Back then, I was into prog: Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, music made by people who kept pin-ups of Ayn Rand in their bedrooms but would have considered it crass to gawk at her. These bands were intellectual and socially cast out, and their music made me feel like I had a future.
  
  But there were exceptions. I listened to a bit of Pearl Jam here and there. I loved Counting Crows. And I had a desperate crush on Sarah McLachlan.
  
  It happened from the very first time I saw her video for "Possession" on MTV. (Watch here; embedding disabled by request.) I was infatuated. Sarah McLachlan was 25 in 1993. She was beautiful but not flawless, with her ever-so-slightly crooked nose and the mole on her cheek. She always looked as uncomfortable on camera as I felt in real life, which just made me love her more. So I got her record through Columbia House. I listened to it once and didn't like the rest of it, so I just kept listening to "Possession."
  
  It was around this time that I made friends with a girl for the first time in my adolescent life.
  
  I don't remember meeting Lesli. She was in my 11th grade honors English class. She started sometime after the beginning of the year. I'd later learn that that's because she'd just been mainstreamed from an alternative school. She didn't finish the year in my class.
  
  I first got to know her when our teacher, Mrs. Long, paired us together to do a class presentation on "The Sleeper of the Vale" by Arthur Rimbaud. Lesli and I met at lunchtime one day and read over the poem and wrote down a few reflections on it. I think she did most of the work. But I have vivid memories of our presentation to the class: we just talked to each other about the poem--about the combination of comfort and horror in the poem, with its lush natural imagery and its dead human subject. We talked about how it was a symbol of Rimbaud's repressed homosexuality. If we'd looked out at the class, we'd probably have noticed that they were almost as transfixed by our conversation as we were.
  
  It was the first time in my life that I ever became conscious of myself as somebody who can read literature.
  
  Lesli was enigmatic to the extreme. She remains one of the most naturally gifted writers I've ever known. I still remember the oral report she gave on the antebellum South. She had thick sandy-blonde hair that shaped her face all wrong and never seemed to lay at a natural angle to anything. Sometimes, she wore clothes she'd made out of old curtains and blankets. She had a preternatural maturity about her and approached self-destruction like a systematic duty.
  
  A bit later, Lesli became my first "date," and this is where Sarah McLachlan enters the picture. As a teenager, I would have died before I'd've asked a girl out, between my abysmal self-esteem and my desperate fear of rejection. But Lesli asked me one day if I wanted to go out for coffee with her, and I said yes. So she picked me up at my house in her VW Bug and we went to a strip-mall coffee place in Vacaville, California, and drank espresso and listened to classical guitar. Then we went back to her place and sat on her parents' front driveway and listened to music. She put Sarah McLachlan on. We listened to the whole record through while she told me about losing her virginity at 14, and about her Southern Baptist parents' reaction, and about the alternative school, and about pot. And then the hidden piano version of "Possession" came on at the end. I'd never heard it before.
  
  It's a cliche that the best moments of our lives pass quickly, and the worst are interminable. These four minutes were an exception. They lasted forever. I felt like the only two entities in the whole universe were me and Sarah McLachlan. I've never been more intensely conscious of how vulnerable another human being can sound. It was excruciating and unbearable and I never wanted it to end. But it did. Lesli and I sat and talked for awhile more. She played me her favorite song, "Elsewhere," from the same record, and some stuff by Ministry. We discussed religion. Her friend Daniel, who had a VW minibus, drove me home.
  
  And this, in turn, is one of my life's controlling themes: on what amounts to my first date, my most intimate experience was not with my date but with a recording.
  
  I only ever saw Lesli once more: I was at the same coffee place, the next year, with my girlfriend, and she stopped by. We chatted amiably. She left. I read in the newspaper at the end of the year that she'd given the valedictory speech at the alternative high school. It's the last I ever heard of her.
  

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