Phil Elverum - Distortion lyrics

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Phil Elverum - Distortion lyrics

Well I don't believe in ghosts or anything I know that you are gone and that I'm carrying some version of you around Some untrustworthy old description in my memories And that must be your ghost taking form, created every moment by me dreaming you so And is it my job now to hold whatever's left of you for all time? And to reenact you for our daughter's life I do remember when I was a kid and realized that life ends, and it's just over That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do anything, and then what? I guess just forgotten And I said to my mom that I hope to do something important with my life, not be famous, but just remembered a little more To echo beyond my actual end And my mom laughed at a kid trying to wriggle his way out of mortality, of the inescapable final feral scream But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means Unsatisfied, ambitious, and squirming The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great grandfather's embalmed in a casket in Everett, in a room by the freeway where they talked me into reading a thing from the bible about walking through a valley in the shadow of d**h, but I didn't understand the words, I thought of actually walking through a valley in a shadow with a backpack and a tent. But that dead body next to me spoke clear and metaphor-free In December 2001, after having the spent summer and fall traveling mostly alone around the country that was spiraling into war and mania, little flags were everywhere, remember? And I was living on the periphery as a 23-year-old (?) wrapped up in doing what I wanted, and it was music, and being on newsprint, and sleeping in yards without asking permission, and eating all the fruit from the tree like Tarzan, or Walt Whitman, voracious, devouring, laughing, singing my song But that December I was shaken by a pregnancy scare from someone I had been with for only one-night, many states away that I hadn't planned to keep knowing A young and embarra**ing overconfident animal night, and the terror of the idea of fatherhood at 23 destroyed my foundation, left me freaked out and wandering around Mourning the independence and solitude that defined me then And I saw my ancestors as sad and misunderstood, in the same way that my descendants will squint back through a fog trying to see some polluted version of all I'm meant to be in life Their recollections pruned by the accidents of time, what got thrown away and what gets talked about at night But she had her period eventually, and I went back to being 23 11 years later I was traveling alone again on an airplane from Auckland, New Zealand to Perth, Western Australia, very alone so far away from you and the home that we had made I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Keroauc, a documentary though, in deeper than the usual congratulations and repetitions of the Beat Generation stuff They interviewed his daughter Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history She told about this dead beat drinking, watching three-stooges on TV, not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child, taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology Dead-beat dad (get it?) And then she spoke, I heard your voice telling me about the adults who had abandoned you as a sweet kid, and left you to grow precariously. And then she spoke out in her face, and saw you looking back at me. On a tiny airplane-seat screen at the bottom of the world, I saw a French-Canadian resemblance, and I heard suffering echoing A lineage of bad parents and strong daughters withstanding And she had black hair and freckles and pale skin just like you, and she told the hard truth and slayed the Gods just like you I saw the cracks in the façade of posterity I missed you so I came home The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève, when I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house And I looked around the room and asked “Are you here?” And you weren't, and you are not here. I sing to you though I keep you breathing through my lungs in a constant uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out until I am dead too And then eventually the people who remember me will die, containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me, and breathe, and wonder why And then distortion And then the silence of space The night palace The ocean blurring But in my tears right now, light gleams