Iris recommends: “Rambling Man” by Laura Marling
“Rambling Man” is the third track in Laura Marling’s 2010 album I Speak Because I Can, and was the opening to her show at the Southbank Centre in 2016. I was there with a friend, sat at the top of the Royal Festival Hall, listening to a whole set of songs neither of us knew from before. Afterwards we had dinner at a Mexican place that stayed open late, walked over to Holborn station in the drizzling rain, and made a stop on on Waterloo Bridge to take photos of the riverbank by night. Mine was a shot of the London Eye glowing in red neon light. It wasn’t ages ago, but these days, that’s what it feels like.
There isn’t much I can tell you about these days that you haven’t already felt on your own skin. Do you, too, find yourself searching for music that can help you make the smallest amount of sense of the horror? Do you, too, not quite know where to look?
I’ve been trying try to trust my intuition, the verses that get stuck in my head when music should be my last thought: the hours spent trying to get a week’s worth of food out of half-empty supermarkets, the rushed two minutes between a work call and the next, or the nights I struggle to fall asleep. Yesterday, as I brewed my morning coffee, staring out of a kitchen window that stopped having secrets for me years ago, “Rambling Man” hit me without warning:
We’re beaten, battered and cold
My children will live just to grow old
But if I sit here and weep
I’ll be blown over by the slightest of breeze
At last, something clicked into place: my stage of grief about all we’re going through, about the state of the world, is despair. I don’t know how to make it better, and couldn’t possibly tell you whether anything resembling a life worth living will be within reach on the other side. I have to remind myself that it’s human to doubt, and it’s okay to not have answers; it’s okay, even, to let in the fear that the answers I’ll get won’t be the ones I hope for. It will pass. It will come back. It will pass again. One short moment of clarity today is still one more moment of clarity than I thought I’d have when I got out of bed.
I spend much of my day pretending I’m anything but absolutely terrified, for the sake of keeping my job, protecting loved ones who risk much more, or just, you know, getting up and dressed. I can’t be alone in this. For everyone with jaws clenched tight and a permanent knot in the stomach, here’s a virtual hug, and a song to remember we don’t have to have our shit together all the time: it’s enough to fight back when we can.
