The Holocene is a dark place. The bar on the left is shrouded in shadowy whispering figures and before you opens up a massive dance floor with crumbling beige curtains blocking the windows and small, barely-there lights that float in darkness like low-watt stars. Past the main area it splits into a hallway on the left and a door leading into the showroom. The doorway was bulging with standers and beyond a small sea of people were seated as droning feedback and indiscernible vocals flowed out. This was Grouper.
Midway down the hall another door opened up to a smaller room on the left. It looked like a meditation room of sorts. There was a small wooden table in the center with a barely-visible oil candle burning away, and four simple benches lining their respective walls. A dim bulb hung still in the air, suspended in space. The far wall had been painted a detailed swirl, which was right at home in this dark little space. I perched for a moment behind others looking in at the show through the leftside door, then walked into the smaller room and sat down. Music like this is not so much about being seen as just listened to. Why was no one else in here?
I leaned back against a wall and closed my eyes, drinking water, considering the room. Before the citywide smoking ban, this had been a curtained haven for smokers to congregate, making it the worst concentration of fumes you could imagine. A couple bars I’d been to had been particularly smoky, but a room this size got real bad real fast. I marveled at what a change the air quality had wrought on it. The whole place had become something entirely lovely. I wanted to rent it out as a surrogate bedroom. If I could just get rid of the bar…
Part of not drinking in a place that serves booze means not feeling that you can really be anywhere for too long. I picked up and went back to the main area determined to order a coke, did so, and sat down at a table overlooking the dance floor. A pretty girl was sitting at the table next to mine, looking uneasy and fidgeting. I sat there looking at the different clusters of people and trying not look at any of them too long and then coming back to my coke. This girl in front of me was dressed nice – she had clearly done herself up, and I wondered if this was a normal thing or if she had made a particular evening of it, and I felt just how out of touch I’d become. My sense of what normal people did at bars, how they dressed, what they came for, what they expected and what they got when it was over had drifted away. I looked on at them now as if studying some alien race in the field. The only bitch of it was feeling my own solitude by seeing their lack of it, and I lost much of myself just by being there.
The music ended and there was applause, and then the shuffle began. I walked in to the performance area and scanned for a seat. I found one between a group of people and a girl sitting alone. I asked if I could sit down and she slid over a bit and I sat. In my state I started to think that this was probably the most I would talk to anyone all night and perhaps I should try to talk some more, but it did not come and so I sat there thinking about how to keep my posture from collapsing into something painful and looking around at the different groups of people. An Eluvium show is a fairly specialized thing; this is not a band you casually drop in on. Everyone here had to share some love of these modern hymns, this sacred, reflective music. It followed that there should be some implicit communal bond between us all, just for being there, and I looked around to see if anyone else felt it. But no one seemed to and it was just a bunch of people at a show and I gave up the search. It is a strange thing when the things that we hold most dear – a record or a film or a book – should be equally loved by another, and yet we may have nothing in common with that person at all. Looking around the room, I probably had more in common with most of them than I’d like to admit. But sitting between and amongst them I felt as removed as I ever did during the long hours and days holed up in my bedroom, living out my own little story. The only difference was it was slightly more comfortable to be alone.
Thirty minutes into the show I began to feel tired, so I got up and walked to the merch table and bought a couple LPs and shuffled out the door. It was no good to stay for its own sake. You just make yourself more tired and more sad and plus it was good to be back in the open air. I walked home. Tomorrow I would listen to the LPs and enjoy them and life would go on. I would make good coffee and work and feel like myself again.
That was enough.
