Thou Afraid of a Thread?

Was all of this just an excuse for me to talk about Penny & Sparrow? I don't have an answer to that question, but maybe grab a pair of headphones to listen along as you read.

My newest inquiry began as they all do—with a Penny & Sparrow song. No, I’m totally kidding—most of my inquiries don’t begin with Penny & Sparrow songs, but I wish they all did. I don’t know where this line of questioning began for me, but the questions have been affirmed and illuminated by Penny & Sparrow’s 2022 album, Olly Olly. If you’ve spent any time at all talking to me, you likely know my love for the two-man-band—I don’t purport to hide my affections. I don’t think I anticipated loving the music Andy and Kyle make as much as I do; it surprises me continually. Not like falling in love quickly, but rather spending hours and hours with someone and then no special moment comes along and you realize you’re desperately in love with them and you can’t pinpoint how it happened. Like that. 

Olly Olly is Penny & Sparrow’s first self-produced album. When the album came out, and as I’ve fallen in love with it over the last year or so, and seen them tour it twice (shout out Minneapolis!, shout out Charlottesville!), my beaming pride in these men I’ve never met has only grown and I am grateful for all the album has come to mean to me. There’s a line in their song “Gogogo”—track number number ten—where they sing: 

“I can be a kind of music you get better on

Therapeutic, wait a minute, we're inside a song

I love you and I appreciate

All the setting-bone pain

All the beauty made.”

Gosh, it sweeps my heart a little bit when I think deeply on it, because I have been getting better on their music for quite some time now. But what I mean by getting better is that their music (along with really good therapists, some of the most lovely and caring friends, the buoying support and generous love of my sister, guidance from people I admire, space and time, lots of things I’m forgetting, and a ton of other snippets of media and books), has been helping me redefine what it means to get better. 

I doubt I am alone in looking around and seeing how obsessed our culture is with progress. Pragmatism and progress feel baked into the very definition of what it means to be American—I mean how do you even get a phrase like ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ apart from the practicality of wearing boots and setting yourself in the direction of ever! forward!. Perhaps it’s our Puritan roots (Can we blame everything on the Pilgrims? Or?), perhaps it’s the naiveté of our youth, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but our culture churns out a gluttonous supply of everything dedicated to progress!, achievement!, being the BEST version of yourself!, individualism!, and reaching your maximum and boundless potential!. There’s no ceiling here, folks—only the ceiling you impose on yourself. 

Consider me a small part of the percentage of people chiming in across the internet saying I, too, am a a part of the gifted kid to 20-something burn out population. It’s deliciously delightful to be just millennial enough to be crushed by the weight of potential mixed with the obstacles that all millennials face as we (and I do millennials and no other generation) comes to terms with the reality that our means don’t match the potential we were promised, and also to be just Gen-Z enough to laugh at all of it in the name of ‘who gives a f*ck since this is all way past absurd anyway’ (for those of you who might be paying attention to this on a philosophical level—I’m looking at you postmodernism, you slippery little witch!). Burnout is a bit of a stretch for me. I just love observing this conversation too much not to bring it up. I’m not burnt out as much as I’m tired of progress for the sake of progress, achievement for the sake of achievement, and hyper-vigilance to every personal fault. 

Which reminds me of lyrics from this other Penny & Sparrow song, “Eden/Lia.” In the opening Andy sings, “All of them trapdoors / Several billion / I ain't got time for em'” and later Kyle sings, “See how the sun moves slow / Down the valley's throat / Swallowed underground / Soon Rhododendron blooms / Quiet like a tomb / Covered by a cloud.” If you remember from reading Sharon Creech’s (1994) Walks Two Moons, rhododendrons are commonly used as symbols of danger, warning, and beauty (I once did an Instagram poll about this and I’m still convinced that I read that book because I went to a Department of Defense School—military kids rise UP!). I might say I’m tired of progress, achievement, and my own hyper-vigilance, but the gap between belief and what is felt is a sinkhole in repair. I ain’t got time for progress and yet I am still feeling the effects of my hyper-vigilance. I mean that literally. My body is keeping the score. 

This intrapersonal conversation is very intimate for me and is entwined with a good deal of religious baggage—Olly Olly magnificently covers these two—and is a large part of what is missing from the middle of this post. I prefer not to get into the intimate details, but I will use Penny & Sparrow lyrics to convey what it is I’m trying to get at. Please turn with me to “Innkeepers,” track number eleven, stanzas five and six (that was a religious joke—sorry about that):

“Maybe you will return with ivory feet

Maybe true, time will fuse the chaff and wheat

Is the Christ who slept asleep on me?

My best friend, see your soul is overdressed

What I meant, you're too chickenshit to guess

And I can't help but wonder

As we return to dust

Is the Christ who slept asleep with us?”

The song is a reference to the Innkeepers (the Thenardiers) in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables—there’s a song with a Les Misérables reference on every Penny & Sparrow album. What I’m particularly interested in is the characters, and the lyrics “maybe true, time will fuse the chaff and wheat,” and “my best friend, see your soul is overdressed.”

I’m fascinated by the Thenardiers because—from what little I know of their characters—morality is relative to them. This has never been my position and I doubt it will ever be (If you recall from my last post the Les Mis character I got was Fantine. I also had Jean Valjean in my top 100). I’m not communicating that relativity as a moral position has and likely never will be my position as a marker of good/bad—though it would be easy to do so. I am pointing it out because I am curious about how unburdened I interpret the Thenardiers to be. I have always been burdened by rules which has been both a wonderful and harmful thing. Hence my fascination with the lyrics I’ve pointed out. The first lyric is a direct biblical reference that is both a hope and a prayer of mine. It’s a reference to Luke 3:17 reading, “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire,” which is a quote from John the Baptist. I won’t go down this rabbit hole. I’ll simply stop at saying my curiosity with the Thenardiers has been because I hope they are right in their moral relativity. I hope that time will fuse the chaff in wheat.

The second I’ll let Andy explain: 

“Imagine being invited to a friend’s house for movie night and showing up in a ball gown. Everyone else is in PJ’s. You’re uncomfortable in your evening wear and (rather than change into spare sweat pants that were offered to you) you piss & moan about how nobody got the ‘black tie memo.’ You are then patiently reminded that there was no such dress code. It would be lunacy (in my opinion) to continue being rude and maybe (just maybe) trying on the damn sweatpants. They might even fit beautifully.”

The irony of my weariness with progress, achievement, and hyper-vigilance to my own faults is that the rules of each were made up and I decided to impose them on myself in a lot of ways. What I’m trying to say is that I’m the guest showing up to the PJ party in a ballgown. I have, of course, been rewarded in many ways for my dedication to progress, achievement, and the surveying of my own faults, but I’ve also gained a considerable amount of anxiety as a result as well as an unwillingness to sit with the more painful parts of myself. 

So, rather than being Sisyphus pushing that boulder of progress back up the hill again, what I’m opening up space for is the ability to revel in the peace of self-acceptance. Perhaps you’re tracking along with me and believe self-acceptance to be a flimsy and unreliable stopping point. It’s easy to believe because progress is so appealing. However, what I’m advocating for is the ability to wonder what might happen if we allow self-acceptance to be the stopping point. To be seen, understood, accepted, and then maybe (just maybe) loved in all of our good parts and all of our terrible parts by ourselves is nearly unfathomable to me. Or rather, was nearly unfathomable to me. Now it’s barely fathomable. 

I keep asking myself, ‘what if I’m not getting any better’? This question isn’t absent of change which is inevitable. Instead, it’s absent of the kind of change that only leads to better. What if I become a worse version of myself? What then? I am getting better. But my definition of better has changed to focus less on improvement and more on being well. 

I’ll leave you with lyrics from one last song. Track eight, Voodoo, which uses Beatitudnal language (think of the Jesus’ sermon on the mount “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”):

“Blessed growing up

There have been others

Blessed are those &

Blessed is moving on

Blessed be how does it feel?

Playing it now is surreal

Blessing the new and the old me

And blessed be the beauty in loving both”

I hope that as you recall younger versions of yourself, your best moments, your worst moments, all the times you’ve loved well, and all the times you haven’t, that you consider each version whatever synonym of blessed you choose to use; perhaps it is loved.

—iesha monique