Godspeed

Ten years later, still figuring out my father's story

Hope. The word is hope.

Last night Paul and I took chairs to the cemetery — Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery, where Godspeed You Black Emperor was playing an outdoor concert. It was a perfect night, clear, with a warm, mild breeze. We were early enough to snare a patch of lawn with decent sightlines, and I took my sneakers off and sank my bare feet deep into the grass. Yes, I touched grass.

Godspeed is an instrumental post-rock chamber ensemble whose live shows are epic experiences of sound and vision: ambient waves of drone and distortion laced with samples and field recording build to crescendo and crash over the listener; live 16-millimeter projections warp and dance behind the musicians. They are anticapitalist, anarchist, Canadian. They don’t do social media, or have a website, and the few interviews the band has done have all been collectively answered. They freely allow taping at their shows, and describe their work as protest music. With the cemetery’s crickets providing powerful counterpoint to the glorious noise onstage, the difficult beauty of it all was kicking up big feelings commensurate with the bigness of the band.

Today is the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, so the brutal timing of a night in the cemetery was right there for the taking. I’ve written about my dad, Duncan Bayne, who died one day after his 76th birthday, in the past, and still feel myself turning the words over to make them all click just so. I don’t think I’ve gotten there yet, but last night one of the big feelings — next to all the big feelings about how we carve out space for art amid the horror of the world, and about alternative communities and the glorious tonic of seeing so many weirdos gathered in one space for an evening, sharing an experience that by its very principles resists commodification and branding, and about how I need to get the fuck off social media — was a reflection on how these family stories don’t ever really end. We keep telling them, adding and subtracting and reworking — like a semi-improvisatory sound-and-light spectacular —at least until we ourselves end and become part of someone else’s neverending story.

In my peer group I was relatively early to the father-losing story, though by no means the earliest. But in the past year or two many of my friends have lost their fathers too. I was thinking of all of them last night, and the communal experience we now share, with varying degrees of violence, with fatherless children around the world. I see you, my mind-rays transmitted from the lawn, Bohemian’s massive mausoleum looming, lit with red, beyond the stage. I see you, with your messy relationships, your expectations and disappointments and love and thoughtlessness and they ways our dads shape us in the strangest ways, the losses we carry.

One thing I’ve come to realize these past ten years is how much my father worried about me, my erratic career and lack of stability, my solitude. I didn’t really see it clearly when I was younger, more defensive and flailing. I’m glad he has been spared the national nightmare of the past decade but I do wish he could have stayed with us a little longer just to see that for the most part I turned out OK.

Case in point: last night, near the end of Godspeed’s set, I discovered that my drivers license and debit card had fallen out of my coat pocket. Perhaps hypnotized by the sonic magic, I didn’t panic. Instead, while it seemed unlikely that in this massive crowd someone would have noticed my identity lying on the ground, I made my way through the back to the entry gate box office, to see if there was a lost and found. And there, to my surprise, sat my cards, which had been retrieved and turned in by some eagle-eyed Samaritan, people looking out for each other like we’ve been led to believe was some Luddite fairy tale.

Thank you fellow art freak, whoever you are. Thank you. I see you.

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Here are a couple of things I’ve written about my dad in the past. I have a lot of thoughts on the events of the moment — things I think you should watch or read, takes on the current discourse around book reviews and the lack thereof, updates on various activities. But I’ll save those for another day.