So life goes on, as people eat brunch and chat and twiddle on their phones the concrete actions of life, their symbolic meaning hidden from me. I am okay with, even comforted by, the concrete but the symbolic is unknowable, even if I could hear the conversations or hear the texts. What does it say, what does it mean? Why do you mean it the way you do? Why do we want such different things? For we have what seems like cross purposes / we are all trying to make the world better — but with different goals, different ends, different means. I wish in one way that we would all think similarly– that there would be no conflict on anything, ever. And so this, I suppose, is the way I grasp ineffability, heaven. In another way, pragmatically, I wish we could all just agree to disagree, to be kind to each other in concrete ways, regardless of the symbolic meaning. But we don’t trust each other enough to be okay with that: we humans love power and that is a shame. We like to punish each other for not agreeing– or maybe we don’t, and my skepticism goes to show a lack of trust.
so let me call it what it is: I don’t trust anyone to pull up short, to say, “this is enough, thanks.” Everyone wants everyone to think exactly as they do, and thus there is no “enough” while we are still individuals separated by the frames of these bodies, by the following of different leaders, by the memory of different experiences uninterpreted by the same lens. For we will never be the same, reformed to a single consciousness, but we will be ourselves, interpreted by the same arbiter. We all would like it to be the arbiter of our choice, be it God or reincarnation or nothingness. Our choice of final arbiter is how we structure the rest of our lives, as they keep going, concretely and symbolically.
1. Yellowstone 2. Women’s Suffrage! 3. Sugar Beets For Breakfast 4. The Magnificent Carbon Wings of the Proposed Turbines in Carbon County 5. Teenage Bottlerocket is Ready to Explode! 6. The Unexpected Dreariness of Cody, Birthplace of Jackson Pollock 7. For Matthew Shepard 8. Rodeo (After Aaron Copland, Who Probably Never Went to Wyoming) 9. Let Us Now Consider The Majestic Moose, While We Wait For It To Move Off the Road 10. In Which No One Injures Themselves Snowboarding in Jackson Hole 11. In Which Our Protagonist Injures Himself While Cross-Country Skiing in Rick’s Basin 12. #ThatsWY 13. The Solitude of Unnamed Places Along Empty Highways 14. Bighorn Medicine Wheel 15. The Legend of Josh Allen 16. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the First Woman Governor in the United States
In 2005, Sufjan Stevens released Sufjan Stevens invites you to: Come on Feel the ILLINOISE, which most people just call Illinois. It was the second album of his Fifty States project, following Sufjan Stevens presents… Greetings from Michigan, the Great Lake State (mostly called Michigan). Illinoise was as far as he got in making 50 albums for 50 states before moving on to other things.
The Superman image was controversial due to copyright issues.
Illinois is an absolutely incredible album. It is an album that is by turns joyful and careful, celebratory and incisive, large-format and intimate. It has songs about death, songs about life, songs about family, songs about friends, songs about history, songs about the future. Its arrangements are powerful and also playful. It is the ideal form of a certain type of indie-folk. It placed on year-end lists, and even topped an “albums of the decade” list.
It is also unsparingly detailed in its attention to the good and bad of the state of Illinois–not just Chicago. (Although, of course, the single is called “Chicago.”) It looks at Illinois. It pays attention to Illinois. I don’t know how people in Decatur, Illinois feel about “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother!”, but I imagine it feels good to have your city’s name prominently featured in of one of the best albums of the ’00s.
When I was 18, listening to this record, I wanted Sufjan to complete the project so that I could have an album about Oklahoma. I wanted someone to look at Oklahoma the way Sufjan really focused in on Illinois. And while the Flaming Lips, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Sam Anderson’s Boom Town have since brought varying measures of attention to Oklahoma, Sufjan Stevens never did write an album about Oklahoma. He stopped at Illinois.
But what if he had written about Oklahoma? What if he had written about every state? What if he had followed his own hype? What would those track lists have looked like?
I don’t know what Sufjan’s albums would have looked like, but I can imagine my own. I’m picking up the mantle. Over the next year, I’ll be posting track listings for imagined state albums here at Gospelized. Will I get to all 50? I have no idea. I hope so. But as Sufjan found: there’s a lot of states.
A moment for the technical stuff: I’ve used a random number generator to pick the order of the states I’ll be writing about; the number each state was assigned for randomization was its order of admission into the union. I am choosing to stick to the following form: no less than fifteen and no more than nineteen song titles, all words must be either part of the album title or song titles, each line numbered as if it were a track. If you are reading this and want to illustrate any of these state albums in an album art / poster style, I would be absolutely thrilled: email me at statealbums@gmail.com.
My hope is that these imagined track lists honor the states they describe and the people within that state. May these efforts read as a bit of attention, a serious look at your state, a poem of consideration on the way it was and is and even could be.
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I want the world’s most perfect OS, a stable one that has no vulnerabilities. the human system is working its way there, our perfect righteousness already installed but our sin continuously competing for computing cycles. yet we have a good designer continuously patching and patching and patching until one day (trumpets.wav) it is made stable with a final great push, no more attacks can be levied, the viruses are all defeated, and then we can go further up and further in, with no more worries about firewalls
Moral development is a firewall: a set of techniques that check viruses when they arise.
Spiritual development is a new operating system: a new person who operates differently, through fear and trembling away from the sword of fire toward the garden city transforming bit by bit into what viruses cannot touch
