Meditations on The Caretaker's “Everywhere at the End of Time”

I have always been sentimental about memory. Nostalgia was surely one of the first big boy words I learned. And all throughout my life I sort of developed a strong attachment memory, and subsequently to things, which became an obsession almost. I never wanted to see them go, even if they had lost any and all useful purpose, because they still retained a strong emotional attachment to me. I had a memory forever entwined with those old things, so I never wanted to see them go. However, in my late teens I realized I was being stupid, I realized there was no memory within the object itself, it was only in me. So I started to throw a bunch of stuff out, I went from a borderline hoarder to a borderline minimalist, and it was pretty good. I came to the realization that all things were inherently temporary. No matter how long I held on to them, eventually I would lose them one way or another, and if someone or some thing were to forcefully take them from me, I would be heartbroken beyond repair. So I decided to strike first, I cleared my room of all those things and I was relieved to know that I had gained a distinct peace of mind, that I never had to worry about losing those objects because I had the memories associated with them forever in my mind. In essence then, I realized that, however fleeting life is, my memories would never leave me... until I heard this album.

Everywhere at the End of Time is a six and a half hour-long album of experimental music, all of it instrumental, and it essentially depicts someone's slow descent into dementia. It's definitely not the kind of music I listen to, in fact, I don't think I ever listened to such an album or genre, if this can even be said to have a proper genre, but due to the overall theme of memory, it appealed to me. I knew I just had to listen to it and, though I didn't do so in one go, I ended up listening to the first four and a half hours in the very same night, though I had to get up early the next morning. I guess on that particular night it just made more sense to stay up late than to get up early... Anyway, I think the album can be described as I just did, as a depiction, but to be honest, I start to think that all great art is just telling a story. It don't matter if we are writing books, making music, painting pictures or what have you. All art is to tell a story, the rest is just the means of transportation. And this album is precisely that, a story, the story of a nameless hero who could be anyone. In fact, it is the story of a lot of people, of a lot of people who are alive today, people who are slowly forgetting everything they ever knew or cared about. And at this present time, the album has five million hits, which inevitably means that some of those millions of people who listened to it will one day develop dementia, maybe myself included. It sounds like statistics but I wanna call it a logical certainty. Some of us will draw the bad cards, it's seemingly inevitable. That means even my treasured memories might one day leave me... I guess it is true that nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is forever. And ironically, dementia is actually quite a reminder, in the sense that it humbles us to entertain the truth that the essence of who we are, the thing we might call our soul, it is all just an illusion of the brain. And in truth we are no more than a piece of meat, with heavy bits of plaque slowly growing all around it.

A fusion between an old papyrus and a newspaper, bland, creased and without any words or pictures. An everyday object already losing meaning.

This first stage appears to be the most universally beloved. The initial and obvious reason for that love would be that the music is quite pleasant. The first track appears to have become symbolic of the whole album, giving us a very sweet and nostalgic tune, but with the distinct feeling that something is wrong. This entire stage is comprised of ballroom music from the twenties, thirties and forties, which leaves us with a sweet nostalgia for a time we never lived. It's easy to depict those years with nothing but class – the suits and dresses, the cigarettes, the classy cars, the beauty and the simplicity... Of course it wasn't all great, no time in human history ever was, I suppose, but it seems to be a recurring theme that, when the loss of memory is imminent, or when the future is everything but certain, the past becomes instantly sweetened, kinda like how coffee tastes better when looking at a rainy day more so than when actually drinking it. I guess then if our lives are brief, then so are our memories, but when our bodies can outlive our memories, who are we?

This stage, which comprises only about forty minutes, seems like a strange omen. It sounds so beautiful and you can tell it's music alright, you can tell real instruments are actually playing, but it's all becoming faint already, like burning paper, like listening to a very familiar song on some very shoddy headphones. But the problem lies deeper than that, though we can't quite realize it just yet. At this point, memory will last forever, it sure ought to, otherwise what is there left? The ballroom is gone, nowadays it's probably just some warehouse, and even the street where it was on is now unrecognizable. People dress differently, they speak differently, they act differently. I suppose after enough time on this planet we realize times have changed and, though things will never go back to the way they were, though the good ol' days are long gone, we can still remember them fondly and forever... For now, the songs almost loop into themselves, you expect them to go on, to change, to surprise you, maybe you expect a singer to come in with some lyrics. But that doesn't happen, not a lot of complexity is added, not a lot of layers... It's almost as if bits of the song are already missing, like trying to sing a song you only listened to once before and so most of the lyrics aren't yours to know. But these aren't new songs, they are old, indeed, they are so old they don't have catchy titles, they aren't referred to by name but instead by how they seemingly make the hero feel. I imagine he feels like he's been alive forever, but what comes after forever?...

I often catch myself remembering these initial tracks. In fact, I've even caught myself whistling It's only a burning memory and All that follows is true. I'm not quite sure why, there probably isn't any deeper reason, however, and so as to entertain my thoughts while I still have them, it could be that I feel old already. I've kinda felt old for a while now, and maybe that thought often crosses my mind with a pinch of irony to help me at least smile at the truth that not even my memories are eternal. Everything that is born will one day die, that much has been true ever since time began... But I guess I never considered that you don't need to be physically born to one day die, it would appear that all things that simply begin to exist will one day die. We live our entire lives trying to accept the truth that the body of the person we love will one day decay, die and decay some more, but are we ready to accept that our memories of that person will die just as easily? And though there is a lot of beauty in between birth and death, is there any meaning in all that death?

A slightly distorted flower vase which appears to have been underwater for a hundred years. The handles are almost turning into figurines, like two little dancers.

The transition to stage two would be almost seamless if not for a distinct recurring sound in the background, almost like scratching, almost as if the brain fog is beginning to take a physical form and weight. And the slightly upbeat tunes from the previous stage are becoming slower, more drawn out and, in a word, sadder. The glamour and glitz of the ballroom isn't quite the same anymore. Place names are probably long gone, faces and voices too, but what about colors, aromas, any and all sensations? Are those gone too? They can't be, they must be somewhere around here, they have to be merely misplaced and we can somehow recover them. But it could also be that eventually they are left at a place we can no longer return to. For our hero, misplacing a memory must be as real as misplacing some car keys.

What does it matter how my heart breaks is a very noticeable tune here, it seems to be a sadder version of the very first. Except now the sounds go lower and lower, instruments become strange, more than being merely out of tune. It seems our hero requires more and more effort to remember the song... You know how in movies someone finds an old tape recorder and plays a song? It works well for the most part but there's some interference, some scratches, some cigarette burns, some faint laundry detergent in the air after the washed sheets are taken away? It sorta reminds me of that... I guess I'm being overly literary, but what else am I gonna be? How else to describe memory and memory loss? The great memories aren't really visual or auditory, are they? They don't play out as a letter or a number or a story, they play out as a sensation, as an instant and unexpected trigger, a kind of sudden urge to be somewhere that no longer makes sense, to be with people who are now wholly different or even already gone, to simply feel something with more than just our fingertips... Does that make sense?

I now have to confess Surrendering to despair was when I first broke down a bit. Then again I was writing something else at the time so it could have been a coincidence. And in typical false memory fashion, I mistook the titles and thought it had been the previously mentioned track to break me. I guess the latter is sadder to me, it's a total white flag, it's a hymn that says – Yeah, well, I had some good times... And the odd, repetitive sounds in the background were reminding me of someone fiddling with papers, or maybe even a distant lawnmower. It's like this battle is so inward, so intimate, but all the while, life goes on as planned. The hero's world is failing, it's ceasing to make any sense, but the grass grows on his neighbor's yard all the same. The little ones play there, and come summertime there will be an inflatable pool and grandmas sitting in lawn chairs, with a towel ready for sunset. But what is all that? It's all noise. Our true place in the world is our own heads, but even that is being denied to our hero... If we have no memory, our lives have no continuity. We expect time to stand still forever but it never does, it slowly chips away at us, never tiring until finally we notice it. But none of us ever dream we will one day be as old as our grandmas.

A highly distorted flower vase taking on a life of its own. A harmless everyday object becoming almost violent.

This stage starts off pretty strong actually. The first tune has some life to it, it's fairly clear and kinda booming. Maybe there's some springtime at the end of all this... Thing is though, once again, that track, that memory, it cuts abruptly, and it shifts to And heart breaks which almost completes the trilogy of deterioration that is the opening track of the album. Now it's slower and fainter, as if it echoes throughout the hallways of an abandoned mall. We think we don't need our cherished places to remain alive and meaningful to us because we can keep their meaning hidden and safe from the entire world, we can keep it in our very memories... But then dementia comes along and burns through them like a wildfire, and you discover that the old, run-down mall where you met your sweetheart has become a pile of rubble, gray and dusty and empty, not unlike our hero's brain. This track fades and dies, the radio's batteries are running low, they're giving it their all and it's still not enough. And not only are you unable to replace them but there's also just too much damage everywhere else for a replacement to be worth it. The problem isn't anything except absolutely everything.

Fun fact, as I wrote the previous paragraph I had a clear déjà vu. It was so vivid... This memory of something past was so strong in me that I felt I could almost predict the very immediate future. For some reason I thought something, which I don't know what, would happen. Someone would send me a message, I'd have a new email in my inbox, I dunno, just some good news. But now the moment's passed, nothing happened in the meantime and, when rereading the previous paragraph, I have no clue what the origin of that déjà vu was. It makes me wonder if that's something similar to what people with dementia experience, this feeling of absolute clarity being absolutely smashed by a vain nothingness, by sheer stupidity. It's a gut feeling so strong it almost transcends reason, it almost makes me feel I'm more than just meat, that I have a soul and that my soul is at times in sync with everything in this world, it makes me think things aren't meaningless... But then reality hits so hard and nothing makes sense anymore.

I'm fairly certain Long term dusk glimpses is also a deterioration of some other previous track but, in keeping with the memory loss theme, I can't remember which one. I could even be completely wrong about that... So what else can I say? I really don't know. I'm finding myself at a loss for words. The album is becoming gradually darker. At a certain point in this stage we listen to things we'd be remiss to call music, but there's still a story being told here, and that story isn't over yet... Burning despair does ache is yet another rendition of the first track but now it's not even musical at all. Notes have a very hard time being played, there's still some melody there, hidden under all that density, all that weight, but it's plain wrong. The hymn of the ballroom has been steadily declining, so much so that the subsequent drop is more of an abyss than a slam.

A lady's portrait. Her nose, lips, chin and shoulder are somewhat clear, but the rest of her has become inaccessible. Her face and hair have lost all definition, now more akin to old leather straps painted in a sickly blue.

This one is what separates the men from the boys... The whole album would already be perfectly respectable with only three stages, spanning a very decent two hours, but instead it goes way deeper into this twisted spiral. In fact, we aren't even halfway done... Stage four marks the beginning of what is called the post-awareness stage. Now our hero's recollections are gone, almost completely, so what remains is mostly a vague, static noise often interrupted by sad attempts at melody, all of which represent sad attempts at memory. You can almost hear hints of the previous tracks but, assuming you don't have an expertly keen ear for music, you can't quite tell what you're listening to. Maybe you've heard it before, maybe your memory is sharp and you made a quick association from a single, vague detail. Maybe you did, or maybe it's just that our hero is struggling so much to remember that he'd rather take any brief moment of clarity, no matter how meaningless, as a blissful revelation. Thing is though, he's already too far gone, his mind is a now trap he can never escape from, because after all, just where would he go? It's all dark and horror, and we still have four and a half hours of it left, a time limit which is actually the rest of our hero's life.

In the aforementioned separation I can only claim to be a teenager. I've listened to the whole album once before, and I'm listening to it again as I write this essay, but I confess the first time around I didn't have the stamina to truly appreciate it. I'm trying to because I don't see this album as simple music, it's certainly not meant to be enjoyed as a happy occasion, nobody is gonna be dancing along to this at weddings... In that sense, the album's sheer length is alienating to most people, and to be honest I don't think most people would even have an interest at all in such an album, even less so upon learning its length. But I also think that the very initial questions this album raises, just the mere poke of memory not being forever, of it being a very delicate and fleeting thing, just that alone would provoke an existential dread most people would much rather avoid. Now, I'm certainly not intent on avoiding it, I wanna confront it, even at great personal cost, though I no longer have much credit on that, but still, can I be said to truly experience it? I do wish I had the possibility to adjourn to my bedroom for six and a half uninterrupted hours just listening to this... But even if I'm not interrupted by anyone, my mind still wanders, as it is wandering now, and that thought only now makes me realize that, were I to become fully committed to this album, were I to lock myself away for six and a half hours, I could still let my thoughts wander free, should I ever have the inclination to while away the time in that manner. But it's funny because our hero has been denied that luxury... Letting his thoughts wander has become an impossibility, his mind is now nothing but constant attempts at remembrance being forever interrupted by static noise. We're no longer listening to music, we are listening to the thoughts of a person who can't hear himself think.

Remember when I said the titles were more akin to descriptions of sensations rather than actual names? In this stage that pleasure has escaped our hero as well. The titles have now become mere default descriptions, like something you read in a boring manual rather than in a nice book. The hero's mind is lacking all thoughts, and even his story is now without history. So his feelings regarding the brief memories he previously had are now a vague thing, even the words escape him, and the attempts at remembering, which were previously a collection of brief and beautiful, albeit slightly distorted sounds, are now a big, tortuous and confusing mess... Our hero is fighting against himself, he's losing slowly but surely, and very, very badly. None of us can help him, and he can't even ask for help. At this point, the hero probably doesn't want to go back, his memories are no longer there. But maybe he can go forward... There better be something at the end of all this, and if you keep listening and following the story at this point, you begin to hope for some kind of meaningful ending... Or at least I know I am, even if I have listened to this story once before.

Impossible to tell. I wanna say it's a woman on a staircase, displaying a dress. If she's standing on one leg, then she could perhaps be a ballerina holding on to a sisyphean boulder instead of a handrail, but her other leg is distorted beyond reason.

At this point, any semblance of music is an oasis. Whenever melody does come, it's brief and immediately drowned out by the static mess. The void is all there is, everything around our hero is darker than midnight. It doesn't matter what time it is, it doesn't matter where he is... It will always be dark around him and he will always be nowhere. He has surely lost track of time, hell, he probably doesn't even know what “time” is anymore. And that confusion is reflected back on us as listeners, because we started with the classic instrumental music of a beautiful and vague golden age, a time we long for without even having lived it, and now we find ourselves listening to something completely different... How did I get here? Why am I listening to noise while staring at a strange painting I can't quite perceive? How did the music change so much so gradually?... I did call our hero's predicament inward and intimate, but I also wanna call it cosmic horror. If we have no place to be in this world except in our own minds, and if your mind becomes a void like this, then all that exists is the void. Nothing else matters because only your perspective matters, and when your perspective is gone, so is the world. We are permanently locked in our own points of view, none of us can ever hope or expect to be someone else, even momentarily. That is what I often call the trap of solipsism. Everyone refers to themselves as “I” or “me” because we're unable to think except in that way, we have no clue what it's like to actually be someone else. We can imagine the lives of others, their everyday stuff, we can pity or envy them, but we can't really slip into their view of the world because their view is simply not ours to see, we just can't abandon our own minds. So when your mind starts to go, you'll have nothing to do except to follow.

But follow where? The void is a big nothing, it's not even evil per se, it just doesn't care about us. The hero's brain has deteriorated to the point where the world makes no sense, though it mercilessly goes on as usual for everyone else. It's completely unfair and it doesn't give a damn, and that's why it's so horrifying. The true existential dread isn't that the world is evil, it's that it's wholly indifferent... And so our hero is now fighting a losing struggle, one he can't possibly hope to win because the void has far more resources to spend, the most important of which being time itself. The void can outlast our hero forever, it can just vibrate and echo for a little while, becoming more and more faint, stealing reality bit by bit until it all becomes a black hole. And in all that darkness, the hope for a moment of beauty wanes and wanes and wanes, until there's nothing left except pure nothingness. And if this is the inevitable fate of all life, how confident are you that you will be able to avoid it? How confident are you that you're above this torture? And how confident are you that, when the body can be so expertly destroyed, there is something else under it, something underneath all this flesh, something that could never be deteriorated by this world?... At this point, there's no bargaining with the void. What I've been wanting to say is that, in this losing struggle, either there's a soul or there isn't... and it's beginning to look like there isn't.

An inverted canvas. For all we know there's a beautiful painting on the other side, but it has become forever inaccessible to our hero. It don't matter what's on the other side because it's no longer his to remember.

The sound is now completely hopeless. It doesn't mean absolutely anything... The tracks in the first three stages had beautiful titles, ones descriptive of sensations and memories, then for stages four and five, the titles were instead placeholders of sorts, textbook definitions of whatever our hero is feeling. But in this final stage, we find new titles again, though they are so bleak we'd rather get nothing at all. Indeed, the first track is called A confusion so thick you forget forgetting, a title which, if I say so myself, is an incredible play on words. At times a thing that is hard to describe is best described briefly, and that is our hero's turmoil, captured in one single word. But that word is often vague, often used to describe all sorts of things, though mainly psychological. But then the adjective comes in to give an actual physical weight to the confusion. So it's not just a question of not knowing what to do, it's not just about searching for a tiny object inside a messy room, it's not just a feeling. The confusion is now physically heavy, it's a stir of gunk and filth inside our hero's brain. And lastly, to forget forgetting is one of those eloquent repetitions, something which initially catches us as a redundancy but that actually captures a simple truth – dementia is so overwhelming that even the act of forgetting is itself forgotten, because dementia is an all-consuming thing.

I don't know how to listen to this stage. This may sound pretentious but I have to say it's not meant to be enjoyed in a typical way. It's meant to be an experience, an almost sickly one... After a while I get legitimately dizzy and nauseous, I unfortunately force myself to take breaks, both for my own sake but also, regrettably, because everyone around me forces me to. I simply can't devote full attention to the hero's struggles while all around me loud televisions are booming, phone conversations are raging, neighbors are arguing, dogs are barking, doors are opening and closing... In my frustration I wish that the world itself became a void, that my life became so estranged I wouldn't have anyone else around me, but then what if I did? What if I became so alone that nothing else in the world made sense? For all I know, the desperate attempts a person with dementia makes to understand the world are not entirely distinct from the woes of loneliness. It's all about wanting someone or something to hold on to, anything at all that makes some sense, anything that can be recognized and, through that simple recognition, it makes us feel safe. And so while listening to a person suffer from absolute existential alienation I wished to be alienated myself... Isn't that something?

When reading the comments on the album, I came across a very interesting one I wanted to talk about. The person wrote something along the lines of imagining what it'd be like to click on a random YouTube video and, when scrolling through the comments, noticing a tag that reads – Posted 93 years ago. It sounds funny, but is it? I don't think so, it's actually a very scary thing, one of those colossal amounts of time condensed into one single sentence, a time span so large that to think of it almost makes me wanna vomit. And in all likelihood, it's something I'll never witness, not with any real meaning. It's just so bizarre how something trivial, like a video being uploaded or a comment being written, when attributed a specific date it becomes such an impossibility in the future. In a word, it forces us to confront our mortality in such a casual way that it sounds like a bad joke.

I suppose I've digressed, the sweetest luxury of all which has been denied to our hero, because to remember is a digression of its own. As the album now draws to a close, everything else fades, the music has become faint long ago, and now even the noise faints as well. If that could be called bliss, it's a very bittersweet one indeed. There's no more music, but at the very end, maybe something meaningful happens – in the very last minutes we find some clarity, we hear a long, continuous sound, not a melody and not a song, just a kind of calling... The tune plays for what seems like forever, for what could be the hero's life entire flashing before his eyes in a tide of memories, like when a wave breaks across the shore and clears away all the seaweeds. It could well be a moment of clarity, a moment of absolute freedom from within the prison of the hero's own body, a moment when something deeper inside him finally fought back against the void... But that tune abruptly, and mercilessly, stops. And what then follows is a few minutes of a much sadder tune, something accompanied by what seems like a beautiful, but so distant, human voice.

Our hero has died. The last five minutes of this colossal work are his eulogy. We listened to his thoughts for so long and we don't even know his name... We know he fought hard, but in the end the void took him. We might be tempted to shed a tear, if temptation is even the right word for it, but why should we? If the hero has endured such a wicked torment at the mercy of a merciless enemy, why shouldn't we instead celebrate his death, his release from the pain? As I said, it's bittersweet, but bittersweet things seem always more bitter than sweet. And at the end of it all, we are left with a literal minute of silence, in honor of the departed.

To quote another Al Bowlly song, it's all forgotten now... Are we happy about it? I don't think so. But why though? Why doesn't the hero's death come to us as a relief? Shouldn't our tears be tears of joy? I shudder to think so, but rationally it would make perfect sense, wouldn't it? Rationally, the hero should have been put out of his misery at the end of stage three. But instead we appear to strive beyond it, we almost secretly wish for him to make it all the way to the end, and if we can't help him at all, then we can at least keep him company. So we do, we honor the man with nothing more than our time because it's all we can give him, and because it's what he had the least of. Time itself has been stolen from him, so why should his death be a sad thing? A hero didn't die, the hero must have died a long time ago. What died was a chunk of meat, a thing no different than the plaques which in the end filled his brain... But can we truly accept that? In reaching the very end of this essay only now do I reach the very beginning of my point... May the ballroom remain eternal, writes the artist, and with good reason, because if the ballroom is just temporary, then what does this all mean? To suffer is bad enough, but to suffer without meaning? To live an entire life only to one day forget absolutely everything? How can I be happy in this world if all I know of my very self is subject to the whims of such an indifferent illness?

No, the ballroom has to be eternal, though I have no faith that it truly is. Our hero's memories, though completely destroyed, have to reside somewhere deeper, somewhere strangely hidden but far more beautiful than anything in this world. Our memories cannot not be contained within mere objects, nor in ourselves, for we too are temporary. So what is humanity without a soul? And who is our hero without a memory?... We have to be more than flesh, there has to be a soul untouched by vanities, of which this world is filled. And thus, our memories must reside in our souls, the only true part of our nature that nothing in this world could ever hope to destroy, or even worse, forget.