Navigating the “double infinity web” with Adrianne Lenker
“You basically lose everything in your life, and then you die,” Adrianne Lenker states, a bleak outlook for some, a sobering reality for others. Her statement, as direct as it may be, is actually filled with the beauty of intensity and the liberating epiphany that life is short, and we should embrace the messy fragments of life while facing its shortcomings head-on. This fearless reckoning is something Lenker addresses in her music.
Songs is usually regarded as Lenker’s opus, filled with intimate reflections and profound self-discovery, with tracks like ‘Ingydar’, ‘Anything’, ‘Zombie Girl’, and ‘Dragon Eyes’ arriving at a pivotal moment in her career. Its reflective, almost meditative state offers a more overt invitation into her intimate world. ‘Ingydar’, in particular, proved Lenker’s ability to connect the fickleness of existence as she mused over realisations like the passage of time and how everything ends.
“Have you ever used a vacuum cleaner, and there’s a button that sucks the cord back in?” She asked GQ in 2020. Her question allowed her to expand on some harsh realities about the “double infinity web” of existence and how life is like a chord that is gifted to you from birth, one that extends and flourishes, reaching every aspect of experience until one day, often when you least expect, it is sucked back up into the hands of time.
“We’re both growing and becoming,” she explained, the duality within every philosophical musing almost laughable as we spend most of our time attempting to understand it rather than accepting it and being present. Inspired by the name of her great aunt’s now-deceased horse, ‘Ingydar’ floats along the stream of fragmented pieces of mortality, everything that we encounter seeming like part of a whole, like “Fragilely, gradually and surrounding” and the flies that “draw sugar” from the horse’s head—it might be bleak for the human mind, but entirely natural for the cyclical nature of the world that consumes.
Even ‘Anything’, a song ostensibly about love and longing, opens with some surprisingly grotesque imagery. “Staring down the barrel of the hot sun,” Lenker sings, “shining with the sheen of a shotgun.” In fact, the entire track tugs on opposing themes of love and threat, the violence enabling it to allow a sense of realism while framing the tender moments as more poignant than if they had been included in isolation.
“Without that death, without that loss, nothing would be as we know it, and all of the things that we love and appreciate about life couldn’t exist,” Lenker explained, a position which highlights the necessity of the dualities she includes in her own music. Often, her images of death, loss, grieving, and violence are blanketed in poetic description, challenging the view that these things are all inherently “bad” when, in reality, they are just as natural as breathing.
As we journey through life, we will encounter the “good” and the “bad” both individually and in tandem, which Lenker masterfully navigates on Songs and her latest endeavour, Bright Future. However, perhaps more interesting is the fact Lenker dealt with love and loss in Songs, while Bright Future looks at the possibility of taking pain and allowing it to influence growth, healing, and looking forward.
The “double infinity web”, to Lenker, is this constant push and pull between the past, present, and future, and how, cognitively, we are stuck in a network of trying to tirelessly ‘figure it all out’. Bright Future takes this lamentation a step further by reframing pessimism and loss of hope as a source of greater enjoyment and the only natural way to identify beauty in the world. In ‘Donut Seam’, for instance, she sings, “This whole world is dying, don’t it seem like a good time for swimming / Before the water disappears / Now our love is dying, don’t it seem like a good time for kissing, one more kiss.”
For Lenker, every moment of loss, every heartbreak, and every moment of complete and utter despair should be paid attention to. “So cherish it, savour it, push into it, and let yourself feel it fully, because it’s also beautiful,” she told The Cut. While we often attempt to shun negativity, in Lenker’s view, every part of human existence must be embraced.
However, Lenker’s position doesn’t attempt to teach us that we should glorify melancholy, nor does it tell us that the macabre is something we should allow ourselves complete submission to. Rather, allowing it to guide us from time to time is the only real conduit to happiness and freedom. “There’s a constant process of healing that’s happening, that we’re constantly wounding and experiencing just the hits of life and nature, and then needing to repair and mend ourselves,” she explained.
In a way, this is the true “double infinity web”. Oscillating between good and bad can leave us feeling trapped in a whirlwind of a destination-less frenzy. In reality, however, it’s the opposite. As Lenker concluded: “Our bodies and our spirits are simultaneously so fragile and sensitive, and then at the same time resilient. And we’re somehow caught in between this double infinity web, where we can’t see anything beyond, before or after.”
