7. Minnesota

Heat and humidity somewhere near a lake in Minnesota and a house where some packets of seeds have just come in the mail. A sweet, melancholy sequence of chords, G-G6/E-D-Csus2, and someone holding the packets and looking at them. They’re in Dutch and have colorful pictures of flowers on them. You don’t know why it pains you but it does.

“I circled the house and I scattered them around,” the speaker sings, over a IV-V-I-IV progression, “let the water sink down into the soil.” And then he just stands there looking down, half-dreaming: “Stared a long time at the residue/Blood, milk, and oil.” The atmosphere is half-unreal too:

God the humidity is something
Our shirts are soaked clean through
The house is throbbing, and the heat keeps coming
And I keep looking at you

Darnielle runs through the original progression a couple of times, a little more forcefully than before, and then starts a new verse:

And then you’re singing in Dutch to me
And I recognize the song
It seems so old and so fragile
And I haven’t heard it in so long

Back then, in the days of the old Dutch song, it had seemed like they were going somewhere. Now, though, they’re just here, in strange, inassimilable Minnesota, with “[h]ot wind coming off the water” and the “sky gone crazy with stars.” “While we stay here, we imagine we’re alive,” the speaker sings, as if he’s grasping something that he hadn’t totally grasped before. “We see shadows on the walls.”

There’s something waiting for us in the hot, wet air
Sweat, water, and alcohol

Just the old blood
Rising up through the wooden floor again
Just the old love
Asking for more again

Outside Plato’s fire-lit cave, where the prisoners watched puppet-shadows on the wall, the true, sun-lit world was waiting. This is different. The only thing waiting for the couple in “Minnesota” is a kind of residue in the atmosphere of the house, a residue that smells the way their bodies do after they’ve been drinking for a long time. It’s the ghost of their old love, the love that they each hacked until it bled to death. It’ll be horrible when they finally meet and recognize it, but it’ll be a relief, too. You can hear it in the way that the sweet, sad vocals belly out a little, like a sail.

But why will it be a relief? In Darnielle’s mind, the answer has something to do with Joan Didion’s conception of narrative (“This is chapter three of my English thesis,” Darnielle said before playing “Minnesota” in April 1997). In May 1997, Darnielle told an interviewer that he had been heavily influenced by the moments in Didion’s novels when her protagonists “realize that the story that they’re playing out in their lives is not the story they’re actually implicated in” and either “catch a glimpse of what the other story might be or become faintly cognizant of the fact that there is no story.” The slow collapse of the original love-relationship story in “Minnesota” enables the couple to glimpse, beyond it, the other story (and beyond that, the absence of any story at all). It’s not totally clear what the other story is, but it seems like it might be the story of our inability to sustain the versions of ourselves that we promise to each other, or maybe the story of the lasting reality of the damage that we do to each other in our relationships. They’re unpleasant stories, but they feel truer to life than tales of love and romance.

And yet it hurts me to become aware of the speaker standing in the brightness, looking at the packet of seeds, at the pictured promise that they will grow and flourish. It hurts me to become aware of him thinking, in images, that the soil around the house is so polluted that the seeds will never grow. The sudden self-awareness that enters the song with “While we stay here, we imagine we’re alive” has the joy of reality in it, which is part of why I love it so much. But the sordid, sodden grief that enters the song with “Sweat, water, and alcohol”—an echo and extension of “Blood, milk, and oil”—is something that I love even more. If things aren’t going to get better before they come to an end, then they might as well get worse. Blood pooling underneath the floorboards and rising up through the cracks, love in each of us demanding more of what it wants from us. And a confused, unjustified central feeling, somewhere in the spirit of the song: All I want to do is get drunk. And have sex. And wake up late and disoriented, and walk outside.