Music Mondays: Gregory Alan Isakov

Spaces, Places, and Being Haunted

I am not a huge fan of horror films, but I recently watched the Netflix series, "The Haunting of Hill House."

It is amazing.

Beautifully written, complex characters, and a twisting story that was simultaneously existentially profound and narratively intoxicating.

The director, Mike Flanagan, is also the director of other series that are equally beautiful and tortured: "Midnight Mass,"

and "The Haunting of Bly Manor."

I highly recommend them all. Seriously. As soon as you are done reading this, call in sick to work and stay home and watch them all.

Yes. Do. It. Now.

Anyway, in the last scene of "The Haunting of Hill House" the background music is the song "If I Go, I'm Goin" by Gregory Alan Isakov. The song has been around since 2009, but I only heard it for the first time while watching the show.

In literal and metaphorical ways, I think it is right to say that the song is haunted just as the house on which the series centers is filled with ghosts.

They both stand simultaneously as laments for what is gone and also as expressions of hope for what remains possible. Maybe this should not come as some great surprise. Indeed, laments are, I would argue, anchored in the paradoxical hope that only loss can foster. A lament is a heart-cry in the face of the felt reality of absence. But, it is also the case that the very act of writing the lament (whether expressed in poetry, prose, or as a lyric) is a manifestation of the continuance of presence. In the face of loss, the lament protests that all is not lost.

Beauty remains (hopefully).
Meaning can still be made (hopefully).