There’s a passage in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, a novel translated into English by Jennifer Croft in 2007, concerning the Flemish anatomist and illustrator, Philip Verheyen. In early adulthood, Verheyen suffered an infection in his left leg that resulted in amputation. As a God fearing man, he believed Christ would come again and resurrect our bodies, and therefore could not countenance the limb being buried. “He was very fearful that his leg might rise on its own,” Tokarczuk writes. “He wanted his body to be buried, when the time came, as a whole.”
Verheyen asked that the leg be preserved, so that he might keep it in his possession. But soon he found himself plagued by mysterious sensations, phantom pains in a limb no longer present. He began to dissect the leg in search of answers. The process led to the scientific discovery of a number of components, not least the Achilles tendon, but no explanation was found for the mystery sensations. The moment of amputation was clear and final, and surely the leg did not long for its return, but the body from which it had been removed still sensed it near—as though to be alive is to continue to feel, even when the source has gone.
Risking Illness, the forthcoming album from Queens-based songwriter Ian Wayne, confronts an absence of its own. Pivoting away from the tongue-in-cheek sound of debut A Place Where Nothing Matters, the record locates a far more sombre atmosphere, a change that has been attributed to the circumstances under which is arose. Wayne was touring with his band towards the end of 2017 when he received news that a young family member was gravely ill, and when they passed a short time later, the cruel arbitrary nature of the event opened up a void.
Wayne insists that Risking Illness is not an album about that one particular experience, and that any interpretation of the listener should be divorced from this context in any case. “I believe that these songs should be untied from my purpose in writing them,” he writes as explanation. But the story does hold relevance, not in its specificity but rather its shared experience. Just one more manifestation of loss, impossibly personal and life-changing. Elsewhere on the record, other versions emerge—lost relationships, connections never realised—and the lasting impression is not the detail within Wayne’s catalogue of grief, but rather the simple fact that he too has such a catalogue. Just like ours, yet as intimate as a fingerprint.
The effect is achieved not only in the writing but the recording process itself. With Keith Nelson (keyboards), Andrew Stocker (bass) and Dan Knishkowy (drums), Risking Illness was tracked live. The resulting songs are charged not only with an immediacy but a sense of captured transience. Each a fleeting thing that came together at a certain place and time, captured as it arrived, preserved before it could leave again. Visitations that stepped out one by one then commingled, much like grief itself. The beauty and sadness of such things lies not in their purpose or meaning, but the very fact that they appeared at all. These visitations, from somewhere beyond our world or some folded dimension within it, coalescing into an enduring whole.
Today, we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Winter’s’, the final single from the record and the one from which it derives its title. Perhaps the most overt confrontation with the personal tragedy of 2017, the song finds Wayne reflecting on the strangeness of loss. How it is so big and so small, changing everything while the world remains the same. So sudden and so nebulous, the amputation and the phantom pain. And how death is so tightly bound with its opposite, so reliant on the continued motion of life. “How does what does not exist cause me pain?” Tokarczuk has Verheyen ask of his amputated leg. Is it a sign of something deeper or higher than us, some mystery beyond our comprehension? Can such fundamental components of ourselves ever truly be lost? “Why do I feel this lack, this sense of absence?” Tokarczuk continues:
Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces—does something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?
