"The Infinite Abyss of Space" by Chris Ayer, Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Chris Ayer has been playing guitar since he was 18 years old. A graduate of Stanford where he studied music and philosophy, Ayer also was a part of an all-male a capella group during his time in college. Moving to Brooklyn after graduating, he hosted a series of podcasts in which shared experiences during his time at Stanford that ended up in his songs. Ayer recorded his first full-length album in Nashville in 2006. His song "Evaporate" won the John Lennon Songwriting Folk category that year as well. In 2013, he released his second album, The Noise, which is his earliest recording available on AppleMusic. "The Infinite Abyss of Space" is the final track on The Noise. From a cursory look into Ayer's music, it seems that the final track on The Noise fits into the space that Ayer grew into; whereas most tracks on The Noise sound a bit coffee shop, folk singer-songwriter, rather than a polished pop singer-songwriter.
I'LL FILL UP THE SPACE WITH SOMETHING. I was introduced to "The Infinite Abyss of Space" from NoiseTrade's 2012 Holiday Road Trip Mixtape. The song on my coffee playlist got catchier and catchier, and today I thought, "This song is scary enough to make it to my Halloween portion of the playlist. In one performance, Ayer says that he wrote the song about an astronaut, lost in space with only a few hours left of oxygen. The song plays with the word space. In the first usage, it's the space in a house or apartment building. The singer is experiencing a change, maybe a break up causing a vacancy in his life. Maybe someone has changed into someone he doesn't recognize, but he's optimistic about filling up the second mention of space, the absence of the relationship. Next, there's "room left in [his chest]" meaning the space that allows him to love or feel something for another person. Finally, in the third verse, the singer contemplates the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe. He says: "somebody put the stars in their corners to fill the space with something." The vastness of space, seemingly full of large amounts of nothing is carefully ordered into what it should be by nature or some divine hand. The hope in the song is that the singer will move on and "fill the space with something." And as every failed Marie Kondo tidying up experience teaches us, clutter is going to happen.
THIS ONE TIME, THE COSMOS WERE BORN. I have two coworkers in my office. One is a conservative Adventist, the other is an atheist. My position is somewhere between. We usually get along pretty well, but sometimes they have a one-sided conversation about their beliefs, though."I don't know how the world is going to end, but it's certainly not going to end the way it's described in the Bible. The sun has about four billion years left before it becomes a red giant." "We're certainly heading for destruction before then." "Well, it will certainly be climate change before beasts come out of the earth!" The tension lingers in the office whenever issues of anything dating back before 5,000 years comes up. "You can either believe that you came from something and that your life has meaning or that you came from a monkey," she says. Having grown up as an Adventist and being taught that the Bible is literal, I am still undecided about what I believe. On the one hand, Adventism wraps everything up neatly, complete with an End-times message and fear-tactics to keep you in the pew. On the other hand, there are Biblical scholars in Christian and Jewish traditions that interpret the early scriptures as symbolic rather than literal. The symbolic approach leaves for a more nuanced spirituality. These days, I'm more inclined to believe the more nuanced approach. Why? Because I've realized that those who follow conservative interpretations in other aspects--sexuality and drinking alcohol just to name two--have lied to congregants and told them that the church has always has a singular view. For some, it's comforting to follow the rules of a God who set the stars in the sky 6,000 years ago, who wrote a book that said everything you should do. Others wonder how much of that is an invisible entity and how much is actually just a political force that wants control over people's well-being.
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