You & Me & A High Balcony
I like minimalism, as an aesthetic. I imagine this is not surprising, since you probably need to appreciate a minimal soundscape to enjoy early Mountain Goats. Intricately produced acoustic wonder, it ain’t. That’s totally fine though, because some of us like that simplicity. We like paring things down to one man, one acoustic guitar, and one creaky boombox. Inside that space, which might seem so uncrowded as to be barren, we discover an unlikely infinity.
That same appetite for simplicity drives the narrator of this song. He starts by insisting on a “clean slate.” He talks about the lack of complications—“no good reasons left not to let down my guard.” He imagines isolation both physical and technological: “let’s pretend we’re all alone, let’s unplug the telephone.” And, in the end, he insists that it comes down to simple questions, to “you and me and a high balcony.” As if he can reduce the universe to three terms, as if he can separate himself from everything wrong. By shutting out as much of the world as possible, he can leave only what is good in the world. Past that balcony lies innumerable “but”s and “we can’t”s. Why not simply…ignore it?
The problem, of course, is that the world is not defined by what we choose to consider important, that the world goes on existing in all its chaos no matter how simple our viewpoint is. The narrator can’t escape this, and the complications of reality creep in with a steady determination. He immediately has to come up with alibis (“if a stranger should ask you…”), which goes to show that they can’t abandon the rest of the world, because even as he asserts that desire he has to plan for the interaction with that environment. The tasks he assigns to himself and to his companion are introduced with “just” as if they’re not a big deal (“just rehearse the alibis…”), but in truth they turn this simple existence free from unhappy compromise with the outside world into a carefully staged performance. There’s nothing natural or simple about it. Every strand of complexity that he’s cut in separating the two of them off is precisely replaced—or worse—by the new requirements that maintaining mental separation places on him. I mean, really. “Don’t blink, don’t try too hard not to”? It’s like the advice of “act natural.” All we do all the time is act natural. “Supernatural” isn’t really available to us. He think narrowing the world to a single room and a single other person will bring clarity, but that action introduces enough complexity to offset all his efforts. It reminds me, the physicist, of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can try to be tricky about how you move energy around, you can try to move heat from here to there, but there are very hard limits to how well you can do. Something is always lost, there are costs that cannot be shuffled away.
“Anhydrous and matches, why don’t we cook up two more batches?” There’s a line that changes things. If you don’t know, these are ingredients for making methamphetamine, and you want the matchbooks, not the boxes. (I believe this is a We Shall All Be Healed outtake.) So this is the sort of reality that’s outside of these people, always hovering in their peripheral. An addiction is a complicating factor, to put it mildly, and so they can’t free themselves by shutting out the outside world. The endeavor is doubly doomed: first, because they cannot really isolate themselves without inviting still more trouble, and second because their problems aren’t really external to them. They still have all the materials they need to craft their poison of choice. Even when all alone, their addiction is present, and ready to strike. It’s the sort of “why not?” logic that typifies destructive impulses, an erosion of the self-control faculty. This is what underlies persecution fantasies. We want to believe that all our ills can be blamed on the government, or our parents, or the scumbags of the world. And, of course, plenty of people are done in by these factors. But sometimes there are truths that will not budge. Sometimes it really is your fault.
With all these problems, their project begins to fall apart almost immediately. To quote a large fragment: “it’s going to come down to this: you, and me, and a high balcony and professional wrestling on pay-per-view. Windows and light and the radio blaring all night and the truth slowly dawning on me and then on you.” That’s a sentence that starts with the isolation, and gradually expands. First the balcony is included. Then there’s the television, with all the links to the great external world. Then windows, light, the noise of the radio—at this point these people aren’t really isolated anymore. Finally, the truth, the thing they ultimately hoped to escape. But they cannot wall themselves in, and even if they could the fatal mistakes have already been made, and they are stuck with them. In the end, no matter what you do or where you go, you are forced to live with who you are.











