In this special column for Atwood Magazine, I explore the impact of one artist and album across the range of my experience in one city or across several cities. The aspiration is that you will resonate with my experiences and how they might intersect with your own life in deepening our understanding and reflection on a particular artist and album in our contemporary world.
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All I could imagine was an eternity with Christina S., deeply and continuously unearthing the passion of how our memories could become embodied in dreaming a life together. It was a life that always felt like the intense magic of unimaginable words and worlds that Cocteau Twins conveyed to us – and, in a manner of speaking, that became our own new and unfettered emotional language.
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Stream: ‘Victorialand’ – Cocteau Twins
For the first time in my life, I felt like I was falling in love.
I left home in January of 1987 to attend Syracuse University, where I would also be competing in varsity swimming at the national level. It was an entirely transformative time in my life, when every experience was new and profoundly revealing in very different ways. It was also a very challenging period, as I experienced an initial time of solitude in a student residence that was rather removed from campus, but all of that would dramatically change in the autumn of 1987, when I would be on the main campus.
On that main campus, and on the hub of Marshall Street, I felt like I was falling in love when I walked into the bohemian clothing shop that was downstairs next to the collegiate Faegan’s Pub, which would become one of my favorite haunts for many years during my sojourn in upstate New York. In this shop, and at the desk, was Christina S. – a statuesque and lithe woman in her mid-20s with abundant long golden tresses, in tight-fitting black jeans and a t-shirt, as she lit up the room, while Cocteau Twins’ 1986 album Victorialand saturated the ambience. Despite my musical awareness and immersion in the 4AD label, Cocteau Twins had somehow escaped my radar, and I was immediately entranced by Christina and the stunning music that was surrounding me. Christina S. was from upstate New York, stunningly beautiful in an ethereal, timeless sense, very self-assured, and I wanted nothing more than to be by her side.
It was almost as if I had entered a new portal of my existence, as Christina enabled me to imagine a different life and world in that late winter and spring of 1987. I returned to that shop a few days later, and as Christina and I casually conversed, I asked her if she would like to hang out sometime. She slightly leaned into me, smiled mischievously underneath her adorable blond bangs that framed her otherworldly beauty – like that of Kate Moss, but even more strikingly beautiful – and she said, “I would really love to do that with you.”
Later that week, she invited me to her apartment, which was a dark sanctuary abounding with low, comfortable couches, large velvet pillows, and flickering candles – but most significantly, there again was the voice of Elizabeth Fraser with Cocteau Twins. On this 1984 album Treasure, there was a different enrapturing feeling, like that of a silkened cocoon of consciousness. With Christina, and through her fascination with Cocteau Twins, I felt like I was inhabiting soaring new levels of consciousness, where every day with her felt like a new experience of who I was and who I could become with Christina by my side. As we drank our wine and felt the overwhelming sensations for each other, our conversation led to a dream-like semblance of word and association, and in that moment, we bonded even more intensely – we seemed to be living the dreamwork of Cocteau Twins, where feeling in music was paramount.
That night, we entwined in each other’s warmth, and as the glimmer in Christina’s eyes reflected into my being, I felt as if I could imagine a swirling world – a different way of imagining human experience.
She led me through the remarkable prisms of expression that Cocteau Twins envisioned in their 1983 album Head Over Heels, which is exactly how I felt with her. As we made love for the first time, it was as if we had elevated ourselves into another level of being, where the outside world had entirely disappeared, and all that remained was the intensity and jouissance of passionate physicality in the ethereal breath of Elizabeth Fraser’s voice. Christina and I had become one person within the ecstasies of passion. In our ultimate form of exposure to each other in physical pleasure, we bonded forever, like hand in glove.
The identification of Cocteau Twins with Christina was remarkable, in that she seemed to embody how their music made you feel – deep and intense realms of feeling, the wonder and fragility of life, liberating sensations of passion, and always living life as if encapsulated in the most wonderful dream. Life with Christina was the most intoxicating of all elixirs, and I felt like all the longings in my past dreams had become reality in this dreamlike state of inhabiting each other’s consciousness – as the music of Cocteau Twins was the soundtrack of our desire, one that seemed to be situated in an era of centuries past. Orhan Pamuk has described this feeling, which intently resonates with how I reflect on Christina as being inseparable from Cocteau Twins – always caught between dreaming and memories of consciousness. He writes in Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022:
“Memory and dream are each a moment – each an image. I was once there, but whether it was in a dream or in the past, I do not know. I experience the present as if it were the past…”
All I could imagine was an eternity with Christina, deeply and continuously unearthing the passion of how our memories could become embodied in dreaming a life together that always felt like the intense magic of unimaginable words and worlds that Cocteau Twins conveyed to us. In a manner of speaking, that became our own new and unfettered emotional language. As the weeks passed by, we became inseparable, and every time I saw her after a short absence, in my mind, I felt an overwhelming emotional fervor, as she made me feel alive in ways I never imagined possible, while also enabling me to see the world through the prism of her own perception.
Her vision of the world was endlessly entrancing, and it was as if I had stepped into another dimension of being. This was only intensified through her remarkably tireless fascination with Cocteau Twins, their music being an extension of how she was so radically different from any other person I had met in my life. Their music was how we experienced each other, and in this way, the geography of Syracuse itself began to shift. The city I had found so alien and cold was transformed into something continuously warm and dreamlike, and with Christina at the center, every day was an incredible wonder within every second of being alive.
The magic with her had been present from the very first moment in each other’s presence, and it was the utter contingency of us meeting that had seemingly been by divine design.
There was at hand certainly a striking parallel, as the music of Cocteau Twins conveyed and inspired divine worlds of another universe, where connections are mysteriously forged. For me, Christina was like someone who had stepped out of a dream that I always longed to return to, and for the very first time, that dream was reality itself.
One night, we stepped back into the debut album by Cocteau Twins – Garlands, which in some ways is them at their most raw level, both dissonantly precocious and intensely attractive. Christina and I came to life in this realm, and that’s where we curated the beautiful design of a remarkable relationship that was born within the ethereal and dissonant aural beauty of Elizabeth Fraser with Cocteau Twins.
Being in love with Christina S., amidst Cocteau Twins, was the most extraordinary time in my life.
– to be continued in the next installment of Music & Cities.
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© courtesy of the artist
© courtesy of the artistVictorialand
an album by Cocteau Twins
