10.17.2025
Debussy's 1st Arabesque, Lily Chou Chou and hyperfixation
Debussy's 1st Arabesque, Lily Chou Chou and hyperfixation
Suggested listening: Claude Debussy - Arabesque No. 1
Per the titular determination of this journal entry, I have only engaged with and hyperfixated on Glide; I did not, and still unfortunately, have not watched Shoplifters nor have I read anything by Brent Edwards (and now, I don’t even remember the specific book I was recommended, and am in a bit of an awkward spot to ask her which one it was she recommended, so I must either read everything Edwards has ever written or more simply, avoid him perpetually for fear that I may read the wrong book).
I added Glide to my yearn playlist and I listened to it an excruciating amount thereafter. I have a habit of hyperfixating on things for prolonged periods of time. Songs, movies, people, memories, food, the list goes on. I naïvely believe that it’s impossible to actually have too much of a good thing.
It’s not lyrical masterpiece, but I still think there’s enough in the song that continuously resonated with me:
Luck would have it that Lily Chou Chou and I both want to be everything! But ultimately, I don’t think lyrical depth was what kept me crawling back to the song (it’s maybe a little too saccharine and heavyhanded). Instead, I think I find myself engaging in acts of aspirational thinking or nostalgia when I consume something to the dizzying degree that I do.
In a similar vein, the girl I had a crush on had posted a few songs on her SoundCloud, one which I embarrassingly listened to perhaps over a hundred times before I realized that on SoundCloud one could see the specifics of who was listening to their music and the frequency at which they were listening. It’s sobering to quantify what a hyperfixation looks like (you must imagine my horror at the very moment I deduced this fact while I was waiting for a text back from her).
I find myself wondering where hyperfixation fits into my coping toolset—I think it’s a means of dealing with uncertainty. In these moments, I have the song I am listening to, and I have the agency to play it over again and feel a particular emotion and fantasize a certain way. It’s repetitive, like meditation, and it isn’t something I need to actively engage with. As long as I fixate on the object, I embrace the implicit emotions that accompany it sans thought. In this case, it was brief respite from the feeling that I was missing something; I felt connected to this fantasy for as long as I immersed myself in it.
After my recent rewatch of the film, I added a degree of separation to the fixation; I started learning Debussy’s 1st Arabesque on piano, memorizing the first few pages pretty immediately and playing them whenever given the chance (chances include: at home on my Yamaha P40 and at school on a Casio whose keys do not contain any velocity and convinced me that I was a rotten piano player until I figured it out. It was a difficult deduction because the keys were weighted, yet played with equal velocity and dynamic. I have never figured out how to fix it).
The Arabesque feels to be a sort of second degree abstraction; I’m hyperfixated on playing the piece (maybe not even on learning it entirely, but playing what I know) because of my rewatch of Lily Chou Chou which reminded me of my initial hyperfixation and the circumstances surrounding it. I’m not certain that I’ll ever be entirely compelled to complete the piece (though, I’d really like to—it surely wouldn’t be a net negative in my life), but my constant repetition of the first and second page of the piece, playing them over as though there was a repeat at the end of the page and repeating ad nauseum, leads me to believe that completion isn’t my intrinsic goal. Instead, I think I’m wholly committed to the act of repetition as a manner of self-soothing.
I leave a lot of things unresolved, it’s a habit I’ve tried to kick, and I think it haunts me. As I write this, I note that I have a lot of projects that I have yet to finish, pieces I have yet to learn, and so on. Instead, I’m cross-legged on a couch listening to the entire Lily Chou Chou album on repeat as I write something about my mental state from two years ago as it bleeds into the present. Reflection is productive, my therapist and I are in lock-step there, but I don’t know when to stop reflecting. A number of things I start never end up complete because I get stuck in a spiral, or I lose momentum, or I short-circuit and find them impossible.
The children in All About Lily Chou Chou all have this ferocious hyperfixation on Lily Chou Chou. She’s this ephemeral and highly influential musician that brings them solace as they grapple with the trials of being a kid/teenager. In the face of bullying, suicide, violence, and other pretty grim happenings, the Lily Chou Chou online forum and her discography offer these students a means of coping with, but not necessarily a means of processing, their traumas. And, because they can’t resolve these traumas, they act out, propagating violence they’ve experienced unto others. They’re messy kids, and though their means of externalizing trauma and grief may very well be seen as immature, barbaric, and horrific, they embody the violence associated with an inability to reconcile the remainder, what they couldn’t reconcile.
Things don’t fit neatly. Experiences, relationships, and memories are all messy and often rife with irresolution. I’ve been reading a lot of Hegel and Adorno recently (I know, I know), and have managed to find some comfort in Adorno’s approach to negative dialectics vis-à-vis Hegel’s approach. Hegel seeks totality: objects need to fit neatly into categories and concepts, whereas Adorno argues that Hegel’s approach is reductive. Though categorization is violent and uncomfortable, Adorno argues we should recognize that there will always exist a remainder when we try to categorize things, instead of entirely buying that concepts and things are perfectly harmonious and sympatico.
The remainder is exactly what I struggle with, and I think the reason I hyperfixate. I struggle to place the remainder; placing it is how I find solace. Hyperfixating keeps me suspended, it prompts me to try to fit the remainder into something I know it can’t fit into already. The tension of the remainder finds its way into the work I do and the art I make, but I don’t know if there’s a real way to rid oneself of it.
Irresolution, then, isn’t as fatal as I think it should be, but to believe that, I think I need to believe that resolution and completion aren’t obligated to each other. Ultimately, people live their entire lives with plenty that gets left unresolved, and by the time they’ve died, their lives are technically complete, however they might feel about it. My grandmother was just moved to hospice after an excruciating battle with leukemia—I can only imagine what thoughts and memories might be incessantly replaying in her mind, and whether she wishes she had found a means to resolve one thing or another into a Hegelian totality.
Immediately after writing this (i.e., the above), I stood up and walked across the shop floor to leave my campus and take the train home. Before leaving the building, I noticed that the terrible Casio keyboard, which for a period, had gone missing, was back in its place, in front of the entry doors. I sat down, took my earbuds out, and started plunking away at the first Arabesque. It had been a while since I had played the piece; I found that I managed to breeze through a section that I found previously impossible because I had consistently overthought it in the past.
Two classmates came up to me as I played. The first asked me if I was playing a Ravel, to which I laughed and explained that I hadn’t nearly the aptitude to play any Ravel. He told me that his grandfather had been a piano player for his entire life, and that he had a particular affinity for impressionism, that the piece I was playing was immediately nostalgic and reminded him of his grandfather. The second classmate approached me and correctly guessed that I was playing the first Arabesque before mentioning that he had tried to learn it a while ago to no avail because of its difficulty, and found it enticing because of its polyrhythms. I told him that one enters a certain state when playing impressionist pieces from memory, one that makes the hard-to-memorize and atypical rhythms and harmonies hardly an active thought, but a feeling.
Clearly, and to my bewilderment, my partial-playing of the Arabesque triggered a memory, an irresolution in both of these classmates—one as it relates to loss and grief, the other to the struggle to complete.
Debussy’s Arabesque may be, for me, completely resolved, despite being incomplete. The two pages of the Arabesque that I have memorized can exist without the other three, and they do.