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Mac miller swimming poster reddit3/18/2024 The piece that sticks out is John Berryman's poem 'Henry's Understanding,' where the author fantasizes about letting go: "I'd take off all my clothes / & cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff / into the terrible water & walk forever / under it out toward the island." Miller drifted into that territory himself three years ago on "Days," singing about new love, a theoretically positive thing: "I've been floating for so long / think I'm ready to drown" For Laing, Berryman wasn't writing about a "fantasy of death," but "a dream of entering some other realm, both protective and destructive: an underwater world, where you are naked, unreachable, and entirely alone." Midway through, on a visit to Key West, she writes that dreams of submersion-"these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution, and death"-snake through the the works of almost all the alcoholic writers she's chosen. There were open expanses of water all over their writing. In The Trip to Echo Spring, writer Olivia Laing picks apart the work of six 20th Century authors, all of whom were alcoholics. It's the first time that Miller puts his head beneath the surface, and he's fine with it: "If I drown, I don't care." On the narcoleptic "Perfecto," he loses some energy: "I'm treading water I swear." Four songs into his post-dependency record, he's gone from front crawl to partial submersion to barely staying afloat. As the record progresses, there's always the sense that he's catching air between lungfulls of water. Miller's floating one moment, down beneath the surface the next he rises and sinks so often that he risks getting the bends. What sets this apart as Miller's best album yet, though, is the way he prods at that trope, particularly in the middle of the record. The next song, "Hurt Feelings," is one of the murkier songs on the record, a casual fuck-you to anyone who still won't take his side: "I keep my head above the water." And, at first, that seems to be what he's selling: "I was drowning, but now I'm swimming / Through stressful waters to relief," he croaks on opener "Come Back to Earth." It's a metaphor that he doesn't tire of. That could have set up a disappointingly straightforward redemption narrative, the type of thing that lesser pop musicians fall back on after crises.
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