chin chin and muck muck
and we taught each other dearly how to love
Chin Chin and Muck Muck were children growing up apart from each other at the same damn time. Chin Chin lived by the mountains, sometimes on them, and Muck Muck lived in a cramped colony in The City where her personal freedom got electrocuted with her when she grabbed a live wire at the age of seven. Chin Chin bathed in the river and smoked a lot of cigarettes before anything else could happen to him, even though it must be said that much had already happened with him. His personal freedom was malleable, and stretched beyond the river that lived right by his house. Muck Muck would go to school with the same bag three years in a row, and people would make fun of her sometimes, and they would ask her if her mother didn’t know how to make sandwiches or something exciting. They would ask her stupid questions, and she knew in her heart they were all stupider than her, but she was easy to cry. She lied about having a car to one of the bullies. There had been two bullies in her life, occurring at a gap of six years, and both looked alarmingly similar. When Muck Muck saw Roald Dahl’s doodle of ugly people, she saw her bullies in them. When Muck Muck heard that the Car Bully’s father had passed away, she felt sad and scared because Muck Muck also had a father, and she had just lied about having a car and maybe a punishment was due… but nothing happened. When her father found out about the lie, from the stupid Car Bully, he talked to Muck Muck gently on the bike, the only time Muck Muck had found anybody audible on the bike. She felt bad about making her father feel bad. By the next year, they had a dingy second-hand car to call their own.
Chin Chin meanwhile, hated school and preferred to avoid it as much as possible. He loved his brothers and he loved his mother and he loved his father, all in different manners. Chin Chin had so much love in him that it was easy for him to give away enough to fill the other person up but still have some left for the next. He was like the river that was his neighbour. He grew up with her, and he learnt from her. Whenever the world would close up on him, Chin Chin would go sit by the river. When he inevitably left the place, he would search for a body of water to hold him down everywhere.
Chin Chin loved people and so he thought people would love him too. They did, but in ways that did not make sense to him. Nobody cared for him in the way he cared for people. He felt like he lacked something fundamental; why was his vessel of love always empty? Did it have cracks? Had the smoking and the running around and the lying taken the form of a broken earthen pot as a punishment? He did not pay much heed to it; he went on, walked on. He listened to songs and walked along all paths he could put his feet on. He dreamt of avenging everybody. He felt a tinge of violence in him, but he knew how to control it. The river the river the river.
Muck Muck read of rivers and mountains and seas and people like Chin Chin. Muck Muck fell in love with sentences and images in her head that seemed to exist in a reality so different from hers. She knew the world was waiting for her, she just needed to reach the correct train station, the one where all the cool-looking people with just one bag would be standing, ripened with youth and life and love. She wanted LOVE so badly. She had a faint inkling that it existed exactly in the places her mother told her not to go, places where people like “them” didn’t venture.
Chin Chin and Muck Muck kept looking for love and grew up in the sometimes scratchy nest of their own personal worlds. They tried to copy the other birdies, the other rats, the other cats, the other dogs. But Imitating is not Persisting. One Life you have got. Imitation is not enduring the things that come your way, because you are trying to get out of a problem that happened to somebody else. Chin Chin and Muck Muck made their way out of their personal webs of families and lies. They carried whatever optimism and hope they had gathered from others they had seen on the Big Screen, and the Small Phone Screen, and the Small Letters Arranged Deliciously in Big and Small Books, and went ahead. Muck Muck went eastwards, Chin Chin went south. They met new people, new birdies, all looking for That One Thing That Changes Your Life. They met people who smoked cigarettes with them and poured drinks in plastic cups. They met people who walked the grounds with them, talking about things they had in common – films, songs, memories. Chin Chin still didn’t feel the vessel fill up, not even in the least bit. He felt a bit freer, a bit better, but he was still loveless, and the river was gone too. Muck Muck sat by the sea and climbed mountains and induced sleep for hours at a stretch because nobody she met understood what she wanted. Nobody read the same books, so nobody knew what she was asking for. Nobody knew what it meant, all of it.
One year, the seasons got confused and started occurring all at once. The Southwest monsoon got in a headlock with the Northeast monsoon, and Chin Chin and Muck Muck landed in the eye of the storm. They bumped into each other and they both had big bumps on their heads. They apologised to each other and sat for the storm to pass. Muck Muck talked about the mountains she had seen, and Chin Chin told her that she had not really seen a mountain until she went where he was from. Chin Chin said The City he had moved to was bad, and Muck Muck said that had been her home for a long time, and if he saw it with her, he would definitely imitate her opinion regarding the place. They promised to show each other the Other World, and sat together, waiting for the storm to pass. The monsoon winds knew their job was done. All ceased.
Some time down the lane, Muck Muck started feeling heavy in his heart on the regular. Chin Chin thought it was all the smoking. Turns out the earthen pot had been perfectly made all along – it had started to fill up. Chin Chin turned into an angry woman who hated a lot of things, and was indifferent to the rest, so she knew what she felt for Muck Muck was something else. It was the second electrocution of her life, and it brought back something that was lost years ago.
Devendra Banhart told Pitchfork Media about this song: “All the records I’ve made have been peppered with a couple little insouciant, joking tunes that are for fun. Like I’m trying to write weird bubble-gum pop. But this record I tried to get all of that out with the one song, ‘Chin Chin & Muck Muck’, which I sing from the point of view of an old woman because that seems to be who I really am. I go to bed at 8:30, I drink warm milk, I watch my shows. I like it.”
how does one write like that? just how? what is this sorcery?
loved this!