ARTS

What’s Happening, Where Are You Going?

A priest, a wife, and a daughter drift into a door frame as though their bodies are being pushed through water. The entry is slack and passive. Their faces show a fear of going any further. Catching sight of what lies beyond the door, the priest begins to trace a mournful sign of the cross into the air, but the video frame is already slipping away, impatient. The frame turns instead towards a dying man lying at the far end of the bedroom. An overhanging Our Lady of Guadalupe watches while sweat discharges from his brow. In pursuit of agency, he bows his head to accept the lighter offered by an extemporaneous, skeletal hand. With a drag of his cigarette, the room pinwheels into optical oblivion. His irises come alight at the mirage. Amid his distraction the three figures slip away from his bedroom door, leaving space for another to slip in. Wheeling herself forward on a toy rocking horse, a red-dressed child inches into view. A beat of recognition passes, and his tired eyes capsize beneath the weight of a smile. The dying man beckons the child to his side and she follows—wordless understanding stringing her along.

The red-dressed child is Laura Lee Ochoa, bassist of the musical trio Khruangbin, and this is the animated music video for the song Cómo Te Quiero from their 2018 album Con Todo el Mundo. In lieu of a signature sound, the Houston-based band holds down an extensive track record in experiments with sonic fusion. From the extravagant reverb of 1960s Thai funk to the propulsive guitar work found in Persian rock, Khruangbin is known for their instrumental soundscapes that never fully belong to any one place. It’s this demonstrated affection for synthesis and expansion that makes the quiet world of Cómo Te Quiero profoundly distinct and curiously precious.

I came across the animated video by chance three years after its making, yet somehow the timing was just right. Lee Ochoa’s retrospective gaze mirrors my memories of the past year with more fullness than seems possible. A loved one in my life is dying. He sees figures in his bedroom that I cannot identify. Around him, our relatives wonder if there is a medication that will stop the apparitions where they begin.

The mutability of these circumstances across life and art illuminates the ways that an encroaching death is pushing me towards a discourse of preventive care—care that intends to tether its recipient firmly to the land of the living. As a consequence of its representations throughout medicine and media, this fearful display of love is often upheld as an infallible cure to the drifting mind—perhaps the only thing that can be done to seize agency on behalf of both the dying and their loved ones in the face of loss. Yet in the midst of losing a loved one in my life, the world of Cómo Te Quiero invites me to consider otherwise. I begin to understand the ways that even care can blur the line between what it means to hold onto someone and what it means to hold them back.

¿Qué pasa, a dónde vas? No pierdas la cabeza Sacas tus dientes para mí Y cuéntame una historia Te esperaré, y al final Siempre estarás

What’s happening, where are you going? Don’t lose your head Pick up your teeth for me And tell me a story I’ll wait for you, and at the end You will always be

On a sonic level, Cómo Te Quiero deploys lyrics with restraint and understatement. Occupying a slim 30 seconds of the four-minute song, the lyrics are taken from six phrases of a letter written by Lee Ochoa to her grandfather after his passing. Working in tandem with Khruangbin’s reputation as a largely instrumental group, their one-sided conversation is bottled into vocals that prefer slippage and collision over an offer of legibility. In the few seconds that a guitar riff wanes, freeing up space for lyrical clarity, any vocals that may have been coherent are sieved through a tremulant Leslie speaker. Designed for use on electric organs, the speaker was made to recreate the resounding quality of elaborate pipe organ systems—never to modify the human voice. The effect of running Lee Ochoa’s vocals through its pivoting design is an echoing, sonic cloud, often gone before its shape can be discerned.

These qualities of capture and escape channeled by Cómo Te Quiero’s instrumental composition are a beautiful fit for the video’s auditory landscape. As she began collaborating with Sanam Petri—the video’s creative director—over the animated elements of Cómo Te Quiero, Lee Ochoa honed in on the unpinnable final days of her grandfather’s life. They were filled with vivid visions—a pinwheeling bedroom, someone’s skeletal hand—that she could discern from his bedside recollections but never see for herself. In an interview with Khruangbin’s North American record label, Dead Oceans, Petri likened these visions to experiences from another dimension—images, sounds, and sensations culled from a different set of physics and temporality. “Laura always wondered what the world looked like in those last days, what was happening behind his eyes,” Petri recalled. With their energies set on mapping this uncharted inner world, they agreed that the video would “take the viewer on that last journey with him, back though his mind one last time. One last great adventure of a grandfather and granddaughter.”

As the video picks up from her grandfather’s beckoning, Lee Ochoa crosses the bedroom to stand by his side. He takes her by the shoulders into his embrace and begins to recount his visions. He starts by taking a breath around his cigarette, released as smoke from his pursed lips. Initially a realistic rendering, the plume of smoke begins to unfurl and swell across the screen, surpassing even the rectangular bounds of the video frame, until it is recast as part of a pastel cloudscape. An airplane soars out of the cigarette clouds, and through the windows, Lee Ochoa and her grandfather are seated as its passengers. From here, her grandfather’s visions continue to lead them through a journey of changeable matter, landmarked by cycles of material creation and collapse. Yet all throughout, exactly where they are headed remains unknown.

The images that Lee Ochoa’s grandfather witnessed in his final days might be termed as ‘deathbed phenomena’—incidents which encompass a range of sensory experiences while remaining rooted in the distinct context of death drawing near. Medical practitioners and writers disagree whether deathbed phenomena are comprised of visual stimuli that can be more accurately described as visions or hallucinations. In the world of Cómo Te Quiero, the term ‘vision’ feels most appropriate.

Hallucinations refer to the perception of forms and figures in an external space that others would view as empty, whereas visions invite a consideration of these forms and figures’ potentially spiritual dimensions. Deathbed visions are distinguished from hallucinations for their capacity to situate the dying in encounters which usher them towards a departure from this world. Airplanes, trains, and concrete roads are all symbols that appear across comparative medical accounts of deathbed visions, and lead their recipients towards a literal point of departure. Deathbed visions have also manifested in incidents where dying individuals tell their loved ones that they need help finding their shoes, even as they are bedbound. Many images that emerge in deathbed phenomena fit cleanly into these explicitly navigational examples, though they may also manifest as more symbolic points of departure. A characteristic vision recorded across medical accounts of deathbed phenomena is the appearance of a salvational figure specific to the individual’s cultural context, who presents themself as a spiritual guide for them to surrender their trust in. Another is the appearance of a loved one who also presents themselves as a guide away from this world. In many cases, these guides are loved ones who, unknown to the individual, have just passed away themselves.

In contemplating how these visions unfold for their recipients, the image that comes to mind might be an abrupt switch, where the individual’s material environment is suddenly replaced with the sensory atmosphere of deathbed phenomena. Yet these visions rarely appear as straightforward divergences from their environment, rather unfolding as integrated fusions of the two—for instance, ladders, staircases, and stepping stones that extend from a bedroom corner into an unknown beyond. The deathbed phenomena that unfold throughout Cómo Te Quiero extensively map the onset and tipping points of such integration.

As Lee Ochoa and her grandfather cross a river by boat, the water beneath them begins to contract, kaleidoscoping apart until it eventually lends shape to a set of blue playing cards. The video frame pulls away from its tight view of the cards, revealing that they are held by a life-sized incarnation of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As she slides her cards across a table towards Lee Ochoa and her grandfather, the river’s blue shifts once more, this time into a pattern streaked with white. It is the precise pattern of the striped pajamas worn by Lee Ochoa’s grandfather all throughout the journey.

What’s Happening, Where Are You Going?

Witnessing the dead in Khruangbin’s mixed-media farewell, Cómo Te Quiero

Throughout the video, every vision experienced by Lee Ochoa’s grandfather is simultaneously rooted in and subversive of the built environment of his bedroom. Each image that brings him closer to death sinks itself deeper into the likeness, and subsequent distortion, of the tangible objects surrounding him. As the construction of his visions lends these objects a second life beyond their material reality, the room itself is transformed into a site of constant rediscovery amid death.

As much as these visions are capable of rooting themselves in material surroundings, the spatial laws that they abide by are ultimately incoherent to material reality. There is no road that takes us from our bedrooms to the next life, and there is no ladder that allows us to pass clean through our ceilings. As deathbed visions unfold according to their own laws of physics and temporality, they bump up against those of this world. This interfacing isn’t an inherently incompatible event, but it certainly can be. As loved ones in proximity to the dying witness these visions from afar, they are ultimately bearing witness to the bypassing of a once-shared reality.

When the dying transcend a shared reality to engage in visions that guide them towards departure, loved ones might feel that they have been left behind. Tugged by the urge to reel them back into a shared reality, loved ones may respond to the visions disclosed to them with denial, medication, or a blend of both. Sedation or major tranquilizer drugs might serve as tethers to a materially coherent existence, but not without the cost of severing the dying from the interior journey elsewhere. Reaching for medication likewise severs loved ones from the opportunity to meet them where they stand: before a permeable door between worlds. Beyond the spiritual guidance they offer, I begin to understand how deathbed visions fulfill the urgent, cerebral function of introducing the dying to the logics of a more nebulous, unpinnable beyond.

Although loved ones cannot accompany them through that permeable door, the visions that prepare the dying for passage can be held rather than turned away. After a year of navigating the final moments of my own grandfather’s life beneath a language of fear, Lee Ochoa’s uncompromising understanding of her grandfather’s journey is unbearably beautiful. The destination is his alone, but she joins him through every reconstructed reality as a passenger and co-conspirer. I think about where I stand in position to this permeable door, and I wonder if children are naturally more equipped to handle the logics of what lies beyond through the recency of their entering this world. Yet, there is a startling maturity to the end of the video, where Lee Ochoa’s grandfather has died and the room is emptied of his physical form. She sits alone on an unoccupied bed, and the frame follows her gaze as it lingers over the images that guided her grandfather through his final journey: his flooring patterned after a certain river’s blue, the portrait of Mary with her hands clasped over her chest, an airplane lazing in the skies overhead. It stirs the gentle realization that everything necessary to return to the world she shared with her grandfather still lives, catalogued in every likeness that his visions breached. To be able to hold these memories in her mind, all she had to do was bear witness.

In his final days, Jose Guillermo Ochoa Jr. often asked his granddaughter “¿Cómo me quieres?” which translates from Spanish into “How do you love me?” The answer she reserved for him alone was “con todo el mundo,” meaning “with all the world.” By name alone, Cómo Te Quiero is nestled at the heart of its parent album, riffing off this well-worn exchange to capture the bond between grandfather and granddaughter. The conversation between song and album is simple yet apt, honoring the time that has passed rather than moving against it. With the time that remains, I hope I can do the same.

AUDREY BUHAIN B’22 is coming of age.