The Life of a Showgirl

The mindfulness drop-ins return today (Friday) at 1.10pm in the Chaplaincy as usual. Do join us for some replenishment and reflection at the end of a cold week.

A reminder that my Mindfulness Course for Staff and PGRs starts on Monday 27th October at 10.30am; there are still places available, so do get in touch if you have any questions or would like to join.

For this week's MindLetter, I caught up with Taylor Swift - or rather, she caught up with me.

The Life of a Showgirl

If you, like me, have ever gone on a seven-day meditation retreat a week after Taylor Swift released a new album, then you too will know what it’s like to have poppy, punchy, inescapable music ear-worming its way through the multiple layers of your very fallible human consciousness while you are also trying to contemplate the experiential possibilities of impermanence and not-self.

It was an online retreat, which I observed largely in my living-room, with thirty companions online and another forty-five or so down at the retreat centre in Devon, where I had been many times in the past. I put out comms to friends and family, shut down my emails for the week, and unplugged the radio. It was not so much that I stepped into silence as rather the dissolution of noise allowed the silence to emerge: a stillness, a presence, the sounds of the wind in the trees and distant aeroplanes rippling like the water upon the surface of a mirror-like pond.

But there, too, was Taylor.

‘You can call me honey if you want / Because I’m the one you want,’ sang my brain as I walked slowly from room to room to make tea or get a toy for the dog. ‘I’ll be your father figure, / I drink that brown liqueur,’ it yodelled as I mindfully hung up the laundry or chopped vegetables for a stew. My body had got the retreat memo swiftly enough; the sedate pace of several hours of sitting meditation each day felt like a welcome relief to a physical system used to hurtling itself around Edinburgh’s roads on its bike several days a week. But the hurtling was happening internally now. ‘They should HAVE-what-they-WANT / they desERVE-what-they-WANT / I hope-they-GET-what-they-WANT,’ fired my neurons, hitting the beats with an enthusiasm akin to moshing.

These weren’t even my favourite songs from the new album,[1] let alone the entire Taylor canon.[2] Moreover, I remembered, when ‘Honey’ intruded upon me as I was contemplatively brushing my teeth, that I had read a couple of articles upon the album’s release to get the critical consensus: which was that The Life of a Showgirl was a bit of a washout. It was nothing she hadn’t done before, and better that time, one critic noted (ouch). Maybe she could only write great songs while unhappy, others commentated; perhaps the blissed-out impending Mrs Travis Kelce had lost her musical mojo. I felt a little awkward. Not only did I have a Taylor Swift album stuck in my head while on retreat, but it was reportedly not even that good, either.

In this spiritual and cultural ennui, there was nothing for it but to fold the whole thing – repetitive thinking; internet gossip; the existential question of whether one can really only make great art when recovering from a breakup – into my retreat experience. At first, I tried to register the return of ‘Father Figure’ or ‘Wi$h Li$t’ the same way one regards the return of a ball thrown at one’s feet by an insistent dog. This I have some experience with. But more lyrics only came to mind, albeit those from last year’s record.[3] 

At this, despite myself, I began to laugh. Feeling embarrassed about having Taylor Swift hooked around your brain is like blaming yourself if it rains, I thought: never mind the reviews, the woman is as unstoppable as the weather. I realised that in that one short week before I went on retreat, my life at home had been so saturated by The Life of a Showgirl that almost everything I now did in that space prompted its mental offering. It was a phenomenon of working memory and mind, nothing more, nothing less; a kind of prior incantatem[4] of lyric or rhythm that my brain deemed necessary in that moment.

And what was it, I wondered, that was so necessary about this re-spooling of songs in my head? Once the gravity drained out of it, I could investigate its tone and texture. It felt as though my brain was trying to achieve something; there was a quasi-urgency to its beat-hitting strikes. It took me a little time, and then I realised: the rushing energy of term-time, keeping on top of several things at once, juggling without confuddling, didn’t just vanish into thin air because I had gone on retreat. My Showgirl ear-worms were like every other instance of ‘driven doing mode’ or repetitive thinking that had ever cropped up during any meditation I had practised or led. It was simply my mind trying to help with the task at hand, and doing so with whatever material it happened to have recently picked up.

So the next time Hope sniffed the Michaelmas daisies outside, and I heard ‘Mich-ael-mas-daisies’ to the tune of ‘Elizabeth Taylor’, I rather enjoyed it. My brain spun ‘Honey’ and ‘Wi$h Li$t’ out a few more times, then worked through ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ and ‘Opalite’. At some stage – I can’t pinpoint when – the ear-worms stopped, thus demonstrating what I had been trying to discern all the way along: that everything really is impermanent; and that you are not your thoughts. As for The Life of a Showgirl, what can I say? She's the voice of my generation. 

Warm wishes for this autumnal weekend,

Kitty

[1] ‘Eldest Daughter’ – that bridge is why they call her the Bridgemaster; and the eponymous track, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’.

[2] The pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore (both 2020) – but I will take alternative suggestions.

[3] ‘I put narcotics into all of my songs / That’s why you’re still singing along’ (‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,’ The Tortured Poets Department, 2024)

[4] Not Taylor, this time, but Harry Potter: the spell that reveals the magic used most recently by a wand.