"Twilight Campfighter" is the song, beyond any of the others, that really cemented Guided by Voices in my mind as something truly special. The album its from, Isolation Drills, is full of gems and hooks and the kind of sparkling, power pop sound that I love, and this track embodies that above all.
I'll start with the title, which I initially thought might be "Twilight campfire," probably because it would have made more sense at the outset. However, my mistake is a productive one, because on the level of sound the two are close, "campfighter" only adds a barely enunciated extra syllable and /t/ sound, but retains the /r/ sound of "campfire." But what it gains is reference to a person and a sense of striving and mission. The TC (twilight campfighter) is still associated with camp fires and all that goes with them: comfort, adventure, safety, vision, wisdom, and perhaps above all, something that keeps the darkness at bay.
The potential salvation described in this song isn't easy, as the second line makes clear ("You build your fires into an open wound"): if we are to be saved, the process will be painful like cauterizing a wound to kill an infection. And what an infection: the situation, as this song presents it, is indeed grim, it is one of a existence as a cog in the capitalist machine:
As we vegetate and wait around for brighter days
And can dance contented to the sound of money
These lines are pretty damning in their description of an infection that is both inner and outer: the word choice of "vegetate" evokes the passivity of a consumerist lifestyle down to the idea that life is about mindless growth and nothing else. The image of people "danc[ing] contented to the sound of money" speaks to the way that our movements through the world are carefully orchestrated from without. Our bodies (and minds) move in harmony with the system that envelops us. Even the fact that it is contentment that characterizes out dancing is damning: if we often think of dancing as a passionate and expressive act, if the highest emotion it gets is contentment then it would seem that much of our affective lives have been leveled off.
But, to further flesh out what this song has to say about the situation we are in, it is important to note that not all is dark: Pollard sings about how, "on these darker trails...to hike through dangerous weather you need twilight eyes." Ultimately it is a twilight time, in which things are murky and ambiguous and it is hard to make out distinct shapes. The upside is that this does mean that the light has not fully gone and not everything is lost, hence the tender and affecting praise of the TC's visionary "twilight eyes":
Could I have seen a sight
Much greater than your twilight eyes
That penetrate our silent lives (lies)?
Things are grim, but they are grim in a particularly murky way in which it can be hard to see just how and why they are so. That is why vision is one of the most important moral qualities. Someone who sees things as they really are--both with the world and ourselves--can help us see as well. Our
lives are silent because we are not truly living them, but dancing to
someone else's song, as it were (hence the sung ambiguity between
"lives" and "lies," in the current state one cannot tell the
difference). "Twilight eyes" can see past those illusory surfaces (and this world is made up of so many mere surfaces), to see what is really important and to help others see the same:
All for longing causes
Racing minds and lengthy pauses
All who must soon shed their veils
And wipe their eyes.
As a final note that I suspect is entirely a matter of my own associations (although who can say for sure), the "twilight eyes" always make me think of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, specifically the figure of Tiresias in "III. The Fire Sermon." Without going too deep into it, The Waste Land is fiercely critical of the seemingly empty lives of those it portrays and as Eliot explains it, Tiresias serves the function of the blind seer who combines the experiences of both sexes, and can thus see better than everyone else:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward
The "darkness" of modernity seems fixed in the violet hour, in the murky twilight where there are no clearcut distinctions to depend upon, something perhaps even more unsettling than simple night.
