A
confused
teenage
girl
sighs, “I think I might be
broken.” Dr. Jean Milburn
(Gillian
Anderson,
“The
X-Files”) replies, “Sex doesn’t
make us whole. So how could
you be broken?” Though Dr.
Milburn is speaking to one of
the many students at Moordale
Secondary School who comes
to ask her advice, she’s really
talking to you. This therapy
session isn’t just for the sake
of fiction. The message is clear
and it’s meant for the viewing
audience.
In the second season of
Netflix’s
“Sex
Education,”
sixteen-year-old
Otis
(Asa
Butterfield,
“The
Space
Between Us”) reopens his ‘sex
advice clinic’ at his high school
with his best friends Eric
(Ncuti Gatwa, “Stonemouth”)
and Maeve (Emma Mackey,
“Badger Lane”). Business is
booming, as an outbreak of
chlamydia-based hysteria has
wreaked havoc on the student
population
of
Moordale.
Despite
the
business’
success, Otis’ personal life
is in shambles: Now dating
classmate Ola (Patricia Allison,
“Moving On”), Otis learns that
his mother, Dr. Milburn, also
happens to be dating Ola’s
father. Realizing the poor sex-
ed curriculum is the culprit
behind
the
community’s
descent into chaos, the board
hires Dr. Milburn to interview
the student body in hopes of
revising lessons to actually

answer their most pressing
questions.
These first few episodes
of the season capture what
makes
“Sex
Education”
so
remarkable — sexuality has
been ignored for so long by
so many institutions that a
whole town goes mad. In a high
school that needs not one, but
two
relationship
therapists,
the
deep-seated
cultural
issues surrounding sex are

more present than ever. Every
student that consults Otis or
Dr. Milburn considers them a
godsend, and with the school’s
limited curriculum, it’s not
hard to see why.
“Sex
Education”
takes
place in a slightly fantastical
midway between America and
Britain and represents the
most potent aspects of each

country’s pop culture. A wide
variety of races, ethnicities,
genders, sexual orientations,
religions,
abilities
and
lifestyles are represented and
united by their collective lack
of representation in education
and public awareness. Students
struggle
with
unwanted
pregnancies, confusion over
sexual orientation, personal
trauma and all the complex
emotions
that
accompany
the universal experience of
growing up in 2020.
Despite addressing mature
topics and including explicit
love scenes, “Sex Education”
may be the most wholesome
show on TV right now. Based
entirely on the idea that talking
about your problems will help
you feel better, the show has
become therapeutic for not
only its characters but its
audience as well. The conflicts
of the story are resolved with
honesty, empathy and clear
communication. In a culture
that emphasizes silence and
shame in matters of sexuality,
the
refreshing
notion
that
kindness and understanding
can make a difference feels
groundbreaking.
Of all the advice given in
“Sex Education,” none of it
is meant solely for the high
school
students
or
their
clueless parents and teachers.
Every second of the show is
crafted to teach its audience
that they’re okay. No one is
truly abnormal. No one is truly
broken. Sexuality is nothing to
be afraid or ashamed of, and
“Sex Education” is begging you
to realize it. This education is
for you, so you better take some
good notes.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 — 5A

‘Sex Education’ Season 2:
the show that 2020 needs

NETFLIX

ANYA SOLLER
Daily Arts Writer

“David died yesterday.”
This is the opening declaration
of First Aid Kit’s single “Strange
Beauty.”
Whispered
in
soft,
lilting
undertones, as if a word spoken too
harshly will break it, the opening
of the song lulls the listener into
hypnosis. The world keeps turning,
the song keeps playing and First
Aid Kit keeps singing. Then the
dam breaks and reality crashes
through –– “It’s left me gasping at
the wheel.” One question lingers
in the turbulence: “Oh, how can I
explain the colossal loss I feel?” A
line that hangs all at once heavy
as a stone and light as a feather,
suspended perpetually in the
intangible cavern of song. It is only
in the second verse that reality
sets in –– Death has finally come
to call. A parallel to the numbing
shock of mourning, First Aid
Kit’s “Strange Beauty” is a heart-
breaking, morbid tribute to loss.
The mysterious “David” whom
First Aid Kit mourns in “Strange
Beauty” and “Random Rules” is
late musician David Berman, who
passed away in August of 2019.
“I think a lot of people were as

shocked as I was upon hearing the
news of David Berman’s passing,”
Klara Söderberg, one of the
Söderberg sisters, noted in a public
statement. “It didn’t seem real. It
left me completely devastated. So I
wrote the song ‘Strange Beauty’ to
try to make sense of my feelings.”
There is something that rings
fresh and raw in the crooning of
First Aid Kit’s songs; something
that, months later, still wears that
stain of mourning.
The two-track release functions
as its own call and response.
“Random Rules,” a cover from
Berman’s band Silver Jews, is
honest and vulnerable, a tribute
to
Berman’s
memory.
Where
“Random Rules” looks for comfort
in the past, “Strange Beauty”
tackles the bleakness of the present
and future. While each song can
stand comfortably on its own, it
feels like a betrayal to indulge
in the grief of “Strange Beauty”
in divorce with the heartfelt
celebration of “Random Rules.”
“In 1984, I was hospitalized
for approaching perfection,” First
Aid Kit echoes in the opening
lines of “Random Rules.” There
is something painful, aching, in
the chorus of “Strange Beauty”:
“And when you are gone, the
world it moves on / But it’s lost its
strange beauty,” for the absence

of
Bernam’s
self-proclaimed
“perfection” has dulled the colors
of the world –– at least, in the eyes
of First Aid Kit.
But why do I feel the urge to
return to the grim, rainy day of
“Strange Beauty”? In part, it is
the lingering resonance of grief,
mourning and infantile blindness
that permeates the song, and which
strikes the heart so thoroughly. It is
hard to forget the aching rhetoric
of the Söderberg sisters. More so,
it is the lack of acknowledgement
for the track’s novelty that drives
me to write about this single. The
coverage of First Aid Kit’s tribute
has been unforgivably shallow,
concise and breezed over. In its
coverage, “Strange Beauty” simply
nods to an artist of obscurity,
David Bernam; a quiet affirmation
that First Aid Kit remains relevant
and active in their music making,
that they have not faded into the
swirling pot of unknown names
and inconsequential bands.
“Strange Beauty,” however, is
more than Bernam, more than
First Aid Kit and more than any
throw-away filler piece to meet a
deadline. “Strange Beauty” is grief
put to words –– a miraculous feat,
when grief so often loss robs us of
our speech, cruelly infantilizing its
victims with the crippling isolation
of heartbreak. First Aid Kit offers

us the gift of comprehension.
Those familiar with mourning
will recognize the solemn truth in
these lyrics. Those that have never
grieved have the chance to open
a rare window into a soul at war
with itself.
The song is deceptive in its
complexity. There is no overt
ingenuity. No exotic metaphors,
or winding prose. The words
are simple, but the meaning is
significant. “David died yesterday
/ Today it’s raining,” the song
begins with first steps, when grief
descends and the world narrows to
simple facts and straightforward
acknowledgements of existence.
This is the “drowning hour,” as
poet Marian Lineaweaver writes
in “My Son: Leavetaking.” Time
suspends, and everything is new
and unsure –– you reach for what
you know.
To be honest, my affection for

this song comes from the striking
parallel it holds with my own
encounters with loss. “Oh it comes
in waves, or a single tear,” the
struggle to cope is a battle waged
endlessly, hopelessly, and one I
know all too well. The pain doesn’t
fade, but there is something
unquestionably validating in the
words murmured in song that go
straight to my heart.
First Aid Kit is not the first to
pen an open letter to grief, nor will
they be the last. I could very well
be deluding myself, too, that this
song is any more special than the
hundreds that have come before.
Grief is a funny thing, found in
strange places and things. For
some, it might be a memory, a
penny, a picture, an old shirt, or a
song. But while “Strange Beauty”
resonates with my own experience,
I do not hold steadfast to its words
because it holds a fading piece of

who I’ve lost. Rather, because –– as
I said before –- there is validation
nestled within the chords, the
sharp breaths and the lulls of
this song. A validation in shared
understanding.
I will not strike of the pretence
of defining another’s grief –– it
is far too personal a journey for
something so audacious. If nothing
else, I hope that whoever reads this
will come away with affirmation
and recognition of their own
grief, as I have. But I will be bold
enough to argue that First Aid Kit
got one thing soul-shatteringly
right. When asked to explain what
is most painful about grief, it is
without doubt that “the world it’s
lost its strange beauty.” From First
Aid Kit I gained a sense of ease.

First Aid Kit’s ‘Strange
Beauty’: grief put to words

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
MUSIC NOTEBOOK

MADELEINE GANNON
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIPEDIA

I think I heard about Joan
Murray via an article in The New
Yorker by Dan Chiasson. What
jumped out at me was a poem short
enough for him to quote in full:
Three mountains high,
O you are a deep and marvelous
blue.
It was with my palms
That I rounded out your slopes;
There was an easy calmness,
An irrelevant ease that touched me
And I stretched my arms and
smoothed
Three mountains high.
I rarely remember in detail
anything I read on the internet,
but this poem stuck with me: it has
a sort of slant symmetry to it, an
incantatory quality, a mysterious
momentum. I love that the word
“irrelevant” is used instead of
“irreverent,”
and
I
love
that
calmness is modified with “easy.”
The poem’s design is small even as
its scale expands so that the speaker
can hold mountains in her arms. It
expanded in my mind after I read it,
acquired a prismatic quality. I found
a collection of her poems shortly
after that.
She had a short, strange life. She
was born in 1917 and died before
her 25th birthday, leaving behind
a body of work largely incomplete
and
fragmentary.
Toward
the
end of her wayward, largely self-
directed education, Murray took a
few classes in poetry from Auden
at The New School and sought out
his feedback. Before then, she had
studied acting and dance, but it
was her encounter with Auden that
prompted her to focus on poetry
and to produce most of her extant
written work. Her mother blamed
her death (from the heart condition
she had since youth) on Auden, who
had prompted her compositional
mania. Grant Code, the editor who
prepared her poems for posthumous
publication, described her papers as
“a confusion: pages of prose mixed
with pages of verse and scarcely
two pages of anything together
that belonged together.” Her poetry
existed at the time of her death in
a stage of complete disarray, as it
was largely all still in the process of
being written and edited.
The exuberance of this brief
period of composition is palpable in
the writing. There’s an unschooled
sincerity, an absence of being
weighed down by what came before
her. It feels like she is perpetually
stumbling on her own ability to
send sparks flying. Her poetry finds
unexpected connections between

images, juxtapositions that have
a mysterious, incantatory energy.
It’s unsparingly sharp, with little
connective tissue, jumping from
vague impressions to deep feeling
and back again. The strength of
her images insists on meaning
that must be disentangled from
the surface texture, which is often
grammatically
ambiguous
and
sparsely punctuated. Take this
untitled poem, which opens as
follows:
Instinct and sleep you are two
passages that converge
Two faces that stare and reflect
back one vision
The sea and the night both stir
their profound surge
Each shouldering the boundary of
their prison.
A man who has raised the inhibited
line of off horizon
Will stretch his thought to the
beach where two converge.
The poem begins by setting
up an opposition that wanders
into a metaphor and runs with it,
then introduces an inexplicable
character, creating convolutions in
its structures of meaning that aren’t
entirely clear on the surface. It’s also
possible that this first stanza is just
the product of a wandering mind —
the image of the sea simply letting
sleep reverberate through it. She has
this way of remaining declarative
and knotty all at once, delivering
ambiguities emphatically.
She writes with themes in mind,
though, themes that become more
apparent the more one reads her.
Her repository of images is more
schematic than it appears at first,
tending toward the Classic and
pastoral. She frequently uses the
image of small, insular groups of
people, marriage, heady admiration
and longing (which can bring
Sappho to mind — she gets a
mention in the poem “Ascetic: Time
Misplaced”). She finds in water
(especially the ocean) a metaphor
for instinct and indeterminacy. The
sea appears as a kind of Dionysian
force,
symbolizing
intuition
and
sensuality
alongside
the
immateriality and uncertainty of
the mind. Just as frequently, the
built environment stands in for
human agency and ambition and
all we want to accomplish in the
world. These two opposing poles
are frequently played off each other.
In one of her only titled poems, “The
Builder,” “the young of the people”
insist that “it is the action of water
that is the nearest thing to man.”
They are rejoined to remain at
their task — “We’re building towers
of Babel that will crumble down
before dawn.” The striking fourth
stanza of the builder recounts an
intense desire: “If there is sea I want

to pack it up in my arms / And let
the blue globe of all that water fill
in my mouth / Rill up my head, my
chest, burst out of the sullen seed of
my loin.”
The built environment is a central
concern of hers more generally.
Buildings are the product of the
mind that change their meaning
by being lived in, a canny metaphor
for cultural production and the
weight of history. She has multiple
poems that use an architect as
a sort of archetypal figure. She
frequently imagines her architect
as “unemployed,” dreaming about
possibility without being able to
act. To me, this misses according
with Ayn Rand if only because she
devotes pages and pages of poetry
to the lives of workers. She has
poems that examine the builders
who enact the designs of architects
and devotes special attention to
the small country houses she saw
in Vermont. More anecdotally,
Farnoosh Fathi, in her introduction
to the 2017 NYRB edition of her
poems, quotes her as once self-
describing as a “labor-unionist or
communist” Joan of Arc, which
is the kind of image that would
sound ridiculous from anyone else
but just about fits her. She makes a
convincing mystic and has the same
fervor.
Like Joan of Arc, Murray has a
kind of lowercase “q” queerness
about her, intimations that never
really rise to the surface. She
describes husbands hypothetically
in her pastoral poems, but her
own devotions, both in poetry
and prose, are to other women.
She has two poems, “Ego Alter
Ego” and “On Dit!” that recount
extended gazes on women, the
former close by the sea (again),
and the latter during a candlelit
night. Fathi opens her selection of
Murray’s correspondance with a
jaw-dropping letter to the novelist
Helen Anderson that opens with
something that feels like erotic
worship. “Dear Helen, I am held
speechless in the hands of some
spirit indefinite and prostrate. Oh,
believe me, the nights slip an endless
chain of thought to where the curve
of your body and the subtle uplift of
the neck and head are pillowed, and
I may only dream that perhaps there
is a traced loveliness that is your
thought, lingering for a moment in
the vacuum of a moment’s shadow
or a moment’s life.” It’s possible that
she means this in what is ultimately
a chaste way, but it’s also undeniable
that this breathless sentence speaks
for itself.

Declarative and knotty, all
at once: On Joan Murray

EMILY YANG
Daily Literature Columnist

Sex Education

Season 2, Ep. 1-4

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