A Thousand Words

Sitting in a rigid church pew, watching light adorn a high-ceilinged, painted cathedral. Halfway through the performance I have a couple realizations. I am surrounded by people who represent past lives I’ve led in Philadelphia, watching a person perform songs that deal largely with personal legacy, relationships, growth, and pain. I have not been to a Philadelphia church sanctuary since 2008. The cushion is uncomfortable and the memories are a little discomfiting as well. I’m constantly embarrassed when I remember my younger self, even if no one remembers me as an embarrassment. Art students who are still in their 20s, figuring out their niche in the downtrodden adult world, still practically able to ignore stimuli around them. Saw one person I knew who has experienced a great loss, an appropriate attendee. Ditto to my emo idol, Johm: A peripheral person in my life for over 10 years who I don’t know, kind of like P. Elverum himself. Aging punks who have a real reverence for the music being performed, and are perhaps more reverent because of how much psychotropics they consumed prior to the show. We discussed Watchmen, Chernobyl, Huppman, flaking out. Talking new media and local connections with these grown boys was as refreshing as an experience I could have hoped for given their level of glaze. 

Inevitably, being in this space carried me to times I have spent here. Hanging out with Aaron and a chattering Bradford Cox while his band looked on with loathing, hearing shoegaze synth erupt from a plexiglass box emanating blue light  -- “Cathedral - M83″, Nosferatu on Halloween in 2008 with pipe organ accompaniment. I thought a lot about my past Beat worship that has been polished by this point in my thirties. It served a purpose to keep me moving and looking for things buried in the grey world that can bring me a glimmer of light. That will hopefully persist in a way that is helpful. Is it crystallized the point where I can never lose it? On some levels it seems self-congratulatory, but that cheapens the joy I derive from these wistful moments. I bought his homemade release “Now Only” because it speaks the most to me about these feelings and features the songs that feel most like the crucially revisited entries in a diary. I could have left with three other records, and regret not picking up the latest but there is a lifetime for collecting relics of memory. Showing up alone to see what was an outward display of isolation and loneliness seemed appropriate enough to eat one of my $25 tickets. Also bringing a companion to an event like this stokes expectations I am not sure could be met. An encounter with the only person I knew would be in attendance at the merch table left me feeling more alone.

Karl Blau did a bunch of a cappella covers of songs, including Snow is Falling in Manhattan by Purple Mountains, a darkly beautiful song that reflected the evening’s theme of grief. His funny earnestness brought the room to warm crescendos of applause. 

Up to this point I have always had my personal expectations of what the mind behind Mount Eerie would be like in person. Equal parts boyish, thoughtful, grim, and fixated on everyday beauty, it is easy to follow the connections his music weaves through my mind. He should look like a small form, too small to sail a ship, yet striking out to sail it through the tumults ahead. I can picture myself as a child playing in the schoolyard of my elementary school, looking up at trees, lacking the willful desire to climb them, paralyzed by their infinity and beauty. Digging in the dirt to make clay, picking small stones to build some imagined palace for the future. My goals all seemed immediate and although I knew nothing of the vastness of the world, I still felt it lurking at the periphery. I felt that colossal jumble of personae, physical objects, renderings of human existence and played in spite of them. That is the closest I can get to pinpointing how I have felt listening to Phil’s music.

Phil’s voice and appearance has an innocence that belies his inner struggle. In person, behind the table selling his work, Phil himself seems unfit for his form. He is obviously torn between celebrity and reclusiveness, and a whole album of songs about breaking up with an A-list celebrity is what he has to show for it. I told him I looked forward to seeing his performance. His self-consciousness about the show didn’t seem to impact his performance, since craft like his seems to exist completely separately from the consequence of how he feels. I truthfully hadn’t listened to the record enough to recognize every song, but that is how I have enjoyed some of the more moving performances I’ve attended (e.g. Emily Haines, Miracle Fortress). The imagery woven by Phil and Julie included the affecting “Widows” which closes with a memory of the fledgling love that came before Phil and Michelle’s likely schism. The accompanying beauty was hearing the songs that acknowledge nothing about the world but its frank existence in contrast to being within a building built to praise a higher power. Phil’s message is clear: the universe is just an experience that we have, it is indifferent to how or what we feel about it. There are things that we cannot help but note: like a bonfire, the loss of contact (eternally) with the ones we love. 

Concise. The conceit of an incisive tooth. To bite and gnash while the anxious jaw clicks – small smashes. A half closed eye that assesses the moisture inside itself, ignore ongoing cell death. A popped toe is this and it makes time slow, takes time to turn over. When a chair from the air fell in my space. Purple shock to the shield, toenail a tone ailed. I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them. And it’s not proper that I took a toe and two heels up ten thousand feet. But they were raw and it was dark. Up way up feeling closer to the heavens when beyond the clouds is just a deep vastness and fastens me back to the soil upon which my torn toe is pressed. I remember being distressed. I’d shut my lids to shut my mind down at night. No avail and no empty spots available. Circled the lot in repetitive loops and could not park my psyche. But a dark animation in heavy lines was a mind’s occupation. I hear things from my bed and even though I no longer fear the dark I hear the dark. If it isn’t the eye’s rough-hewn edges it’s the tune that dredges: Dirges backed on hi hat out of a hiwatt and I don’t know what. Kerouac took speed and spun out a real long one but was a shit role model as the hapless God of Fun. He rolled in an old model across an undiscovered America that was understood cool if you understood it. Now you can’t make friends that way or this way. Just stay put and see who comes your way. Still get giddy for those horns, man, just don’t grow addicted to your own life. Forking paths make it harder to look back but you’ve got to look back or risk losing and boozing your mind like Jack.

I had a vision about losing my youth when I once ingested psilocybin. I was downtown in 2008 and feeling great, like actually invincible and reality was indistinguishable. Ironically I could have lost it all some hours earlier while riding an ancient rusting train headed northwest on tracks by the river. No self love nor lover made for a reckless boy who was determined to wreck. The realest illusion (causing some confusion) was not knowing where I would end up on a train headed...where? Not wanting to know, not sure how to grow, just a nervous pacing runner awaiting the starting gunner. The place I was frightened of leaving actually remains in tattered shirts and tempered outlooks. Wrote it down in one of my notebooks. Drew myself in some perverse cartoon sketchbook. I can carry it with me without carrying it, dig me? It’s more like the maddening substance that unleashed my wild electric synapses on themselves has crystallized around the pulsing part of my primitive mind, just the train, pumping and chugging. 

I must have climbed because I found myself at the top of some ladder. I rung up the slick brown fuel of tired grey people, I stung my wrists with burning sugar, I slung a bag of medical essential materials over my shoulder, I flung needles to pump a watery salt substitute into the fluid-compromised. I could be doing any damn thing and I would be effective, still I knew I would want for more. I can see an end where my expectation meets its destination and I think ‘has that ever been true?’ So wrapped up in journeying through Sal’s paradise I couldn’t plan beyond my nose’s tip, my pants’ seat and thus I had trapped myself in the young idyllic chair from which I could not extract myself. This is the seat I was comfortably slumped in until reality looked at me in the form of a chance to be killed by my own appendix. The thought of losing the opportunity to continue writing my story, instead to be penning an epilogue just before the appendices. I longed to change my life but didn’t want to look at it hard enough, didn’t feel scarred enough.

A grade-school shrimp, I felt made to limp my way away from altercations with people who were bigger, angrier and objectified the ganglier. I had glasses broken, feelings trampled, insults sampled on me. It’s not strange as an adult to me when someone emotionally wounded wants to project these feelings onto me. When you get pushed and pounded you get attention and that was key to the kid in me. Not that I ever put myself in those situations purposefully but I admired the ministrations that were visited upon me after those who’d pound me would leave. Sometimes it felt nice to be pitied.

In which I am an erythrocyte.

I will live for one hundred twenty days -- that’s if I am among the most fortunate. I may be a cell, but I do not hold or contain in the way that other sorts of cells do. Rather, I am contained. I struggle to do endless laps with the meager meals I am given. I stack myself neatly and pile up at thoroughfares where my highway bottlenecks. This roulade I lean into is a physical wonder, a purposeful accident. I feel like I’ll be strong forever, even if I am eternally busy hauling just as much garbage as I can carry. Imagine never going home to a leisurely moment. Imagine being given no rest, not even for an hour. I am robust and shapely, with strong curvature and a stout frame of pure sinew. I am tender and small, scooting by unnoticed most of the time. Matter out of place, that’s what gets noticed. I’ll just spend my whole life in place, to be sure.

I can’t help but expect I have a greater future waiting for me. A destiny where nothing will be wasted. Every part of my earthly vessel will be absorbed into a communal, universal plethora. If there is a comfort I have in my grueling existence, it is that. My higher purpose is to join an ever-replenishing well of matter. My sense of doubt sometimes nags me in my short life. The best method I have found to avoid a crippling paralysis at the nihilistic thoughts is to peer deep, looking down into my purpose. The further rounded down my gaze is, the less I feel the onus of the labor that is this mortal life. To be part of a whole, to encounter friction, strife, and death, to serve nobly a being greater than myself -- what more is there?

If I were to escape, meaning would be lost. Concentration would be worthless; focus, futile. What good would my energy do me in the void? My utility is so core to my existence. Of course I, as all of us, have a soul. However, my entire family knows this metaphysical thing as a “fold”. My fold is my most unique attribute and certainly part of my utility to the higher purpose I serve. My fold is the secret of any talent I appear to possess. I have no will or practiced strength that is not directly rooted in my fold. It cannot be seen, nor can it be touched. It will dissolve into the world I inhabit once I die. It will not be remembered so much as renewed. My fold can tolerate the abuses of my endless journey through highway tunnels subterranean. Eventually it will disintegrate and that is the future we all hope for. Far off lights pressing against sturdy walls sometimes pass me. They are the closest thing to brightness I will likely see. I am basically blind, but a sense exists of what is around, composite shapes give structure to my modest, maroon surroundings. An unfathomably deep, and thick presence bears down on me by the second. It is so hot all the time, but by the same token, I know that if I slow down I will freeze to death. It is just so brutally tiring and yet utterly invigorating. Would that all beings could find an existence this purposive. I have no yearning, no want.

It is true that I wouldn’t be alive without my family. We endlessly support each other. We never need time apart, at least I know I don’t. We don’t talk, but we constantly hug and ritually queue for meals. I know what they are thinking always. Rivalry is far from the point. Service and joy and sacrifice. I am my brother and my brother is me. We are all reflections of one another, identical. We never grieve when there is loss. There simply isn’t time to do so. Once or twice I have seen untold hundreds of my family members leave hurriedly and perish far from the known territory and highway. They did not scream, cry or suffer. I did not feel their loss, for their folds were without a known resting place. Whether they vanish into nothing, or carry on their journey many depths of time farther from me.

A strong, suggestive undulation propels me even while I seem to propel myself. Often, the flexible laneside borders on the highway come just slightly closer together, forcing me on my journey at quicker pace.  I’ve been running almost seventy rotations per minute most days. I don’t think I’ve done much beyond one hundred forty laps a minute, and even then, that wasn’t for long. My pace of work is more comfortable when I don’t feel rushed, not to mention I feel more accomplished in my task. I can do what is necessary with more time to do it. Y’know what I mean? Counting laps becomes a fun exercise when you are as honed in on your job as I am. It’s something to pass the time and keep a placeholder for age and time between my brothers and I. If I got a chance to pause and say one thing to my brothers, it would be a sincere thank you. This life would be positively meaningless without the others beside me to share it. Our experience is a mirror we each possess for the purpose of holding up to one another.