After Rilke

 All is shifting liminality.

            I know this as I walk

                        and shimmering grasses caress my solitude.

They flow onwards toward the sun

            with everything glistening and gliding:

                        children’s voices, bird’s voices, wind.

Clouds are mirrors of the ocean and

            bird wings are mirrors of wind.

                        I hear a train shudder past.

Now an airplane sings overhead,

            lazily stretching its sound waves across the sky,

                        engine yawning like a cat in the sun.

Sun! Like the center of a candle it soothes me

            until a cloud covers my spotted path

                        and a sudden premonition of nighttime

sends shivers down my spine;

            a siren sounds in the distance.

                        How long must I walk without return?

There is no home any longer that I can think of

            except for the immaterial one that resides

                        inside of the void already within me,

vast as exterior night,

with little stars of memories,

dots of consciousness

amidst the slumbering vacant depths.

            I recall all the deaths in my life.

                        I recall death.

Life is perhaps more unbearable.

Where am I then?

            In what depths do I feel such things?

What vacant halls and dusty waiting rooms,

            worse even than The Trial!

                        Memorials, memorandums, and masks:

All this our daily boredom,

our daily bread

                        to bear and bear

When I am just seeking the lightness of a cloud,

             the drifting impermanence of a plane engine heard overhead

                        and the inexpressible comfort in that sound,

in grass, in it’s humility, in its patience…

            Windblown fields I have yet to meet beckon me

                        with their cradle-rockling lullabies

to solitude…

Oh, the blessed relief that only solitude can provide!

                        How much brighter the distant window of a house shines

at night!

Memories Are Made of This...

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, a plane, one of many, landed in JFK airport—the city was still opening its eyes. Among the passengers (lawyers, workers, wives, husbands, criminals, teachers, students, prophets) there was a pithy group of exchange students from Bordeaux, France. When said students arrived at my school, I knew something mysterious had opened. An announcement was made and they were introduced nervously to the rest of us. I knew I should be poised to reach out and touch their newness, smell their rain-soaked jackets, and engaged in the patter of their accented talk.

A week passed. I remained silent. As irreversible time did its work, I persisted, simply not knowing how. Moving forward again to the final fated day of the exchange, the last hours of promise were reaching their end. Change was negligible. An aria’s final suspended chord was ringing into the present, playing to an auditorium of nobody and nothing, and I was the only one onstage. (There had been a few cursory moments of connection in the previous weeks, but they never transcended the moniker of organized formality.)

It was in this final hour I decided to act. Seized with vitality, the morning propelled me forward. During breakfast, I grabbed Tomas, my closest French acquaintance and requested that he gather his comrades and meet me on the sixth floor. The seed of an idea had entered my mind.

I laughed with excitement. It was simple. I was going to send the students on their way with the one gift I could offer: music. The venue was to be the sixth floor alcove, and my weapon of choice an old beige piano, christened by the fingers and boogers of more boisterous children than I cared to imagine. As Tomas and his friends filed into the room, I could tell that they were quietly questioning the reason for this excursion. Once makeshift seating was arranged, they looked at me openly and expectantly. I clumsily related my intent. It probably sounded something like this:

“Hi, I uh just wanted to tell you all that your presence has been important to this community and I wish had gotten to know you better but yeah anyway I just want to wish you farewell and leave you with a piece of music you are all beautiful this is ‘Liebestraum’ composed by Franz Liszt.”

Finally I sank into the piano and played. I entered the keys and struck up waves of sound. The French students sat silently. My posterior hovered a full American inch off the bench. As the final rippling notes of the piece disappeared into space, there was a momentary pause. Then they clapped. I did not expect them to clap. I had made mistakes, but the smiles on their faces made me forget. A moment was shared between us. Something beyond words, whether they be English, French, or more accurately, a combination of the two. For the rest of the day, there was a warmth of rapport between us and a familiarity previously unknown. I am still in contact with two of the students who that day I learned to know.

When they got back on that plane and flew out of JFK to a place hundreds of miles away, they carried a tiny segment of my soul with them. A life lived in delight is a life in which every piece of the soul is distributed outward, one by one. A life lived in delight is a life in which these pieces attach themselves to the people and the trees and the birds and the falling dust, and nothingness becomes irrelevant.

This is why I want to attempt to know people people people people… People from anywhere, everywhere; people who have lived every kind of life—rich, poor, religious, agnostic, nymphomaniac, celibate, vegetarian, scholarly, illiterate—I want to know their stories, their passions, and their fears, because they are also my own; they resonate within me like a hammer hitting the string of a piano, the mechanism at work, creating imperfect sound.

Water

            I glanced over the craggy hot rocks of Sicily’s southernmost shore. The brilliance of the sun radiated off the bright rocks, and I was tempted to shield my eyes. The white foam of the Mediterranean engulfed the rocks and the spray sprinkled my bare skin. As the water receded, there opened a momentary void, a silence. The air hung still and suspended for a couple moments longer before it was shattered by another crash. The foamy water teased me again, the little droplets tempting me to take the plunge. I did not. I simply sat on my hot rock as the unerring song of the sea endured in the otherwise languid afternoon.

            As I sat I began to internalize the rhythm of the water and the song of intense ferocity became comforting to me. It embraced me, like the arms of a mother holding her baby at birth. I wanted to bury myself in the sound of the waves. I wanted to fall into the rhythm and release…

            The way the water consumed the rocks I wished it to consume me. The way it swirled around their bases and came back again, with the rocks holding fast…

            The push and pull. The struggle of the tides of life. Always on the brink of chaos, but always in control. I wanted to release myself to this struggle, this broken song, and let it consume me. Never have a felt happier.

Recalling a Trip (Work in Progress)

Memories are less like postcards and more like three. Second. Snapshots.

I remember Northern Ireland like that. I cannot point to things that happened during that trip that changed my life, but it has carved a space for itself within my cranium nonetheless. Before the end, this “essay” will most-likely turn out platitudinous: a postcard. Here I sit, languid in the late afternoon sun, and moments drift back to me. Listen to this, dear reader.

Coruscated light dapples the the graveyard, adding to the impression of ground-moss as dull chartreuse blanket. We are in Northern Ireland, and tall the graves are Protestant, English, incomplete.

With the excitement of ten year old youth, I buy Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the third installment in his trilogy kneeling on the smooth crystalline floor of an airport bookstore.

Eating corn beef hash in some musty inn at two o’clock in the afternoon.  The hills looked greener than ever through the window. Time moved slowly while we ate (and the adults drank.) There was an air of inactivity to the whole affair, and the afternoon was to unfold in a leisurely manner. It didn’t matter. 

The foam of the frothy sea curling and crashing against Giant’s Causeway. The stone pillars of octagons jutting perfectly beneath our rapid adolescent feet. 

The ruins of a castle… incomplete… themselves fragments.

My friend’s grandfather talks of Eschatology in a dusty room with a window overlooking the sea.

I am jerked violently back into my present tense as the memories stop cascading through me, though the tides continue and continue. Full stop.

Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II: An Appreciation

This album will play thousands of years from now when nature has reclaimed the earth and only faint memories of the human species remain. It will play as an alien race descends from their crafts and finds lost traces of cities that once were. These are only some of the situations that this album conjures up. It is also perfect for listening while: waiting for a flight, driving late at night, exploring an ancient temple in the depths of the jungle, wandering around the MET museum while looking at the artifacts, studying through sleepless nights, getting lost in the Tibetan mountains, looking at the stars, laying on the living room couch and at the ceiling, sleeping, and of course, wandering through a power station on acid.

Thank you Richard James for this beautiful, haunting, timeless, and forever enigmatic music: the soundtrack to all of our dreams.