Dear Andrew,
I love you,
and I must preface this by expressing* my deeply (*to the best of my ability)
held Gratitude for my two best friends and their nurturing role and camaraderie
in my life. Besides that, the both of you enliven me with enthusiasm for this
exciting Social world. But this letter is about what you do not know about me.
It will help you to understand my idealism, why my point of view is God to me,
and how I refuse to consider it a figment of my mere inventiveness.
I can cast
my mind back to late childhood, and then there was a profound Solidarity that I
felt, inclusive of my life and all others, as though one common entity that was
not quite dream but not yet real ran like a river flowing as much through my
own mind as through the pores in my skin. I felt a connectivity with the world,
but parts of this world – Other People – encroached upon me with socialization.
I began to entertain thoughts that would threaten to obscure this continuity
between myself and my environment. While accepting these abstractions like a
good sport, I always kept a reservation in my mind as to their importance.
There are
moments when you terrify me, as though you drove a Caterpillar truck straight
into a house with an infant in it. I am almost afraid that you will dispose of
this letter, which I fear it would be sacrilege to make copies of.
When I hear
Elliott’s music, I can tolerate this socialized world. In every tortured crack
of his voice there is an incontrovertible plea for help and forgiveness, and it
is precisely this – the fact that I can forgive him, and the fact that I
feel moved to help him (if only to spread his vision, one akin to the clawing
angst and clarity of perception that impels me to write this) – allows me to
help and forgive myself. Let me just say now that, regardless of the inevitable
and Beautiful space between us, by virtue of which many of my words may be lost
to you, it is this human-heartedness and forgiveness that seems inexhaustible
between you, me and Kresten, and so never let our inevitable disagreements come
in the way of that.
Elliott is
not the only musician I empathise with, and he is not a projection of my own
needs; my zeal for rendering his vision as I perceive it comes from the fact
that I feel myself to be one of few who can hear it. I would it were not so,
but maybe you can see why, whatever we may do with his work, the one thing I
cannot permit myself to do is to marginalize him as entertainment.
I was once
putting away items at Joann’s on a regular night, only shortly after having
returned from visiting Berkeley, with a brief stop in Los Angeles, wherein I
met a homeless, amiable army veteran who was addicted to wine and presumably
heroin. He told me that I could make a good psychologist, but that I was naive.
His statement unsettled me.
As I was
putting go-backs away at Joann’s, I felt attacked, as though being crushed by a
cinder pile of guilt. I could not explain why, but I felt overwhelmingly like I
had done something terrible – unpardonable. Meanwhile, on the other side of the
wall behind me, my co-worker, Merissa (no connection to Marissa) was listening
to music on her telephone, via speaker.
It wasn’t
until I exited the aisle and came near her that I could discern the lyrics. The
music I had already identified as the theme from ‘Love Story’, played on piano.
The lyrics were rap lyrics. Very hard core. The artist told a story wherein a
woman was gang-raped and then killed. She happened to have been the mother of
one of her assailants, who promptly leapt to his death from a building upon
removing the bag from her head and surmising the situation.
The speaker
had been present, as one of the assailants. He claimed that it was a true
story. Throughout his entire telling of it, there seemed almost a tone of
resignation in his voice, almost as though this were inevitable because of his
lot in life. Notice that the people who joined him in perpetrating this act
were his peers.
I would
take an attitude of humility to things like that, but sometimes it seems that
the worst crime is to be so afraid of being wrong that one does not take a
firm, convicted position.
Another
instance concerns the song ‘Oblivion’ by Grimes. I noted, without doubt in
mind, the incontrovertible fact that the male characters in the music video were
oblivious to the singer’s condition with blaring lucidity and off-putting
eeriness. Upon voicing this obvious fact to Kresten, he affirmed my
understanding, qualifying it with a bit of information: The song dealt with a
traumatizing instance wherein Grimes was attacked at night.
A few
nights later, (or perhaps the one immediately following) I had a vivid
flashback of Grimes’ face, imprinted in my mind like a fossilized fern in
stone. I came closest that night to what I presume Night Terrors to be. Maybe it
was just the fact that Kresten and I both knew what the song was about that the
terror passed fairly easily.
Incidentally,
I learned later that, with the exception of the cinematography, which was done
by a (presumably young) man with a Slavic name, the video was made by women.
The reason that I presume all people involved to have been young is that it was
a soaring work of art and youth that could never have been and should never be
done by someone who has passed the threshold into middle age.
Finally, I
must mention Kresten’s convictions about Tool. Please note that I did not
hesitate – in fact, there was no moment in which my absorbed attention in his
lecture on this matter was interrupted by skepticism – to believe his
interpretation that ‘Third Eye’ was about the experience he described as divine
presence. I took his words not to be interpretation but Information, and
neither would I dream that it were mutually exclusive with my own.
The three
of us have so much to bring to this band. For me, music is an exploration of
the Soul. I hope that, in addition to entertaining your colleagues, you will
entertain that.
No comments:
Post a Comment