Chimes #30

Through music, words emerged in my consciousness as another thing. There were musicians who used words and they showed me. I saw that combinations of words could be molten and that the fires they ignited could be contagious. They could be a door that one could break through into another reality: a place hyper-real, full of things that had the palpable reality of what is called real, but were nonetheless better than real: voices channeled from ether, expounding heroic worlds of oceanic expansive experience. This was another way of moving fingers artfully; more subtle and durable, yet so much harder to do because so stark: mere imitation would get you nowhere. I was on the bottom of another mountain that would take me where the creek ran effortlessly. Or, alternately, I was walking along the ocean-shore, where I heard: let’s swim to the moon…let’s climb through the tide…penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide. A wild congeries of energies coalesced in my brain— what it would be like to seduce N with my own words. To sing to her, or for her, and so ravish her consciousness that all boundaries between us melted, and we could be completely lost in each other like I wanted us to be. To swim with her together, to a place of unrestrained, unselfconsciousness abandon. It was all hidden in the depths of the music— how emotions could stir the human soul into wildness, abandon, ferocity. That I could be the agent for that— the connective tissue between a mass of people and the ability to access primeval chaos, and states of unity, of definition, within the chaos— I related personally to the songs and lyrics that moved me. You reach your hand to hold me but I can’t be your guide. To have that control in the chaos— to see the truth of who the human race were, and who N was, even in the grips of the most orgiastic dementia— I wanted that masterful control of people’s emotions. As I would later approve of The Hierophant as an interesting trump in the tarot deck, I sought to find a place in me which could channel hierophantic tasks. My exposure to these crucial songs dovetailed, also, with the most baroque period of telephone madness with N. We told each other our dreams; performed strange voodoo rituals involving the Bible, stuffed animals, things written, concealed, and revealed later; explored instances, shared and otherwise, of the uncanny. Like a true, soul-level brother and sister, we couldn’t stop shaking each other’s brains. The moon and the tides existed for us together. Music, I later understood, could be cheap, as a manipulator of people’s emotions; words were more durable. And, ultimately, even with all the songs in my head, it was a shared symbolic language which wedded me to N, an encyclopedia of personal references which only we shared. The chaos in the music hovered in the background, tantalizingly but with mixed or blended intentions.