Filling the static and silence
Loneliness can be overwhelming to the extent of despair. It’s practically an innate need of living things to connect with something or someone that acts not only as a mirror to our subjective experience, but also as validation that our subjective experience is not singular. No matter how desperately we want to believe, at times, that our struggles are ours alone—someone somewhere can, at the very least, relate on some minute level.
I was not a particularly social child growing up. I had no patience for childlike activities or conversations, so it went without saying that discussions with adults were far more enjoyable. The trouble with this, however, lay in the fact that I could never take these discourses home with me or to the playground or the cafeteria or anywhere else where I was supposed to act like a kid among other four-footers. Needless to say, my friends were oft books and chatter limited itself to whatever the singer of the song on the record/radio/cassette tape had to say. That I read Moby Dick over the course of a week in sixth grade might speak more about my isolation than anything else.
My stereo and later the iPod eventually filled the static and silence in later years. There was nothing so holy as hearing someone talk about your life without having ever met you, but telling the story so much more eloquently than you ever believed yourself able. (This remains the case—music connects us to emotions and experiences that are both real and fantasized. Why else would Presidential candidates have pep rally playlists?) Nirvana, Placebo, and The Manic Street Preachers crashed through my version of the 90s and Steppenwolf was my turntable favorite, among others.
Either way, these things took me away from the bubble that I felt I occupied.
Where we previously had books (David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Joan Didion) and our favorite bands, the internet and social media cropped up. In a way, the threads that tie us together via social media take what books and bands do and add steroids. Eloquence is one thing, to have an actual conversation with someone that gets it is something else. While you know some vague detail about the people with whom you trade favorite authors or show up at the same shows, the internet affords some speck of anonymity (if desired) when it comes to the gritty, bare bones discussions. You can bare your soul without necessarily having to readily admit it to someone that knows you face to face.
I remember discovering forums and message boards a good ten or fifteen years ago and what a find. You had a handle, you had an avatar, and you could share your secrets without having to share “who” you were. (Of course, now there’s Post Secret, which trumps all of this!) Somehow, even if you felt lonely in your daily life, you could turn on the machine (listen to the bloody modem for those that remember dial-up), and there was suddenly a whole world full of people that “got it.”
People ask now, “Why mess with social media? It seems kind of self-indulgent and a giant waste of time.” I say, why not? It would be like asking, “What’s the point of travelling to other places?” or “Why read the news or magazines?” We are a product of need for other living beings (including plants and animals and whatever else serves as your companion.) Even if one doesn’t particularly like the company of others and prefers a solitary existence (yes, that includes me, the perpetual roommate-free single dweller), we still have a sometimes begrudging need for validation of our existence, of our experience from/by something/someone else.
Even if it’s only a mirror. Figurative or not.
“Terrible Love” ~ The National
For the one I’ve not seen in almost a decade, not a day goes by when I do not think of you and wonder about how our life might have turned out if not for the fact that you didn’t survive to see that future.
All Apologies
My life has had to become very quiet over the last few months.
No shows. No yoga. Almost no music or writing. At all.
Shortly before Labor Day of last year, the universe decided to send me a little gift-wrapped package that I didn’t know how to deal with and inside that little box was/is the possibility of MS. I’ve become a “Dr. House” patient for the moment, so I sit in the dark. Waiting. There are those that have been supportive and understanding and too many more that have not been, including two employers and a yoga community that I was a part of for the last eight years. I am grateful to the ones that have stuck around.
Still, darkness is as darkness does. Being that choosing to leave my house isn’t something I’m wont to do lately, I’ve sought out stories and soundtracks to other people’s lives in order to go somewhere, anywhere else that wasn’t here. Perhaps we all need a vacation from our own lives and what better way then to crack open a book. I’ve ridden along with a British spy in Africa in both the 40s and the late 60s, relived the Paris I dreamt of as a child, and had a good long conversation with an aging Brit about the illusion of memory’s impermeability. The internet and films have also proved a worthy distraction when face to face interaction has been too daunting.
What this has also amounted to, however, is the inability to function in my own life. No amount of good tunes or books or internet distractions (or for that matter, anything) has eased the fact that my balance is shot, I can’t feel my feet, and I just haven’t felt like myself in months. Even trolling for music—I love discovering new songs or albums to color my personal soundtrack—has become impossible.
For now, until life lightens up, the words of others will tell the story. Obviously, if you don’t automatically recognize where “All Apologies” comes from, you missed a most-epic period in music.
Google it. Seriously. There was music before all of this rehashed, hipster synth-pop.
“Nights In White Satin” ~ Midnight Movies
I love this rendition of an old Moody Blues tune…modern, haunting, and perfectly appropriate for a Hitchcock thriller.
I love the way music sews together moments of living—sometimes tying those memories to people, to sensation, or merely to the first auditory glance at an exciting fringe of notes. We oft turn to those songs in hopes of recreating that frame of our life over and over again—occasionally successfully, but too frequently just replaying a memory that is never quite as organic and lush as when it first occurred.
