Bach For Eternity

Bach

Transubstantiation for us was three pills in a folded hundred dollar bill pounded to smooth bits by our teenage fists until a fine blue powder which through empty pen barrels coated our nostrils and dripped down our throats as the solid flat fixtures of our ordinary lives suddenly came apart at the seams and swallowed by some heavenly sea of clouds, soaring magic carpets, the white wings of birds in flight. Then, deep into the night we’d scavenge the city like hunting herons seeking sights never before seen, a street light glowing in tangerine tinge, a lone branch rocking in swaying song, cars with their headlights peering into another universe ready to collide with our own.

Oxy’s, coke, mdma, fifth’s of Vodka in Milo’s backpack. Our little magic potions which would turn our eyes into the magic portals where the world took on the serene quietude of children ready for mischievous, marvelous, play. Stilled, like a clear sky where a bird or a trio of jets would fly by leaving their radiant mark upon the eternal blue canvas of the world where from its heights everything could be everything else, yes was no, no was yes, here was there, and who, what, why, or where we simply didn’t care. Speaking only in coded glances, hidden signs, two eyes were two mirrors back to back where anything, everything, could find its image reflected infinitely in a shared world of our heavenly reverie.

4am one night on the streetcar as we basked in some unknown victory in our reveries we came across perhaps the funniest instance any of us had ever encountered—a group of beefhead college kids coming back from the bar intruded upon our mysterious land with all sorts of incomprehensible questions. Their sight alone—khaki shorts, pink polos, sunglasses, was enough to turn us into giggling girls until one of the intruders told another one of us to GET UP! and we erupted in laughter as the intruder’s cheeks flushed as if he had stumbled upon bathing beautiful Venus boy nymphs and Josh sobered up enough to tell him that this world was ours and would always be ours and so it is best they fuck off. ‘In other words..’ Josh said ‘I have a gun in my backpack’ and so startled they were they jumped off before the stop and we all made shooting motions through the streetcar windows and laughed and laughed and laughed as the sun rose in heroic victory.

—

Now I sometimes wonder where all those dreams and memories have gone. For a while I was quite saddened that I’d only ever live them once. You could use all kinds of words to describe those youthful ecstasies, joy, freedom, happiness, love, but really how the world felt to us in those nights and in those early mornings can never truly be described. Like everything was a mosh of flesh and colorful liquid only given a sense of space or time through the mirrors of our soul; that we were somehow sovereigns of it all, Kings, Dukes, Princes and for all who didn’t know how pitiful they seemed to us. For all the older women, metro-sexual men, idiot college kids who’d see us yet couldn’t see the expanse of dreams and visions before out feet. Like seeing the dark beneath the clouds but not the lining of light telling of a hidden sun.

I suppose for many years after I tried to re-capture that sense of the world as liquid light, alone in a room through heroin and various pills, through skating, through philosophy even. Yet, those memories will always be tinged with a kind of remorse for all who sacrificed themselves for the dream of youth either in death or otherwise personal destruction. I, myself, felt close to the edge at many points in my life and it is only through a rather embarrassing act of will and fortitude that I kept on. One instance, on the verge of failing out of college because I had neglected my studies the entire semester, I came down with the flu. I had no money to buy drugs, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, went through the harsh spring light in a fevered daze on the verge of complete collapse. And, it is genuinely so embarrassing to describe how it was a single piece of music, A Mozart clarinet concerto, which lifted me above my circumstances and even deathly ill I somehow managed to ace all of my exams and make it to the next year. A better man would have just said fuck it.

I somehow parlayed all the ensuing events into academic success and opportunities I could have ever imagined. I could, very easily, right now be studying at the Sorbonne on a fellowship. But really, I just thought, one day, fuck that shit. I just want to move, I want to go fast. I want to fuck on people’s bitches, not spend my days in some dusty fucking library reading (!?) and pretending I’m better than everyone because limp dick old retards say I’m so smart. I can’t explain this to people in my life, they are baffled, baffled that I don’t want to be someone. That I don’t want to be a smart person or a distinguished fellow or an important lawyer or god knows what else. And they’ll never understand, never understand the art I seek. Maybe even I don’t understand.

—

Sometimes I lie awake at night listening to Bach and I feel I understand a small part of it. Some small part of this world that turns and this universe which eternally returns. That youth blooms in accordance with the turning of the planets, yet its colors and beauty hides a secret not belonging to a planetary body but something beyond, like a secret landscape of topological motion without ground or direction or beginning or end, of a lilac horizon in which faintly shapes of things can be made out in gilded outline. If I focus on this or that they appear in full form and color and let me hold it for as long as I like. I imagine these are the treasures of my life which I have collected and will keep collecting.

I believe in divination. I believe that in music some part of this strange topological landscape is revealed like light bursting through clouds and showing the shape of a hill or the depth of a line of trees or the gentle slope of field. When I was young it was Mozart revealing the noxious child laugh of sunlight shooting through oak trees, then it was Chopin and the gentle whispers of love in a hidden pond of translucent water bearing my reflection. Now it is Bach, and it will be Bach for eternity. In Bach is the hollow winter air of memory descending upon this landscape of memory, in Bach is the shape of stars, the depth of space, the form of time. In Bach is somehow all the dreams of my youth and the singular, accidental ecstasy of existence as such.

But maybe I ought to be something. When I don’t hear Bach I sometimes think I ought to be something in this world–what? I don’t really know. I decided to put myself out there in my city, go to groups focused on shit like ‘art’ and ‘poetry’. Generally after one meeting I feel like a beautiful nymphette alone on pedophile island so I don’t return. But I keep going to other ones, and recently a showing of some kind of painting and photographs I got to talking with some over eager bearded dude reeking of weed who was all too excited about shit I could never give a single fuck about. Finally he asks me what I am, ‘an artist?’, ‘ a writer?’, a small part of me wished to say something, some simple designation or idea, but I just shook my head ‘nah all that shit is gay’ and walked out. Artists are gay as fuck. I’m just trying to climb mountains, the mountains of heaven, which, as you reach higher and higher gravity begins to fade until you are leaping and dancing along quickly evaporating pure white towards the sun, hoping with two hands to clasp the rarest light of lilac iridescence, and to keep it for myself for a time until I let it free for the world to see..