On Ephiphany and The Blackness of Soot.

The peculiar thing about having an Epiphany is that it usually happens very, very quietly.

There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.

Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.

Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.

It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of  the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.

The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.

It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.

It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.

Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.

I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.

To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.

But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?

And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.

And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.

Shut in. Shut out. Shut up.

I'm sitting here 

hating the sound of my phone when it rings

and still 

I'm pushing against the silence 

that's thickening and crusting over in this room,

smothering the furniture and the books and the TV flickering wordlessly.

I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I dont know what I'm doing. 

Ignoring the things that need done, doing things that have no meaning.
Boredom. Lethargy. Exhaustion.

What is this? 

It would be so simple - to walk out into the world.
To engage. 

 

But right now it seems to require a monumental act of will. 

And right now I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I'm letting the lonliness achieve critical mass.

Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.

Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.

it's not the storms that rage that will whittle you away...
it's this endless everyday.

wonder what it's all about....nausea i think.

real deep shit

Alternate reality. Consensual reality. Personal reality. Multiple reality...
Why do we not admit to there being more than one absolute legitimate reality? When you think about it, how can there not be?
It's kind of like the Earth, isn't it? One integral, solid whole... But divided and subdivided of necessity till it's in fragments: continent/ country/ city/ district/ yours/ mine/ ours/ theirs...Splintered into separate wholes by this need to hold as our own, individually.

Wouldn't it be ok to think of it as being so much bigger than me that I could climb in and wander around in it's hazy labyrinths, trying to find the perfect fit for the jagged edges of my individuality stained logic and know that I'll find a mirror for my perspective here under the all embracing awning of ultimate truth.
who's to say. Whose to say...