2005-03-03 - 6:17 p.m.
"Who do you need, who do you love, when you come undone?"
Geez.
I feel so stupid to not have seen it before; the obviousness of that statement. This, I think, has been my problem.
I've been thinking about trust a lot lately. People are untrustworthy. I don't mean that in some gothic "I'm all alone in the world that's black like my soul" sense, but only as a statement of fact. We are often so hurt when we are not trusted by those we think should, but the truth is:
Anyone can betray you. Anyone will betray you *under the right set of circumstances*.
Now the threshold of desperation is different for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves-betrayal is possible, and if its possible, then it's probable.
I'm not saying you should never trust anyone ever. I find that to be as impossible and improbable as the inevitability of betrayal is not. We are inclined to trust. We trust--at times--even when we don't want to. Trust is somehow hardwired. But trust can be limited.
I was talking to Andre about this last week after our latest go-round; the first screaming fight I remember being in for years. There is a threshold to trust; a line in the sand that x person is not permitted to cross. As that person earns trust, the threshold is extended, as the person betrays trust, the threshold recedes. But there is no unquestioning trust. Nor is there any reason there should be.
But the music, and the story...
When I come undone, that's what I always fall back to. That's what got me through, gets me through, saves my life time and time again. I owe my life a hundred times over to Duran Duran, or Depeche, or PSB, or a-ha...because they saved me. I love them, I need them, and they are always there, without question or demand. That is not a relationship I can undervalue.
All my memories revolve less around linear time or visual imagery and more around music. There is a soundtrack subtext to Time. And best of all, it changes as I do, evoking the old and projecting forward to create the new.
So obvious... I know I saw it before, but not with this blinding clarity that I feel now. Perhaps its more fair to say that before I knew, but now I believe.
I can't believe I almost didn't go to the concert. I always think of Dog Wizard, where Antryg thinks that--had he time--he would sit in the window and listen dreaming to the sounds of Brighthand's music... I have felt that too, me. That sense of being insensate, wrapped in music like a blanket, something palpable, touchable, material. I think the Dreaming of the aborigines must be like this, this sense of being completely caught up, and utterly free.
I love these moments, discrete, separated from time, but not Time; the true meaning of Zen. Take a moment and extend it outward forever...
It was good to see them. Simon and John...they still love it so very much; all of it, the music, the playing, the applause... That spark of joyfulness still is in them, the best part of being a child. Watching them play off each other, it made me laugh, purely for the joy of seing them be exactly themselves. And Nick, still so self-contained reminding me of Morkeleb the Black, shadow-dragon, and Andy who loves it too, but--I think--for different reasons whose magic fingers create such space and time and story, and Roger who is so different and yet still so much the same, leaving me only with this strange tenderness for someone who knows me not at all.
I loved hearing those sounds--chords and strains and refrains that I love, that I have memorized to their most minute--and knowing that not only am I hearing those noises made by these people I love, but that they are the ones who created them, as well.
I feel proprietary towards them, and protective as well. I feel so stupidly grateful I think I can never express and even writing this makes my eyes burn. This strange symbiosis.
I have arrived at a place where my former concert post-partum at the passing of something so beautiful yet evanescent has given way to the simple appreciation that I was there to see its beauty at all. Like the sand paintings of old, much of its beauty comes from the fact that it can't be calcified, or plasticized, or cemented into place. It's beauty comes from the very fact that it is fleeting.
I can't believe I almost didn't go.
What a perfect, perfect night.
