I keep waking with a start and a fist. I’ve rolled onto my nose again. The break’s become an annual injury - this anniversary the cartilage and calcified bone separated at the bridge against someone’s sternum rather than at the base of the septum against someone’s knuckles. It’s not even visible, shallow enough a fracture to prevent deviation; neither is the bruised tissue around my esophagus that’s transformed eating from a gluttonous pursuit to a masochistic one. Meanwhile, my shins advertise every kicked limb and rib in loud purples, blacks and greens for the better part of each week. Iron bone cane beatings in Shaolin years past make them hardly a nuisance, but summer shorts make them a badge of the weekend’s violence. It’s often the least painful wounds we wear most visibly and the most debilitating that are least apparent.
Injuries misrepresent sparring. It’s not a violent thing for me, at least inherently. Its nature, the appeal and challenge, would better be explained in some other post, but suffice it to say that violence, much less competition or malice, rarely take part. Except when I’m angry. Each person inhabits their own niche of anger. For some it’s the self-righteous perch of indignation; for others, the recess of exclusion and derision. For me, it’s disgust, retching at the fickle, smug self-service of things - most overwhelmingly, rage at my own sense of a right to anger. In anger I fight relentlessly, viciously, violently. On the occasions I cave to anger, my partners encourage me to continue. I’m transformed, and they take notice. To be clear, I’ve never fought an opponent with whom I’m angry. Rather, I funnel an outside world of frustrations and bit lips onto a combat mat. The motivation entices. Without anger, a match is mostly panting and patience, enduring disadvantageous positions for fleeting windows of accomplishment. It’s everyday. Within anger, everything is a will to power, an unbridled vigor that relents only with the submission taps of an opponent. Morality and health are nowhere in it. Voids are inexhaustible.
Exhaustion occupies me these days. Caught somewhere in the pupal exodus of the Middle-American metamorphosis, there’s little else to vie for my time. Apart from manuscripts and songs I can only obsess with physical routines and intake to abet the inevitable boredom. I sustain mostly on fruit and cottage cheese. This is not a unpleasant rut. Indulgence becomes jars of pickle juice to replenish salt. There’s a market in cartoning that brackish draught.
Jars of bitter remains. I never forget, but I quarantine. I stole candy when I was eight. After everyone had gorged themselves through the holidays to keep the peace (a full mouth can’t scream), the kitchen bar collected all the surplus sweets and inedible seasonal goods. I never knew who sent them - names I didn’t recognize, which meant they could only be relatives. For all my addictions, I’ve never been enticed by sugars and syrups. That year, though, one treat seduced me: a unmarked jar filled with little hard candies that mulishly stuck first to their wrapper, next the fingers and finally the depressions of molars. They were unbearably straightforward: a monotone, whorish sweetness. But they were green. Through the distortion of the thick, teardrop blown glass jar, their translucent emerald shapes stacked together into crystalline structures. No matter how many times I shook the jar with random abandon, they arranged themselves into emergent, organic shapes. I stole them back to my room, far past the defoodified checkpoint of the hall door. Through the months the candies disappeared into the dirty hands of friends, and my fondness for their comforting color migrated to the comforting security of the jar. Emptied, I filled it with notes carefully folded the conceal the secrets I scribbled on them. Each time I deposited one, the jar’s bulbous lid opened with an assuring, thick pop. I slid the paper in with care not to disturb any others, then pressed the stiff seal closed with the peace of knowing I would never again read those words. Each paper was a bitter memory I could never forget. But through that thick glass, the words - terse rejections from my father, experiences too troubling to consider until years later - were sundered from their context, from their intention and potency. I suppose that was my first semiotic revelation, that words are only powerful within their microcosm.
Eventually, the stasis of the jar was insufficient. The process, the ritual, of deposit itself became tainted. It needed a metaquarantine, a consecration to cleanse it of the contamination of memory. It needed a sanctuary. So I constructed a room within a room to house my relic, a keep of banana crates and elastic thread. Its facade was a library, stacked with my Feynman lectures; Verne, Tolkein and Lewis novels; Ben Hur (nearly a shelf to itself); and the stacks of legal pads I had filled with characters and languages. Though open to the rest of my room, this enclave created its own space, its own experience centered around the unimposingly positioned jar. Loft design at its essence.
This mirrors the experience of music. Songs create rooms in the larger extent we call consciousness; the neural patterns of activation associated with an auditory stimulus conjure a self within ourselves, a factoring of our mind, that while temporally and neurologically diffuse, returns us to a discrete mental locale with each listening. Like spaces, we experience them localized, only able to fully perceive that place which we immediately occupy, but still conscious of extents - the things before and behind us, our relation to them. Some songs are enclosed; we pace through the same positions in repetitions and loops. Some progress through passages and cognitive corridors, drawn ever forward through long phrasal hallways. Once familiar with a piece, once we’ve explored its architecture, we utilize the space it had revealed to us just as we would a room adjoining our home. We use songs to hide, to store, to expose and to avoid. We revisit these locales to access the thoughts and experiences with which we’ve filled and decorated them. The use of some rooms, even entire wings, becomes specialized to an extreme - e.g., for me, the teflon sterility of Pinback, the Wrens’ toxic dump.
These internal activations are not uniform between individuals. Some songs we share with people and store up in those spaces the experiences supposedly shared with them, but there is no connection, no commonality between those spaces, despite our yearnings. The illusory experience only creates another inlet for solipsistic skepticism. For infidelity. Music cheats between us. How whorish and promiscuous a world, Arabied and deflowered.
In the category of music shared and soiled, The Shins seem an unlikely candidate to be redeemed to me. Besides all the folded papers to which they’re connected that I needn’t mention here, their discography was on an unpromising trajectory. While both their studio efforts were superb, much like The Walkmen they’d led off with a subtle, patient yet catchy light rock album, followed by a more brazenly pop sophomore LP. After reading the initial reviews of Wincing the Night Away, I assumed The Shins had found the same dismal slump as The Walkmen’s A Hundred Miles Off. They’ve lost the flagship-of-indie sound, true, but it’s almost a necessary concession to maintain credibility given the mainstream success they’ve encountered post-Zach-Braff-endorsement. Too popular to please the elitists, they’ve made a subtle shift in sound. Instrumentation has claimed the banner from lyrics. The impeccable metering and syllabic annunciation is still present, but it is not so penetrating as their earlier work. Instead, the songs themselves take focus with a maturing composition. I was wary of the electronic shift, since it now seems a hackneyed right of passage for every artist, but the infusions are tasteful and necessary.
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