9.28.11

"Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me" (Yorke 1993)

I am often melancholy; tragically longing in the mid-morning. Do you get irritated easily?

I remember standing with my bicycle on an unkempt lawn. My friend was there also; we were talking to a man. We had stood on this same spot with our bicycles about a week before and spoken to him and his mother. We had tried to convince them to let us teach them something religious. Come back, they had said. Now we were back.

The man was going blind, they had also informed us. He was taking it very hard, everyday receding more into an unknown world, walking down a fading road alone. His mother was pleasant, but concerned in the stubborn, business way that some mother's are. She knew all the facts and figures; a resourceful woman, but not a scrounger. Her's was a hard-met hope, built and sustained on passion fused with logic, on the defending of her son. There was at least the hope that his condition was treatable.

Their house was close to a main road that headed out to a large bus station and then out to the highway. There was a gourmet sweets shop on that road; we stopped there several times. The road out to the bus station was long and beautiful, but we rarely noticed the beauty - we were most often rushing to the station in a long since futile effort to catch the right bus. My bike seemed to be perpetually stuck in the highest gear, although our bikes didn't even have gears. That must sound like some awful metaphor, but its not - for some reason my bike was simply adamant about missing the bus. Perhaps its previous owner had not been so care-taking as I, though I can hardly claim that I took better care of the vehicle, mostly because of my frustration with its stubborn spite of cooperation. I felt like my legs were going to implode every time we got to that bus station.

I often have the audacity to call this kind of mood "pensive." I guess it is somewhat pensive, but more like a plea for the weight of heavy thoughts.

This time the man was alone - his mother had gone out to run some errands. In the interim since our last visit, he and his mother had visited the hospital and found out that his blindness was not reversible. As he spoke about it, he began to weep. Had God taken even this from him; his sight? What hope could he have in God? He seemed to plead with us for the answer. I don't remember what we told him, but I don't think it was the answer.

So long have I waited, Lord
so long I have tried
so long whipped and hated, Lord
that my hope has burned and died

In ashes let me see thee, Lord
so tired, let me rest
not as I would see me, Lord
but as I need be blessed

I picture my brother playing with his band in a dark room. There is no stage, only a space between the many tables and the wall. There is a moose's head hanging on the wall, or maybe it was more like some type of caribou or elk; I don't really know (it took me a good minute to figure out how to spell "caribou"; spell-check suggestions were "carbonate", "caboose", and "scarab"). There are only two small lamps on either side of the wall, and a neon Coor's Light sign. The band begins amidst a subtle hubbub.

My brother starts to sing and is gradually transformed. Each word that he transmits to the microphone pulls him deeper into some mysterious plane of painful meditation. There is all range of voice; all range of feeling. Within this world he alone transcends the bounds of mortal limitations - social, cultural, ethical, intellectual. Alone he drifts in some immortal current, beyond even the notes of his own music. At times the sound is a gentle haunting of ghostly contemplations, at others the mournful scream of some overpowering memory, once experienced and now laid before the audience, our souls surrounding it and collectively weeping as it is slowly, triumphantly lowered into its grave. Such is the emotional power of his travels that by the end of the performance he is on his knees. Breathing heavily, he resurfaces amidst rapt applause.

"I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. I didn't write that song" (Yorke).