FEVER DREAMT
of microtonal soundtracks
what you listen to when loveless is gone, when you are sick and afraid of being alone
Somewhere between conception and execution, I fell incredibly sick for a day (or so more). I think I made myself sick trying to piece all the little things of life together. I am rarely ever in the present moment; there is always the voice in the back of my mind trying to make sense of every occurrence, seek out the meaning. I have a suspicion that there may be no meaning after all, but it may be one of those lengthy life battles to accept that as truth. I have a suspicion I come across as naive, but the truth is I am just taking it all in. Perhaps too much of it, and now I’ve thought myself ill.
I wanted to write because last week my bloody valentine took loveless off all streaming platforms, and surely it had to mean something. I had just listened through the night before on my commute home from Bushwick. That album changed me, like it did many college radio DJs, it changed my life in a significant way. The week before I had just overdrafted my credit card to buy the last two nosebleed seats to their show (first in 10 years) in Dublin.
How could anything mean nothing? And what’s there to fill the gap?
During my sickness I watched a video essay about Nick Drake’s life and it made me profoundly sad. He was only twenty six when he died. His friends described him as this sort of old soul, not really there, belonging to some other time period. Going through the motions of a decent upper-middle class life, all of these privileges and opportunities moving away as if life itself was dolly-zooming towards the true conduit of meaning: his guitar. I am no Drakian genius at the guitar, but I often find myself with the urgent the necessity to play it. I’m bad at performing and learning other people’s songs make me sleepy. In music my thoughts move languidly and carefully, so unlike the sharp improvisatory witticisms that I associate with the truly talented. When I’m alone I can play for hours; nothing solid or anything that would sound remotely good to anyone else. But I find you play it first, and then you think about it–sometimes for days, weeks, months–and when it returns to you in the eternally spinning cycle of life, it returns a fully conceived idea. It returns and it is there in a sort of wholeness. So whole and complete, in fact, that I would be content to die with no one ever hearing what I play to myself.
When I listen to Nick Drake in the throes of sweating fever, I feel as if he is sitting on the edge of my bed, playing guitar to himself (not to me). Some Benadryl hallucination giving body to the wispy snot-covered tissues in the wastebasket, cheap pre-Halloween phantom wailing beautifully. I feel as if I’m spinning on his own life spiral, watching him think out the phrases and evolve them into song in real time. Lying down alone with him makes me so depressed and lonely that I want to die, but in a meaningful way. I wonder if sadness is a primary emotion for everyone, if we all synthesize its beauty to make its presence in life more meaningful (if not easier). Sometimes I wake up and rue the laws of the universe that I can’t fast-forward the rest of the blank day until I can go back to sleep again. By all intents and purposes my life is fine, if not actually very amazing. I, however, am messy and unfulfilled and deeply uncomfortable with those facts of my existence. There are too many jagged pieces that cannot fit smoothly into the rest of the puzzle.
I spend so much time listening and thinking about and playing music these days. I think a part of it is that I’m running away from my true calling, which is to be a painter. For me painting feels very close to religion, the way I feel when I’m very surrounded by it, like at the monastery or taking a long walk alone or talking to my dad. It’s like putting on glasses with a stronger prescription and seeing the world sharper, as if for the first time. It makes me understand things better, but it’s often very brutal and I can’t deal with that right now, so I’m putting it off even though it may make things worse in the long run. Music comes a little easier these days, conduit for thought that is easier to spend time existing in.
