Memory Day From Waning Heights
We’d sit and share music, remember? We had cables back then, to hook up both our laptops, because using wireless would have taken hours. My memories of rummaging through your collection are some of the fondest I have from back then. I remember you had all the good stuff, the classics, the folksy, the serene and (best of all) all that brazilian stuff (I learned about bossa nova from you). When did those beats extinguish? I didn’t notice, did you?
It was sharing enlightenment, and it felt good to have something of your own and for me to give a part of me. A list of magic minutiae by the thousands, which we couldn’t take in all at once, of course, but which would later accompany us through all the moments when we’d frighten off silence. That’s how I perceived it, maybe I shouldn’t pluralize, so much did happen since then. Did you like my songs? You were incredibly critical, imperviously gourmet in all you tasted, but I was crazier, that’s for certain, and I think you did appreciate that. You see, music for me was my most personal of conquests over culture and I was addicted to whatever the kids were up to always. I loved the sagely notes of all the acoustic guitars you listened to, but I also loved to think that I could dance with all the girls I never got a chance to dance with. Whenever I’d think about it, I’d find no better reason to light my candle than the feeling of youth. I never could become all that accountable or all that well-adjusted to the notion of climbing up spires as long as I’d feel myself a dancer.
Hey, there’d be no way to tell all this looking at me now. A moonlit guitar seems like a more fitting instrument for the soundtrack of my life these days. I managed to lose all of the music you had shared with me at some point…I think my laptop was stolen, but, anyway, I’m sure that among what I lost there were loads of songs I should have kept on listening to. I did always miss you a lot, and, in some far-fetched manner, I kept in touch when I’d listen to what you had given me. Man, I wish I’d recall the names of some of those artists…wait, Fahey was certainly one of them, but I don’t remember the brazilians.
I went through some dark periods, you know, right? I’ll tell you, loneliness is unbearably hard on a dancer. I didn’t start young, I had to pick myself up many times and learn as I went along. I had to earn myself a few dimes before anything happened doing the sort of work that would have me pining away and subtly reconsidering my aversion to suicide from the night before. Maybe I’m exaggerating, I know I learned that it’d be about suffering and I learned to get along, but I felt terribly lonesome nonetheless, having no one to dance with nor anyone who’d see the grace in an aging mosaic like myself, dancing to the kids’ new beats.
Yeah, I see how it could have looked ridiculous, but I never was the serious type. No one would have called you ridiculous, but it didn’t keep you from feeling miserable back then. I understood you all too well, my friend, lost in the mathematics as the world seemed to be dismantled by the short-sightedness of our day, but you fought on. Did you ever feel like dancing? It wasn’t easy for those of us who yearned for the day when the language would cry out for truth, when we’d finally learn to speak without befuddlement of the obscurantist veils that haunted the future.
Sorry, I get like this when I reminisce. Let’s call some girls, I know a few, we’ll have a party, we’re not too old to do that.
