Tree Creature.

The following was transcribed from a handwritten note I wrote yesterday:

8/7/09

Vic,

I’m starting this letter in the dark, for I’m at a concert, an experimental, unclassifiable music concert at a gallery called Eyedrum. Someone just turned on a blue light, grabbed an electric guitar and is playing a growing, bouncing, changing grand wave of noise into the warm, stuffy air of the room around us. When I walked in, I smelled pot, but the friend I came to see put a stick of incense in his mouth and lit it, so that’s the soothing, beautiful smell that’s hanging in the air.

I keep stopping my sentences, closing my eyes. The vibrations of the music hit my feet and make them better. The sound hits my ears, challenges them but promises not to break them. I like where I am right now. There is beauty, safety and feeling in where I am. Overwhelming feeling. There is quiet in the crowd, a beauty in the shared experience.

I wish you could feel this.

There are paper lanterns, hanging red from the ceiling.

I’m sitting next to a guy named Wade, one of those guys whose relaxed, easy friendship and assurance I wish I could carry with me. He doesn’t make me nervous.

I’d not expected to be this happy tonight. I’m going to close my eyes and permit myself to feel it again.

I am in this room of people, alone with the effects of the sound as it soars. It contains layers, it is wide enough to find all of your emotions in it.

This is not what I was expecting.


My friend Nathan’s band is performing now. The safety of church organs devolved into a crash. I felt like I’m falling, now there’s something intimidating and mechanic about the noise, yet there’s joy in a fanfare, mixed with the sound of voices uplifted in joy, a crash of cymbals. The voice is Nathan’s. He’s on a microphone, chanting, but I didn’t notice at first that it was him. He sounded like a chorus of tribal voices, a beauty of simple melody played on piano to bring you home, the tapping of a drumstick on wood. There’s art in the building layers of sound, and my pen doesn’t travel fast enough to mark all the details in this, what I’m discovering and feeling. The writing of this makes me comforted, as though there’s something of this experience that I can take away, share and remember.

There is something beautiful here, something beautiful in someone who would choose to perform this, share it, explore it, how sound can make you feel, associate, remember.

Wow, Nathan just started playing the happiest variation, like the score of a scene of a child walking through a too-bright summer day down a suburban sidewalk, a cul-de-sac of green lawns and sprinklers, the promise of a new house and friendly neighbors, a life the child expected to have and enjoy.

Behind it, a grinding has started, a threat that such promise is fragile, calm can be taken away. But the happiness, only changing a little, remains.

This place is making me feel good. Coming here was a very good idea.

I like Nathan’s group better than the first, there’s more joy in it, more familiar places to visit. It’s still searchable, layered sound with meaning. But it’s also a song. I felt so vulnerable before. This second band is giving me structure, comfort, a place to feel safe and recognize as home.

I feel you’re here with me.

I’m in a room of pervasive good feeling, and I can’t rightly explain it.

It reminds me of who I can be, it reminds me of the Rothko Room at the Tate Gallery in London. When I remember feeling moved, I remember the low light, that room, the meditation and calm I felt with those rectangles.

Benj