Holocene

"And when we meet on a cloud/I'll be laughing out loud/I'll be laughing with everyone I see/Can't believe how strange it is to be/Anything at all" - Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"


In his short story "Modulation," Richard Powers calls music "a need as big as lust or hunger, an urge with no reason on earth ever to have evolved. The only fundamental human pleasure with no survival value whatsoever."


I do not believe that I could survive without music. And the frivolity of the whole enterprise is, to me, what makes it so valuable. A person who was raised without religion (and quite a few of those who did have some kind of mystical education) inevitably must confront the absurdity of consciousness, of having a body, of memory and emotion. Am I a gathering of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, riboflavin, Vitamin K that has thrown itself upright and invented a language? Am I the product of a deity cum puppeteer that has crafted me in His own image and been loosed into the world without instruction or strings? Are there strings that are being pulled? If so, why am I not consulted as to the maneuvers I am to be put through? If I am the byproduct of billions of years of increasingly complex proteins, what is the purpose of my awareness of this fact? Finally, if I am simply a result of biological programming, could you run my life through a computer and get a result identical to the current response that my emotions and memories and reactions have manufactured? Because if you could, then that seems like fate, and fate strikes me as fundamentally unfair. Not just for me, but for the 99.9% of humanity that did not, like me, win the lottery of existence and get born white, straight, male, upper middle class and American in the late 20th Century.


My relationship with my own body has been fraught for most of my life. I ascribe most of the contentiousness to the fact that my body tried to kill me for no particular reason when I was nine years old. Ever since my pancreas stopped producing insulin, I have had to use my brain and centuries of work of doctors to stay alive. Over time, we have gotten to be on better terms, and I've learned to enjoy various activities that only a functioning body can participate in.


The greatest pleasure in my life is reading. The oldest pleasure is listening to music. Even before I could read, I owned a Fisher-Price turntable that I used to wear out copy after copy of An Innocent Man by Billy Joel. Specifically, the track that played "The Longest Time." The casing was white, and I believe the carousel was red and the needle arm yellow. It's been a while, but I do remember using my pudgy forearm to position the needle. The record player sat on the ground and I was able to do that while standing, so I was certainly not very old. The fatty little baby arm has been replaced with a thin, veiny, lightly freckled, longer edition. I need to bend my creaky knees in order to place a record on a turntable. The turntable and the records became a half-pound rectangle of sand and metal. The effect on me when the music plays has only increased with the passage of time, though.


Here's what I mean: when I hear "Jumpin' Jack Flash," I am eight years old, my mother is driving on 7th Avenue towards Laguna Honda Hospital, and she and I are going back and forth - 'what's McJagger's first name?' 'Mick.' 'No, his first name.' 'Mick.' 'Not the first part of his last name, his first name.' 'Mick is his first name.' 'So he only has one name?'; when I hear "Slip Slidin' Away," there is nothing more than a flash of me reaching down into the passenger footwell and examining the cassette cover of the Paul Simon greatest hits set Negotiations and Love Songs and wondering how he could be both a private eye and a singer (he is wearing a trenchcoat and fedora for some reason); "Butterfly" and Aaron and I are parked on Huntington on a foggy morning, running late to class because we wanted to hear that last song from Pinkerton just twenty more times; I am crossing 14th Street between 5th and 6th in a cold winter night rain if "Ambitionz az a Ridah" comes on (my white boy who listens to gangsta rap phase didn't start until I left the suburbs); when John Lennon screams "I Want You," I step out of the C train and make a left to the underground entrance of the Museum of Natural History; "Shake Ya Rump" causes me to set my copy of Infinite Jest on the aluminum bench on the third base side of the Central Park ballfield that has that bigass spectator rock and take a drink of water from the fountain because it's just fucking sweltering out there.


You will have no doubt noted that I am doing something, existing somewhere in a body, in all these memories. But the pleasure of those moments, both at the time and in the present, was not where my feet were going or the chill but the miracle that was exploding in my brain. There has never been any point to music for me. I read in order to teach myself what it is to be a decent person in this world. I write because shooting my mouth off with my friends only earns me their approbation, and that rarely. Plus I can't reread a conversation filled with faux insights in later years and be embarrassed. Only writing affords that privilege. I look at paintings and photographs because I have no visual capacity, and they are mysterious and almost alien to how I conceive the world. But music? The lyrics are often banal or opaque. Of all art forms, music has the least room for originality, given that, as the Beasties tell us, there are 'only twelve notes that a man can play.' I don't think I've ever learned anything from a piece of music.


Except, of course, who I am, who I was and the enduring presence of what I can only assume is a soul mixed with all the chemicals, vitamins and minerals.