The Search

I'm listening to The National's Alligator and The Boxer as I write this.

These have been albums that have been playing a lot in this room of mine for the last few months.

(as my flatmates will surely tell you, bless 'em...)

I have tried to pinpoint exactly why I can't seem to stop listening to them. Why every time these tracks just take me to a very special place. How more than the words, the music or the voice, there's something in there that just clicks.

Just now I went to the bathroom and I was thinking about this. And I was thinking that perhaps throughout our lives we spend a lot of time searching for something out there that matches exactly who we are. We find moments, fragments, glimpses of lives, people, music, words, scents, flavours, impressions, memories, etc.

Obviously, whenever we find these things, we try to cling on to them. They are so rare, so precious!

Perhaps this is what has happened with this band.

I have loved music deeply for a long time. I'm one of those people that will sometimes hear a beautiful song inside my head, dolby stereo and all, better than a live concert. These moments are rare, but when they happen they just take me away. They are more powerful than what is around me.

I think that with this band and these two albums perhaps I have simply reached closer to what I would love to have reached myself with music but never managed to. They somehow mirror a deeper me. As much as sounds and words and shapes can describe it.

This is why I love the lyrics because they tell more than what they say. They're like this Gene Wolfe book in music. The story been read through the lines and in between them. And more stories hinted at. And life, all the while, shining gloriously above it all. An overwhelming sense of purity through whatever is being shared.

"My bodyguard shows her revolver
To anyone who asks"

I can't explain why but lines like these just enter to the core of me and I feel that I am in touch with an incredible distillation of everything that surrounds me.

"I wish I believed in fate
I wish I didn't sleep so late"

At each moment more and more of these reach me. And, I guess these sate me but also open me up to find out and figure out more of this whole makeup that makes the "I" which is so engrossing.

As I was thinking about this I was also thinking about a couple of emails friends sent just today and that affected me deeply albeit in very different ways.
I don't know if you feel this but, quite often lately, I can feel the electrical rewiring of the brain when something affects me deeply. It's the only way I can explain it. It's a feeling quite different from a headache or something because it's much quicker, it's like a flash in your brain, a quick surge that seems to burn momentarily and then vanish as soon as attention is directed towards it. As soon as observation absorbs it perhaps.

But, most of all, I was trying to observe my own feelings and expectations in relation to both those emails, the stuff that they were lifting within me.
I was observing how easily the world takes us in its stride when it touches things we deem important. Be it our "realities" or our "fantasies". We are simply taken in the story happening and that, obviously, we are creating also.

This is why, in all this searching for perfection (or whatever we may want to call it) we always end up meeting ourselves. That external search is nothing but the internal struggle to find what we know is the deepest of our nature. A well of uncontaminated true nature.
We reach into the profound all around us, trying to find a way in.
And sometimes the universe replies. And points right back at us. giving us the flavour of the moment.

Peace.