When I was younger, music was a vast universe of worlds I visited with intense interest: immense, indeed seemingly unending, and containing teeming densities of meanings and moods in galaxies of artists and genres, as well as volumes of minute details I ran through my mind again and again: staring at an album cover and trying to understand its iconography, for example, or pouring for the thousandth time over the liner notes, or listening to a song βor a part of songβ over and over and over, noting new layers or following different instruments. For many years, music could not be drained of meaning; I couldnβt take it all in; it rather took me in; and there was even a sensation when I listened to music of being βinside of it,β as though it were a landscape I wandered within.
A friend and I used to listen to the radio late into the night βB-97 in New Orleansβ sometimes taping it on cassettes in case they played our favorite songs. When something I loved came on βand I mostly loved echoing, reverb-rich late 80s production vibes tracks, especially with women singersβ my heart would expand and my little room would crackle with energy; I felt at one with the night, electric, vivid and sharp and happy. I would lie back on the floor and stare at the ceiling, eyes defocusing, dreaming scenes, thinking of people, imagining stories in which I was, of course, always the protagonist. There was a quality of longing, but without any sorrow or concern with the likelihood of attaining what I longed for. I felt open and desirous, but somehow satiated too.
I relate to these memories ambivalently. They often had strong visual and fantasy dimensions, which I take in part to mean that they were neither about my soul, so to speak, nor about the music itself but rather about the acousticovisual language of cinema and television. The building blocks for what I experienced were happenstance emissions of the thoughtless cultures around me. I was simply a TV-informed daydreaming fantasist making music videos which summed to a pre-teen rock opera cycle, entirely inspired by self-pity, childish egoism, and the yearning for wish-fulfillment.
That is: these βpeakβ aesthetic experiences seem to have been predicated on an immature and aesthetically derivative inner life, a life which I would not want to return to even for such experiences. Aging is full of such exchanges, which seem at first like losses but later turn out to be the consequences of some kinds of treasured reformation. It was good to be fully animated or inhabited by song; it is sad that even when I most adore a song today βand I still listen to songs repetitively, still geek out about minutiaeβ it doesnβt become my frame of mind, doesnβt absorb me in the same spatio-emotional way; but it is best of all that I no longer a mopey, moody, self-centered and self-pitying and self-centered romantic, fixated on lazy cinematic fantasies about myself.1
How much of our nostalgia is essentially this awareness: that not only can we not go home again, but we wouldnβt want to? Yet the fact remains that few of my adult qualia compare to what I experienced hundreds of times in my youth while listening, often with friends, to whatever pop-trash correlated to some pre-fab memetic structure Iβd seen on a screen. It all reminds me of an observation Milan Kundera makes in Testaments Betrayed about his own childhood:
β¦[S]itting at the piano, I would throw myself into passionate improvisations for which I needed nothing but a C-minor chord and the subdominant F-minor, played fortissimo over and over again. The two chords and the endlessly repeated primitve melodic motif made me experience an emotion more intense than any Chopin, any Beethoven, has ever given me. (One time my musician father, completely furious -- I never saw him so furious before or after -- rushed into the room, lifted me off the piano stool, and with a disgust he could barely control, carried me into the dining room and set me down under the table.)
What I was experiencing during those improvisations was ecstasy. What is ecstasy? The boy banging on the keyboard feels an enthusiasm (or a sorrow, or a delight), and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into the state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion).
Ecstasy means being "outside oneself," as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one's position (stasis). To be "outside oneself" does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or th future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is the absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time).
Prepositional or analogical variations notwithstanding, I think weβre talking about the same experience, and the quality of its mindlessness βand how it strikes adultsβ is the problematizing issue. Is this something to seek? Is this something to mourn the loss of?
Almost nothing takes me outside of myself now; my self has expanded, such that my experiential world seems to have contracted. Perhaps I was simply vacant enough as a child to be filled by song and now the inner space is too crowded. In no moment does my internal monologue pause; it is impossibly incessant, and I feel compassion for the many whose need to escape it drives them to whatever forms of mid-life crisis. But I do believe that not only is there no real escape βonly traps which seem like they might beβ but that itβs probably the case that itβs not something we should wish to recover anyway. It was fun while it lasted, and that should be enough.
I absolutely am still this way, but less. Or: I muzzle it, I suppress it, I mask it. I donβt really care about the particulars; itβs good that Iβm not a walking open emotional wound, however I got there.
Sounds like it's time for Steely Dan
In 2017 I was at a hostel in Chiang Mai, Thailand, age 40. They had a little kitchen where I was having some coffee, and Harry Styles "Sign of the Times" came on the radio. I'd never heard it before, and Styles wasn't at all on my radar screen. I had to Shazam the song to see who it was, even.
Yet, something about the moment made me feel like I was 17 again. A mediocre commercial pop song captured my interest. Was it that I was at a hostel with people half my age? No - I've always hosteled abroad in private rooms.
As best I can isolate it, it is this: I was having a brand new experience in a new city in a new country. All of life was new and I was learning to navigate on my own and that made everything, including the music, however mediocre, exciting. It was a soundtrack to an adventure.
Back in the states, age 45, every day is the same. Nothing is new. All the songs sound the same, again. I can't tell one artist from the next.
But when I'm abroad? I remember songs in taxis or at warongs or played by touts in the subway. It has something to do with the excitement of everything around me being new and different and me figuring it all out on my own.