To feel alive, we need to feel mortal.
So we chase sex, alcohol, love and smoking.
The more we detach ourselves from life, the more flat and monotonous it becomes. The more we need to feel mortal.
Music is in the middle.
Music: Louder, more dreamy, more inward, bloody, violent and visceral. Screams. Music is one of the saving arts.
Like all living things, it’s dependent and addictive.
It burns the nerves, tickling them. Goose bumps. But it’s wide, and the addiction is countered by seeking new ones.
Music, film, painting, and theatre dig in and bring out memories we’d buried far away and in places hard to identify.
Everything comes back, stronger than before, and must be burned again with the understanding that it will come back again.
There are Venus with hidden arms and goblins.
It’s a bit of a silly thing to want to be above things and let them flow beneath us. It’s a lot more alive to be exhausted and go down and let it swallow you up.
There’s a part of us that will always keep us tied to society, holding on to what we “belong” to just as a dog is held to a choke collar.
It’s the price we pay to feel alive, to be bruised, to be invisible, to have those moments when we try to chase that memory until the air runs out until we collapse to the ground.
The collar gives way, the air flows back into our lungs.
A new injury has reopened, and we can do nothing but lie on the ground waiting to regain our strength to convince ourselves that that leash was salvific.
Then to feel alive, naked and gaunt, we recoil at the other things that make us mortal, such as smoking and alcohol, or substances to knock us out and smile. But lucidity can strike even in dreams.
Lucidity is that wild instinct that knows how to stab us repeatedly when we least expect it.
If you don’t feel vulnerable, idiotic, but on the contrary confident and determined, it means you are already dead.