I just came across a really creative songwriter/singer on MySpace- Kimya Dawson. She’s an independent artist with six solo albums, you should listen to her song “the beer”: http://www.myspace.com/kimyadawson
This is a clip from a performance when she was with her old band Moldy Peaches:
Once, long ago, there was an intact unity of pure energy torn asunder and the universe spilled out all around it. The four divided forces that rule it were once one in a great sphere of nothingness. As the explosion cooled, matter began to form within the energy and accumulated as the expansion wore on. We and the world as we know it sprang from these remains, but the pure energy lingered and now runs throughout all life. Our reality is its opposite which it quietly and graciously sustains. The world is a delusion encasing a truth. When I point to the leaf and announce that it is green, what I really mean is, it is every color except for green. When I point to the table and call it brown, I know that it is every color except for brown. When I reach for it, my hand does not pass through it when it gets to the threshold of its form- it is halted in its trajectory, and I can feel the insistence that it is there even as I know- at a fundamental level the table is comprised of the same material as the air around me. The nature of nature is deceptive; the underlying energy is the constant to the decay. Nothing is as it appears. What do we put our trust in, then? That which cannot be seen, that inundates us even as it eludes our grasp- and we should be grateful for this. What tends to happen to that which is within our grasp? Let us seek the truth, even if it should lead us down darker patches; there is light at the end of the tunnel. Tear yourself open to the world, let it spill out. Keep your hands to yourself, and you cannot be blamed for what emerges any more than an unintentional universe can be blamed for your existence. You are what you know deep down you are, and it is much more than the surface bundle of insecurities blissfully referred to as identity. You are not fashion, hair color, sexual orientation, occupation, sibling, child, father/mother, wife/husband, bright white teeth. You are Joan of Arc leading the charge, you are Socrates the wise philosopher, you are the son/daughter of God, you are the dream. No one else is going to answer for how you lived in the end but you. Life is yours, and in it you are anything you want to be, as long as you are willing to believe it. How much are you willing to believe? I urge you to consider such things even as I, myself, am lacking. I write these words even as I know the potential for misunderstanding in the written word. The very fact that I am sitting here alone writing them instead of boldly speaking them face to face shows my own sorry lack of conviction. What do I have to offer you, then? No less than the world- physical form encasing a truth, crudeness and beauty that spring from the same source and whose destinies lay intertwined. What I have to offer is contradiction. By my own philosophy I would tell you not to pay attention to a word I have written here, but I would not mean it. I would tell you to go your own way, even as I would wish you would follow mine.
“I’m slipping! I can’t hold on!” her voice breaks in, shrill and desperate. Frantic now, his voice trembles as he tries to calm her. “Shhh…just breathe and you’ll be fine, I promise you. You’re going to be back on your feet safe and sound in no time, but I need you to listen to me, okay?” Her tears stop and she shakes her head yes. “Get a good grip on the chain again. Hang on tight and get ready for me to grab it.” She does as he says, hugging the chain and squeezing her eyes shut, waiting for his rescue.
He edges onto the walkway, and still holding the railing, swings out towards the chain- his shoulder bucks against the strain and his injury flames up to a pain he cannot bear. His fingers reflexively spring out, releasing their hold on the railing. The little girl still waits patiently above, just as he told her. There is a moment where he feels as though he is floating and he simply thinks- I’m going to fall. And he falls, as though in slow motion, a thin smile on his face, his eyes shining. He swings his good arm in a wide arc, as though he is doing a backstroke. Right before he hits the concrete, the hand of his good arm happens upon a lever, pulling it down. The chain the little girl is hugging begins to move, and she rises- up towards the ceiling and the safety of another, higher walkway.
Later, when some police officers question her about the broken and motionless man on the floor of the warehouse, she helplessly shakes her head and says, “I don’t know…just some man.”
As our hero lay dying, thinking his last thoughts that we will never know now due to our distraction with the fate of the little girl, some children were milling around the base of an old tower in a not too far-off rural town. One of them, a no-nonsense girl who never did believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, spotted a flash in the corner of her eye. Searching for the source of it, her eyes turned toward a metallic, rectangular object in the branches of a nearby tree. Nudging her fellow companion, she pointed up to it and asked, “Hey…what’s that?”
“Don’t yell at me old man! Do what I tell you and put the money in the bag!”
The mustached man behind the counter is glaring at the masked man thrusting the gun and practically screaming. “Lazy bum! You sit around, do nothing, and I work every day so you can come in here and take what I earn!” He is putting the money in the bag, though.
“Shutup! You don’t know me! You foreigners come over here and get all the breaks and take Americans’ jobs from them, so shut your mouth! You know nothing!” and he takes the bag stuffed full of cash.
“You’re not getting away, idiot,” the mustache curls with the smile as the storeowner makes a pushing gesture with his finger toward the underside of the counter.
“What!? What did you do that for, you…stupid…” and the arm is now flexed straight, the gun pointed directly at the head of the storeowner, and the finger is tightening-
A bell is ringing. The two of them turn their heads sharply towards the sound- our hero has just stepped through the door, feeling stronger and more determined. For a long moment there is silence, as the stunned storeowner and masked man try to decipher what has just happened, and our hero grapples with the right words to disarm the situation. This tension is broken by approaching police sirens, and the masked one quickly tosses the gun into the hands of our hero and yells “Run!” The storeowner now looks crossly at him and starts yelling, “Don’t you move!” but our hero is oblivious as he stares bewildered at the gun that has just been flung into his hands. He spreads them apart, letting the gun drop to the floor, and it catches on the end of a rack and goes off. Burning lead pierces his shoulder, and he automatically grabs it. His head is spinning, but he must get out of here, so he pivots round to the door to leave, but two squad cars have already parked directly in front of the door. Three officers are already getting out and drawing their guns, and he painfully, helplessly puts his hands up as they grab him. His companion has stepped forward into the fray and is turning her head awkwardly, like a bird’s jerky movements, and is demanding, “What’s going on?”
The now unmasked man, meanwhile, is watching in amazement from further on down the street. He is edging out into the street to get an even better look, and is so taken with himself for his fast, clever thinking, that he does not notice the speeding silver car careening towards him. As it comes upon him, a window rolls down and an arm extends out from it, grabbing the bag of bills right out of his hand. He futilely stomps and screams after it as thin, green-hued slips go streaming out behind the vehicle. It roars towards the market. Passersby, many of them- some seeming to come out of nowhere- are suddenly scrambling towards the fluttering money, eagerly pouncing on it. In the midst of this chaos, our hero manages to slip, unnoticed, out of the custody of the police.
The storeowner is running in circles like a chicken with his head cut off, yelling:
“Don’t touch that! That’s my money!” and he grabs the collar of a man stuffing a handful in his pocket, saying again, “That’s my money, give it back now!”
“No, old man, this is mine, it’s my rebate for all the times I’ve been ripped off in your store!” and he angrily pulls himself away from the store owner’s grasp. The storeowner begins snatching at bills himself, but keeps missing as he points and continues yelling at the boisterous crowd.
Later, after order is restored, the kind blind woman in the flowered hat who is questioned by the police manages to clear our hero’s name- although, she realizes sadly, she does not even know what that name is.
He is gasping and swallowing hard at intervals, holding his shoulder and squeezing up against a concrete wall facing out into an open bland and hotly sunned area with automotive garages and what looks to be some abandoned warehouse. He is listening very hard for any sounds of pursuing police, and consequently nearly jumps out of his skin when he hears what sounds like some melodious bird song. It is not a bird, though; it is the singsong voice of a little girl. She walks right by him, lackadaisically twirling a rope over her head and occasionally hopping over it. There is something oddly familiar about her, so much so he feels compelled to follow her. She is alternately walking and hopping lazily across the open area, when small droplets of rain begin to fall from the sky. Looking up with her hands upheld, she begins to spin. And this is when she notices him.
He stops in his approach of her, and tentatively and quizzically smiles at her. She, in turn, widens her eyes to the size of jawbreakers, gasps, and runs- a not so melodious scream trailing after her.
“No, no- it’s okay. Little girl!” but she keeps right on going, straight toward the warehouse. Worried that she will hurt herself, he starts running after her.
The warehouse is all stained concrete, rusted railings, and thick chains and grime covered levers. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The little girl is at the far end of the warehouse, and stepping up a stairwell leading to a walkway overhead. He follows, calling after her: “I’m not going to hurt you little girl, I promise. Don’t go up there, okay? You could get hurt up there!” She only screams louder at his words, though, slipping and stumbling her way up the stairs. They are both up on the walkway now, he with his head down running to catch up to her, while she stumbles a little in her attempt to get away from him and grabs the railing for support. He hears a wrenching creaking sound and a scream, and looks up to see her swinging out from the walkway on a part of the railing that has given way.
“Grab the chain, grab the chain!” he cries out in terror, and thankfully she does just as the railing begins to dip down a little. He runs up to her, and surveys the area. He pulls on the side of the railing still securely connected to the walkway. Satisfied, he takes a few quick deep breaths and grabs onto it with the hand of the injured shoulder. Trying his best to ignore the pain, he clenches his fingers tightly around it. Leaning out towards her and extending his arm, he calmly says, “Take my hand.”
Crying and screaming, she looks over at him and shakes her head quickly back and forth. Once again, very calmly, he says, “You can do it, come on.”
She hesitantly takes one of her hands from the chain and begins to reach towards him, but screams and snatches it back when her other hand slides a little. Shaking her head again, looking at him with large sad eyes, she cries, “I can’t, I can’t!”
“It’s alright, honey, all you have to do is just reach my hand. As soon as you do, I’ll grab you and I won’t let go. I’ll pull you up on the walkway with me, and you’ll be safe- it’ll be all over. Take some deep breaths first then try again. Come on, breath with me…”
Looking into one another’s eyes they breathe together, and her cries dwindle down to sniffles. She adjusts her grip on the fat chain, and concentrating on his hand, she slowly begins to reach toward it- she slides down again, this time a little more than before, and once again screams as she snaps her hand back. “I can’t reach” is barely audible through her frightened sobs. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, Dadd—“he puts his head down and shakes it. What is he thinking? “I’m going to get you out of here. We’re just going to have to try something different, that’s all. What I’m going to do this time is swing out and catch the chain…”
The roaring of motors and the crunching of wood awaken him to his surroundings once again, and his train of thought unravels. He tries with all his might to hold on, but it is lost to him. He looks up in exasperation, and a few large yellow and black monster vehicles are suddenly upon him. What is this?
There is a sound like escaping steam and one of the doors of the closest tractor swings open. A hard-hatted man pokes his head out and yells at our hero, “Hey! Get out of the way before you get killed!”
Our hero considers this. “Why?” he asks.
Misunderstanding the question, the man replies, “We’ve got to clear this area for a new housing development, so I need you to just be on your way.” Our hero makes no move though, he sits and stares.
Exasperated now, the hard-hat man walks up to him saying, “okay, buddy, time to go now” and grabs his arm to try and lift him up, but our hero stays limp. Turning around, the man yells, “Hey Jerry, can you give me a hand here?” Another hard-hat gets down from one of the tractors, and the two of them carry our hero well away from the site. He watches them walk away, get in their tractors, and begin to demolish the quaint, peaceful woods where he made his home. He is going to sorely miss it. Whatever kind of insight he may have gained here, it is going to have to do because it is time to move on.
It is not too long until he reaches a city, civilization- people. It should be noted that after spending a few weeks in the woods, though there was a small stream nearby, he is not looking particularly approachable, and he seems to have aged. Smiling, he walks down the cracked and slightly misshapen sidewalk, waving at fellow passersby- some waving enthusiastically back, others merely looking around themselves puzzled, and some averting their eyes and quickening their step. Those that are unresponsive do not deter him. In the distance, he spots two figures that, by their demeanor and the faint angry tone he can already hear, seem to be in an argument. Here is a test of his newfound understanding. He continues heading straight for them.
“I never said that! That is not what I said, and you know it! I am so sick of this.” a stomp underlining all emphasized words.
A glare and shaking of the head: “How can you look me straight in the eye and lie like that.”
A loud and frustrated sigh, hands on either side of the head pulling the hair, “This is pointless!”
A tear swelled look heavenward, and a whisper: “This is ‘pointless’?”
There is an irrevocable sentence hovering around the mouth, waiting for the throat to sound it and the lips to form it, it is just about to be said-
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
At first, the couple stares at one another, the words from the rough-looking man not registering, but the irrevocable sentence has been halted. In a much quieter voice, the young clean-cut man says, “Look, not right now okay. We don’t have any money to give you anyway, so just…be on your way now.”
Money, he thinks, somewhat confused, until he realizes what he must look like.
“What do I need money for, when I have the beautiful day and the people in it to spend my time with.”
“What?” the young man turns, incredulous, towards the unshaven, crumpled individual talking nonsense. “What do you need money for?” he says and turns towards his partner whose tear-brimmed eyes have dried, and who now has a small smile teasing the corners of her mouth. “Uh, to live, maybe?”
He puts his arms out, as though hugging the sky, and turns in slow circles as he says, “I’m alive.”
“Yeah, and in a few months when it’s freezing and you have nowhere to go and can’t find any food to eat, come back and tell me again how you don’t need money.” The young man’s companion laughs audibly at this. He looks from one to the other, a feeling of irritation creeping over him.
Shaking his head, he reaches out to them and pleads, “You don’t see.”
“Oh my god!” putting his hands out in front of himself and waving them back and forth, the young man continues with his joke. “I can’t see! Help me! I can’t see!” His partner is laughing nonstop now, hugging herself.
Our hero angrily stalks away from the two of them, thinking to himself: this is pointless! When he steps off the curb to cross the street, a silver sports car screams to a halt a mere inch from him, and he jumps back, yelling after it as it roars away.
The couple watch and chuckle before turning to look at one another with softened eyes. With apologies on their faces and in their arms, they embrace. The irrevocable sentence is safely forgotten, at least for the time being.
Further down the street, he is still fuming over his first encounter with the human race after his tremendous experience of rebirth, so that he does not notice the lady with the sleek dark wooden cane and flowered hat struggling to get through her front gate with a silver wired cart.
“Oh, excuse me, sir?” she calls out to him in a kind voice. With an exasperated mutter of “what now” he stops and takes a couple steps in her direction. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but do you think you could help me out here, I seem to be having a little trouble…” Sighing heavily, he grabs the cart and yanks it impatiently through the gate and out to the sidewalk. “Thank you so much, that’s very kind of you,” she says.
He is about to hurry off, when in a sweet voice she adds: “It sure is a beautiful day today, isn’t it?” He suddenly feels bad about his impatience with her, and turns back around to shyly smile at her.
“Yes, it is lovely.”
“Lovely- that is the perfect word,” she adds and smiles up into the sun, her dark glasses obscuring her eyes. “You wouldn’t mind escorting an old woman to the market, would you?”
Well, it wasn’t as though he had any pressing matters to attend to right now.
“Sure,” he says as he takes her arm, and the two walk down the street that way to the market.
“…people don’t see each other anymore,” he is saying to her as they round the corner of the block the market is on. “They tuck away what is most beautiful about them, fearing that they will find it to be ugly and shameful after all, that if they let it out they will be let down, hurt. Everyone has this wall of protection up around them, they’re afraid of each other. How can people really hope to reach one another that way?”
“Hmm,” she says, thinking about her daughter whom she has not spoken to in almost ten years- her refreshingly funny daughter with her infuriating pride, like her own pride. Usually when she thinks of her, she feels hardened, but now her heart trembles as she looks back on the rift that has separated them for so long- and she can no longer remember how it even got started. “I think you may be right about that, young man,” she says, hearing his words as though they were tailor-made for her. “What about you?”
“Me?” he asks.
Nodding her head, she simply replies, “Yes, you.”
“Well…I mean…I don’t know.”
“What are you doing out here by your lonesome, a young man like you, telling some old woman about ‘life’ and ‘people’. Don’t you have your own family, friends, somewhere?”
He doesn’t respond, but just looks straight ahead. Such words have become foreign to him. “I guess I just feel like there’s something more than” -here he spreads his arm out before them- “all this.” A strain comes into his voice, “I felt compelled to go out and share all the thoughts and feelings running through me.”
“And you should,” she pats his arm as she says this.
He shakes his head, though. “People don’t want to hear about all that.”
“I like hearing it. As a matter of fact, you may have just changed the future for a couple of people just by talking.”
He looks at her out of the corner of his eye and says, “Yeah, well, you’re just one person.”
“So what are you saying, no one else is gonna be like me?”
“Well, yes, everyone’s unique, that’s exactly it.”
She laughs at that, and moves in a little closer towards him. “This world is full of all different kinds of people- you have said as much yourself. Not everyone is going to accept you, not everyone is going to reject you either. All you can do is be the way you know to be, and keep on, and you can’t help but find that acceptance eventually. Like I said, I like ya, so there’s one already.”
Her words were so simply true he found he could not deny them. Warming up inside, he began to walk with a broad smile and a bit of a spring in his step.
The two of them reach the door of the market, and he is startled at the scene that lay just beyond the glass. Pulling his companion to the side quickly, he faces her and grabs her by the shoulders as though he is planting her in a pot. With a firm “Don’t move,” he returns to the market-
Armed with a laptop and the blues, our hero climbs the stairs with the deliberation of someone who doesn’t know where they’re going or why. We don’t know where he came from or who he is, and neither does he. There are bits of memories and feelings that swarm in and out of his consciousness, but they amount to some flotsam and jetsam, a series of moving pictures and sound that he has desperately tried to make sense of. We watch as he reaches the summit of a randomly chosen tower on the edge of a town the name of which is not important and could not be recalled anyway. His breath he must suck, the flimsy railing his hand must cling as he pulls his body up onto neglected cement and steel. Staring out at a wind dusted and sun fried landscape an indescribable feeling- a kind of deep sorrow and angry inescapable love- overwhelms his senses for a moment as he watches the ragtag of people here and there going about their business as usual: hanging an array of clothes that will get dirty again, pumping gas that will be consumed and replaced and itself consuming the very air, a shopping cart squealing on the asphalt full of junk waiting to be discarded, and there through that window- a woman making beds that will only be made again and again. They amount to would-be forgotten names and faces if only they would ever be known, but they will pass mostly unnoticed, mostly by themselves.
They don’t know…they don’t know what they do, he thinks. He opens the laptop bursting with thousands of unseen words and starts the music, a soothing and dusty blues happy in its sadness that had seemed appropriate and yet- no connection is made. He came here to do something, but he cannot remember what. His hands slam the laptop shut, cutting off the music that failed him, and in an unthinking, involuntary motion he flings it up into the shine of the sun. His eyes follow it with little interest, as though it were a small, lackluster bird that happened by, and it falls surprisingly lightly into the branches of a nearby tree. Fearful second thoughts convulse violently in his mind, as though it were his very life hanging precariously among the branches of the indifferent tree, and he makes to save it.
With both hands gripping the railing, he gingerly slips first one leg then the other over it to tentatively search for the slip of concrete edge jutting out beneath. Easing himself carefully hand over hand down to a squat, he slowly turns his head towards the closest branch of the tree. Turning back around, he closes his eyes and rests his forehead against the cold curved steel. You can do this, he thinks, you’re just reaching for something- for a glass across a table, don’t think about it. Taking a few heavy deep breaths, he swings outward, extending his arm towards the branch, and we are reminded of the orangutans that entertained us so much on some class trip we took to the zoo, only this one is not quite as graceful. The branch enticingly comes within reach, only to be cruelly snatched away as his left foot begins to slide, and he desperately snaps his hand back, grabbing at steel and twisting his foot inward on its side to put on the brakes. This does work, however he is left in a compromised position- his leg now awkwardly twisted underneath the railing and his arms fully extended as he hangs slightly below the lip of the concrete walkway. A sound that is something between a laugh and a sob erupts from him, and he asks himself the question that all good people do at some point, the one that never seems to have an answer, and if there was one, it certainly wasn’t coming to mind this time either.
Not realizing how impossible the situation really is, he sets about untangling himself, deciding that he will take the long way back to the bottom of the tower and look for a board or rope to free his laptop from the tree instead. He drags his slippery shoe across the walkway to try to brace it against the concrete lip so he can pull himself upright, but as he does his knee pushes up against his chest and he loses a little bit of his hold on the railing. He is frantic now, and sweating. In his attempt to get a little bit of a better hold, his hand slides even further until the only thing between him and the hard ground below is the slight curl of his fingertips. Is this it, the words scream in his head, am I really here right now? This can’t be happening!
Although our hero brings up a good point, one worthy of rousing debate, we should probably forgo this, as there is a much more pressing matter to attend to right now. The fate of a man, a man no longer hanging by mere fingertips- but falling back into nothing, a terrible cry searing his mind to ash. An inhuman noiseless cry we are blessedly spared the sound of, until it can suddenly be heard- as though our hero’s thoughts and feelings were manifesting in the air around him, but it is not coming from him. It is so bewildering and distracting, he forgets himself, and looks up and around frantically searching for the source of it. Unbeknownst to him, he is a mere few feet from a broken neck and a lifeless bloody heap. Where can that horrible incessant screech be coming from?
He then senses more than sees some kind of flapping beast hovering above him, and this perception is immediately followed by a wrenching pain, like fat metal hooks cutting deep into one shoulder, then the other, and it is so god awful he nearly blacks out. In just a short time, though, he gets used to it and snaps out of his fog to find himself being carried high over the never ending dried fields cut through by narrow strips dotted with miniature cars. He attempts to get a better look at the creature that has him in its clutches, but can only snatch little bits- a part of a gnarled and twisted beak, the very edge of grimy knotted black feathers. He gives up, deciding that from the snippets he’s seen, he’d rather not get the full picture anyway.
The sun is setting, and spread out just above him are rolling dark roses and warm oranges, petering out to a faint yellow. It is a breathtaking, glorious sight, one that he has seen many times before, but never from this point of view.
He is so taken with the view, he doesn’t notice at first that they are headed for an old leafless and blackened tree with a prickly mess of sticks randomly pushed together in a large bowl, taking up nearly half the tree. The ear-splitting chirping finally catches his attention, and he becomes panic-stricken. Does this thing mean to feed me to its…young? His legs and arms start flailing; he would rather have fallen than this! This does him no good, as the great bird’s claws only tighten. It drops him in the thorny nest, and he scrambles to his feet meaning to make a quick getaway. The creature’s young bump him up against the edge of the nest, still squawking furiously, and turn him around. Even facing them directly, he still cannot make out their shapes clearly, which seem to shift strangely in the night. He slouches down into the nest, sliding onto his back to look up at them, and they almost instantly stop and back off from him. Apparently, they didn’t mean to eat him after all. He lies there, stunned.
After they all finally fall asleep, he finds a thin spot in the nest through which he quietly- very quietly- sneaks out to the tree limbs and carefully- very carefully- makes his way down. Once again with his feet on the ground, he runs. He runs until he feels he cannot go on, and sits down hard with heaving shoulders. The sheer absurdity of his experience is something he thinks he needs to seriously think about, and yet he does not feel it absurd- it has all felt oddly mundane. Nevertheless, he ponders what it means to his existence. We will not traverse the disjointed scraps of thoughts and feelings that run through his mind, as it would not make a whole lot of sense to us, and honestly, would not be of that much interest besides. All we really need to know is after a few weeks, our hero is on the brink of an epiphany about his existence and the role of it in the world at large, and I can assure you it is not that of a hot dog vendor or a carpet installer. He feels a great wave of understanding coming over him, a kind of inner swell. He feels he is about to discover something crucial- he can taste it-
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