Time--Line and Circle

Time is linear and time is periodic. I can say I was born June 12th, 1958, which today, September 22, 2009, makes me 51 years, 101 days old. I can recite the successive places I have lived, the degrees I have earned, the jobs I have had. This is one aspect of time, and the way we typically measure a life.

But time is also periodic. We begin and then return to where we began, only to begin anew. And so the cycle repeats itself over and over again. This is how memory works. When we remember an event, we become who we were then, experiencing once more the emotions we felt at the point of origin, as though no time has passed. Emotion, especially when it is associated with tragedy, can trap us in an eternal reenactment of painful events. Perhaps only grace, something that comes from without and is always a gift that we cannot conjure up ourselves, can free us from such a closed emotional loop. I carried around a personal tragedy that bowed me until I walked so doubled over with grief that I could only look at the ground and could not lift my face to see the road ahead, but only the dust under my feet. It has taken many years, in linear time, to work out the kinks of this endless event trapped in the loops of periodic time. First I was forced to lose myself (or at least what I conceived of as myself), and be stripped bare of any sense of who I was and my reason for being. This returned me to a more fundamental, but also more malleable state. But unlike childhood, this time around I possessed a greater capacity for reasoning, and suffering, and so could play a more conscious role in crafting who I was becoming. This tale is part of that story.

Returning to art (history) again, gulping it down, devouring it with such urgency that I pay no mind if some of it drips off my chin or stains my fingers. Trying to make up for lost time, 15 years packed in the salt left from too many tears. Tears that were shed during the days-months-years of leave-taking of my former life. Unwilling to surrender that life, a dream almost within reach: but life intervened and no amount of wanting, wishing or hoping could make that dream come true. The harsh reality of it ripped the life out of me, robbed me of my identity, and turned me naked and alone into a night that appeared to be without end.

With the light was snuffed out, I became more sensitive to the sounds intruding on my awareness: a voice crying out in millennial anguish to the strains of a guitar, a prophet wailing his suffering in the absence of the beloved, a techno priest leading a Maghrebi trance dance. All these had pure, unrestrained emotion as their raw material and sound as their canvas. For the first time in my life, I was truly beyond words. Only music could express my state as I was forced to move into and finally fully embrace the darkness that stripped me of all thought and belief, and left me in the darkness, waiting.

I re-lived my grief in flamenco, tended gently by knowing Gypsy singers who saw the pain, and did not recoil, only nodding in quiet compassion. I discovered a living composer whose music spoke directly to my heart and mind. It poured pure balm into my soul and allowed me to grieve until I could grieve no more. I became a creature of the night, moving in the arms of strangers to the sounds of Buenos Aires. Tango is a dance best danced in the wee hours of the morning; the mind ceases to function, the body blossoms like an exotic night flower as it moves in the half-light around a hot and crowded dance floor. The smell of sweat mixes with perfume to become an elixir found nowhere else. Like some rarefied purification, the bitterness and disappointment ooze out in beads of sweat, leaving a sweet emotional exhaustion in its wake.

Finally the vein is played out, the deep subterranean shaft can be blocked up and, squinting, I returned to the light. It has been many years and I have become pale and blind as a cave shrimp. Upon my return, the world appears too bright, its inhabitants strangers, and I realize that my thoughts and feelings are out of step with my daily life. I am not able to live on my dreams, my creativity pays no bills; I am now divided in two: one person by day, another, very different, person by night. It is in this state that I begin my journey to the East, rediscovering myself at the crossroads between East and West, the future and a faintly remembered past, Hong Kong. The story of that rebirth, another, more hopeful tale, bears the imprint of a man who miraculously, through his art, reached out to me from beyond the grave. But that is a tale for another day.