The Soothing Sounds of Your
Subconscious Soiree
the TheoryPull your head out of your astral plane: As a freshman in college, I was lured to a meeting of the �Universal Rebirth Club� with promises of yoga, meditation, and vegetarian potlucks. The latter could have been construed as a euphemism for getting baked, but thankfully I didn�t stick around long enough to find out. The president of the club had apparently been practicing yoga, meditation and potlucking all of her life. But wait...was she, in fact, the president? I don�t think she was a student at my university. Who was this person? She had a name like �Karma� and her siblings had similar hippie names like �Moon� and �Squirrel� or something like that, but I never saw these people anywhere else on campus. Maybe they were apparitions, which, in hindsight, makes some measure of sense. In one of our first meditation exercises we were told to either assume
the lotus position or to lie on our backs. As a novice, I found the former
rather painful, so I plopped out upon the floor and soon went into a state
of deep relaxation, or, as I like to call it, �sleep.� Even under the annoyed glares of the more-meditative-than-thou Moon and Squirrel, I was able to gather some instruction from Karma. I was to retreat to the �Temple of my Inner Being,� a place where I could best be at peace with my body, mind, and soul. In a realm somewhere between half-consciousness and like-a-logness, in the middle of a picturesque, Technicolor-green garden (featuring the requisite happy bunnies and singing birds), in the very picture of Eden itself, I found my Temple, and I must say I was rather disappointed. It�s diameter was, at most, ten feet, and it�s height was little more. It was built of gray stone, and a birdbath stood unused in the center. It held a weathervane above it, rusted in place and impervious to the wind. It was, in truth, a gazebo with Ionic columns. The accumulation of pennies and the occasional nickel in the birdbath led me to believe that I was not the only person paying visits to this poor excuse for a temple, and that deepened the dissatisfaction. Temple-mates in the Parthenon would be acceptable. In fact, I would probably welcome the company, but there was no way in hell I was sharing space in the Gazebo of my Inner Being. I attended only one other Universal Rebirth meeting, but after spending thirty minutes doing the noodle dance to a yogi monk playing guitar and chanting �love is everything - love is all there is� or �all you need is love� or �band on the run� or something like that, I decided I had better things to do on Thursday night. One of those better things was locking myself in my dorm room and playing whatever rock and jazz records I could listen to without conjuring up any images of Beatlesque yogis or astral gazebos. But, as I would come to understand with a little more maturity, the Clash and Ornette Coleman can only drown out the roar of your subconscious white noise for so long. What are you afraid of? It's only rock 'n roll...or something: I suppose it was only a matter of time. I returned to the Temple of my Inner Being with my first listen to Radiohead's Kid A. The first track, "Everything in It's Right Place" was a total departure from the prog-rock fury of O.K. Computer. With a few exceptions, such as the free-jazz bombast of �the National Anthem,� the sounds Radiohead put on this record were delicate and beautiful, yet somewhat eerie and unnerving. Headphones clamped tightly, I sat in the dark staring at the light that played upon the wall, cut into slats as it was strained through the Venetian blinds. �I wonder how we know they have Venetian blind on Venus. I�ll bet they keep them closed a lot, it being so much closer to the sun than Earth,� I mused deliriously as I drifted off into a half-sleep somewhere around track #5.
And then, terror. I was jolted awake by the icily mathematical percussion and bleak, sparsely melodic strains of �Idioteque.� It was dance music from the pit of Dante�s hell, and it made the dark a very uncomfortable place to be. I got up and turned on the lights and the television, but I kept the headphones on. This music was difficult for me to deal with, but I couldn�t let it out of my head. Perhaps the appeal of this music resides in its contradiction. It is compelling but frightening. Often soothing sounds are arranged in an unsettling way. The listener is both at peace in solitude, and subject to the terror of alienation. Therein lies the Catch-22 of the party music from your mind. To be continued:
� *Although not known for being particularly vocal, bunnies will, in fact, scream when provoked. |
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There
I was again. The Gazebo. Yet the setting was somehow different. The garden
was still green; the sky was still a pristine blue. But I was alone. No
noise from the birds or bunnies.* Not even a wind creating ripples in
the birdbath. Only aural ambiance surrounded me. Deafening in its dominance
of the soundscape, I found it serene, yet ominous. I was so totally alone.