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July 17, 2005
drenched
this will be the night i go more completely deaf. there's a jazz combo playing in the coffeeshop, and they're not bad, and i know the guitarist from somewhere, but it's not getting me where i need to be. i'm battling good music with more useful and appropriate music. i'm having to turn the mix of arvo part, radiohead, zero 7, all up pretty damned loud.
i came here with words building in my head like storm clouds. they've gathered for days, the latest in the evolutionary cycle of rain, drought, storm, calm, evaporation, and back again, and still, the swingy sounds are getting through.
each time, thoughts gather and fall, puddle, run off, sometimes flood, but over time, with the heat of distraction and experience, it all evaporates again. but even then, it's not perfectly distilled - like history, there is the faintest residue of memory - it takes something of the process with it. the water is not of the same composition in which it fell.
but i'm getting ahead of myself, as usual.
there really is something beautiful in rain. who doesn't know this?but tonight, i left home to come to the coffeehouse, my heart as heavy as it's been, immersed in a bitterness and despair. driving out of the parking garage, i emerged from semi-darkness into grey, into the downpour, and the rain was what my heart felt, and what i felt was the rain, and it was all, in some way, beautiful.
and i couldn't help but wonder if it was right or if it was wrong, if this was the symptom, the consequence of the failure of my brain's chemistry, if there was something wrong with me, to see beauty where i saw pain.
but i also wondered, as i sat watching the rain on the windshield, if there wasn't something almost completely right about it.
as one of a handful of necessary constants in nature, in our existence, and very survival, rain itself is now steeped in mythology, as one of our most powerful archetypes. it has become laden with meaning and metaphor. renewal and rejuvenation. even when its excess brings death and suffering, many of us watch the video with conflict in our hearts, the palpable disconnect between the beauty and its consequence.
but rain is also a metaphor for sorrow, gloom, despair, solitude. we haven't had to work hard at all to romanticize it in our collective consciousness. our folklore, our art, our music, our films, are all redolent of rain's imagery. blue eyes crying in the rain... when it's raining icepicks on your steel shores... audrey hepburn looking forlorn in the rain...
and there's beauty in that, too, isn't there? how conscious are we of our desire to embrace the rain, to embrace sorrow, even emptiness? if we, if i, embrace it too much, then it's pathological, it's a problem. it is, indeed, just a symptom, just a false signal from the short-circuiting of neural pathways.
but we don't just praise those who bring messages of redemption, of hope, of humor. we praise those just as much, if not more, that can touch, and not just touch, but truly, deeply, even harshly reveal, deliver, remind us of the impact of that other side of our hearts and emotions.
me - i'm here again, in the rain. it's raining in my heart, and i can't seem to get away from it. there are measurable factors, chemical, situational, cognitive. but once again, i have to wonder, how much of this is illness, and how much being alive, how much just truly being me? how much of this is something i've been given - the lack of a psychological filter, of a natural biochemical defense - meant to give me the raw material for what i'm here to do?
that same lack of a filter sometimes makes me funny, sometimes makes me sharp and insightful. sometimes, though, i just want to flood the world with words, with the precipitation, with the tears of my heart. i want you to see the rain, and not simply drive through it, or think it's pretty. i want it to break your heart, and i want you to see that awful beauty, as well.
we can't live without this cycle. we have to know it all, feel it all. i take shelter, at times, where i can, when i can, in distractions and medications. i run from the storm, at times, trying to outpace it, trying to find and track the eye's falsehood. but sometimes, it catches me, and i stand and face into the wind and feel the rain, and watch it come down, trying to see and taste what is different in it from the last time. and with these words, i try my best to get you to stand there with me.
Posted by Rob at July 17, 2005 08:08 PM