July 28, 2003

let it bleed.

I generally scoff at organized religion.
I'm not a believer in astrology.
I believe in fate, but only from a scientific point of view. There is only one reaction which will happen to each given set of circumstances, everything, including the human brain, is a set of chemical and electrical impulses. I guess this would be some sort of biological determinism.

I don't believe in magic,
I don't believe in I - ching,
I don't believe in bible,
I don't believe in tarot,
I don't believe in Hitler,
I don't believe in Jesus,
I don't believe in Kennedy,
I don't believe in Buddha,
I don't believe in mantra,
I don't believe in Gita,
I don't believe in yoga,
I don't believe in kings,
I don't believe in Lennon,
I don't believe in Yoko,
I don't believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me.

What I do believe in, however, is the mystic power of the radio.
The seemingly random interplay of songs on the radio can, at times, not be random at all. Each song can carry a message, especially when driving home at 2:30am and Where the Streets Have No Name comes over the airwaves on a hot summer night. Your car becomes a golden comet, shooting through the deserted, darkened lanes of your home town, windows down, hand out, blasting The Joshua Tree, singing as if it were the Gospel, as if in this one moment, you switched from Saul to Paul, as if you had gazed on the face of the infinite, as if Dave Evans' guitar cut through the shielding of your soul and unleashed it into the night air, and the whole of the earth, the whole of its atmoshphere and oceans were not enough to hold it, and it expanded out into endlessness.

And then, when you pull into your driveway, and think "I bet she has emailed me," and the strains of a boys' choir come on the radio, and you check and see that she has, and Mick and the London Bach Choir start to tell you about how you can't always get what you want, and you start to think that, well, you can't always get what you want, and thank you radio for reminding me of that, and then, prosaically, tritely, it's follwed be them reminding you that if you try sometimes, you just might get what you need, and you realize that the crux of the song, the crux of the feeling just then is not the beautiful tragedy of no one ever getting what they want (apologies for paraphrasing TMBG there), or the hope given by the concession that you can sometimes get what you need, but it is the 'try.'

It is the keeping on. The very point of existence. The very definition of humanity. What this whole post means, I can't tell you. I can't sum it up, but in the meandering there is a meaning to me. Hopefully you find one too.

"We all need someone we can feed on."

Posted by orion at July 28, 2003 02:21 PM | TrackBack