Let us suppose these things are like the truth.
--
Xenophanes
It starts as a
tingling in my neck. A
shivering. Like after you take a piss and get that spastic rrughrahah.
First time, it was a
Mozart tape I got in a series of audiobooks about the lives of the composers. Bach was my favorite, but Mozart gave me the spastic
tingles. Near the end, with the narrator describing his death and legacy, they cue up a crescendoing
Requiem and there’s me, 7 or so, worming out with epileptic
joy, curled up in the wayback, listening on my Walkman, face pushed into the cool red plastic side of our
cooler.
It was usually music that did it. But it also happened with books. Like right at the beginning of
The Phantom Tollbooth, when Milo gets the big box delivered to his bedroom and realizes what it is is a portal from his
monochrome world (even Milo sounding perfectly like a last word before sleep, a
long-voweled sigh) into something big and florid and chancy.
That’s it, really, although I like to think my aesthetic shivery thing is
idiosyncratic and
ineffable. It’s a sense of expansion, of things opening up all around me, of possibility
unfurling. A Friday in the
fall
and you're fifteen. It's night.
Three of you have a beer to split and your feet cricklecrack the tiny gravel of the path. Some laughter. Your parents are gone. Some quiet. A swingset. There are girls to see somewhere. Anything might happen. Some wind. Some stars.
Or
Bridge to Terabithia. Death. A book taking you seriously, letting you in on the tragedy of life that almost everyone is trying oh so hard to keep you insulated from. Or
The Diary of Anne Frank. My God. 2nd grade, sitting in the library when it's raining, on the blue industrial nubby carpet, a girl a bit older talking to me. Grown men want to kill her and her family because of their name. Adults gone so damn crazy. Why did they kill this girl, who I was sort of in love with and had the unguarded expansiveness of the precocious and the good. The knocking at the door. Jackboots on the stones outside.
Undone. It’s the darkness sometimes, too, that brings these fits. The last sentence of
The Lottery: And they were upon her. Feel it. How alive and correct and
sepia-colored with dried blood. … falling
gently, gently falling over the living and the…. borne back ceaselessly into the ….
Please see this. Please feel the thrum and the
knot. In
chess, when the squares are
music and the pieces are lines and the moves are so right you feel electricity behind your eyes.
Arurughughugh. I want to stress that these fits are
visceral and involuntary. Like a doctor’s soft plastic triangle bounced off your
knee. Tap – kick. Beauty – shiveryshake. It can sometimes happen in a movie that just hits the narrative beats with perfect syncopation, first 14 minutes of Raising Arizona for example. Feeling you're in a master’s hands. Watching the sort of genius tinged with
violence. Or too when I sense that a person with whom I’m speaking is right
there with me, and there is a freedom and unpretentious ease.
Engagement. A chance of surprise. A labyrinthine mind like
Nabokov treating you to a subjective slice of its runtime.
Rugugugugh. My eyes close a bit. My shoulders tense up. I know what you’re
thinking, but it’s completely different. Instead of death more like a little
birth, raw scary glimmering openness (like a wound, like a gosling) rather than muted
bliss. Most often it’s the human voice that triggers me
. Could be the worst cliché of a school musical or
something, but then
she’s singing a solo and that damn note rings out, expanding and quivering in ether, by the time it reaches my ears the soundwaves already grown a bit distorted and lossy, but still right there I am in the dark sweaty auditorium, trembling, the world
cracked open for a second like a
geode to reveal the pure chaos and truly strange beating
heart at the center of the thing. I was born to find these moments. It is written under my
skin.