Switchfoot: Nothing is Sound

If you somehow were able to climb into my head, and dug with your hands (or a shovel, if you somehow managed to have the presence of mind to bring one), you would find layers of my mind that are pure sonic energy. I do not listen to a wide variety of music, so you'll find a lot of repetitive sounds, but you'll figure out very quickly that I use music the way anyone else uses a hammer and a nail. I'm lousy with hammers and nails, but use music like only a master carpenter ever could. Music is a tool, an instrument for building the mental landscape. If you kept going, lower and lower, you'd eventually find a point where there is no further to dig: all would be random chaos, the type of raw and powerful feelings that are impossible to communicate, possibly even feel directly.

The sonic foundation of every last thing I've ever come to believe is the Switchfoot album Nothing is Sound. There is very little before that point, and most of that's adrift in the chaos, waiting for reclamation. Everything after that rests upon the foundation that is Nothing is Sound.

Like all music that one loves, this came at a particular time in my life. I was a senior in highschool. My best friend had gone off the deep end due to his parent's nasty divorce. My own parents were in grave danger of having the same thing happening to them.  Most of my other friends were a year older than I, and had graduated. And I'd relapsed into lyme's disease, which this time brought along extreme exhaustion and a brain fog so intense that I could barely think, nevermind see the oncoming car until it was honking right at me. My friend would show up at random hours of the night, awaken me from a sleep that did no good, and beg for help through the fog of pain and confusion. He'd then vanish back into the night, and I'd collapse back into a fugue state that had as much to do with sleep as a cat does with a dog. I literally didn't have the energy to fight or run from a mental breakdown so profound I am still putting the pieces back together, seventeen years later. I couldn't rationalize what was going on: it was Hell. Everywhere I looked, inside and out, was Hell.

And this is the album that I learned how to deal with it.

We Are One Tonight particularly struck me, although at the time I'd have no idea why. I wasn't in a relationship, and was missing my wife (although I didn't know it), and I had no reason to really feel so attached, at least from what I could tell. It's pretty easy to tell now that I was hoping my parents would make it (they did!), and that that hope came out in the song. I also wanted, somehow, to have hope for msyelf, that somehow the wreckage that was me could somehow be mended, somehow I'd make it, somehow I would not die. Against all hopes, against all reason, against everything I could comprehend, I wanted to live. So I'd just drive or put on headphones and just sing, at the top of my lungs. I'd scream to this song so loudly people outside the car would hear me. At some point it became an anthem, a declaration that I would not go down so easy, a stubborn defiance against the powers that had cut me out of a reality anyone would have recognized. 

Even now, sixteen years later, I feel a fire in my gut as something I thought was dead roars to life, screaming "NO NOT YET, DON'T YOU COLLAPSE ON ME". It spits and fights and scratches and screeches its defiance of the gods, of reality, of every living creature, that I am still alive and you can take my life out of my cold dead fingers. It takes the lyrics and changes the feeling from "I'm dying" to a statement of faith: a creed that is roared at full blast. 

More than a refusal. 

More than a denial of death.

More than even "I wish to live": that's still too abstract.

It is a full and  roaring primal fire, one that will consume all in its path, bursting open seeds of hope that could never have been cracked open otherwise. It becomes the loud anthem of a man who cannot return to what he was, and does not wish to. It becomes the battle cry of someone who wishes to reconcile the irreconcilable, to fight to mend, even at the cost mine own self. If you are going to live you must be okay with living killing you. Listening to this song reminds me of this fact. And so I grab the bitter cup and drain to the dregs in one gulp.