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.

The Shadow Proves the Sunshine

Once, in a time that gets further and further away with each passing second, a time so long ago that I would barely recognize myself, but still so near to me that its shadow is constantly in my heart, I was going to kill myself. I'd had enough. The whole entirety of my life felt like a gigantic bruise. At the time I couldn't even remember half the things I'd been through, but their shadows had voices. And they hadn't stopped screaming in a very very long time. And so I'd decided that enough was enough. A plan came to me. I knew what I needed to do.

But something in my head, a voice I'd not heard in a very long time, spoke with a force that made me pause. The awfulness that was in my head was not going to stop should I die. It would only get worse. My body was playing interference with the noise I was hearing at that point. It would only intensify after death. And, for whatever reason, I believed that. But that left me in a bind. Because the noise was still going on, right then, and I remembered asking why on earth I shouldn't just embrace it and let it hollow me out. It wasn't going to stop. I couldn't stop it.

The icon that I bumped into was not this one. But it had a similar facial configuration. The thing is that earlier icons of Christ were designed to have two halves: an angry, judgmental half, and a merciful soft one. And, as I stared at this icon, I found that the noise just got louder and louder and louder until I could almost hear it with my ears because my mind was trying to receive a thought and it didn't really want to so it was just cranking the noise so I could continue alongside my doomed course. But, somehow, it got through.

If all I've seen is wrath there must be mercy somewhere. And I want to find it.

And then the noise stopped. Merciful sweetness, it just stopped. I stood in utter interior silence. I could relax. I could breathe. I could just exist. I was free. It wasn't a lack of noise, it was peace. And I let myself just be in it. I never wanted to leave it. Even an instant of this peace, of this silence, which was definitely not coming from me, which had nothing to do with me, was enough of a reason to live.


And then I heard it.

The smallest of whispers.

Is everything alright now?
 
Small. Still. Like a child whispering a secret into your ear. But inconceivably more powerful. And anyone who has had a child whisper into your ear knows that is the most powerful thing in the world. To have a little voice in your hear, telling you the most earnest, the most deathly serious of their secrets, or just anything at all, really, will change your life, regardless of what is said. I have two of my own. I know.

This whisper outstripped it. There was a power behind that whisper that could have unmade me in a moment. I trembled with fear to hear it, from the sheer power of it. A choice had been made to preserve me, even while pressing down the pain, even if only for a moment. I responded with a joy that I did not understand. And still don't. "Yes, yes it's OK. There is still hope."

A few years passed and I began to forget. That's no crime, I suppose, but it  did make life a lot harder. And then, one day, the album Nothing is Sound was released, and this song was on it:


In the coming years, as the shadows in my mind continued to scream as loudly as they could, I would find random spots where I could listen to this song. I could feel the Silence behind it, that presence that reminded me that all it was going to take was a bit more pushing. Just keep going. I would find mercy soon enough. Even if that meant just listening to the song and waiting it out.

Boy, the Silence's definition of soon and my definition of soon do not line up at all. But push I did. Somehow the woman who interceded for me in the above moment, in a moment of Silence herself, decided that I was marriageable material. I certainly didn't argue. I still try not to. And so we keep on. So far two children have followed. Silence sits behind their eyes, and I only hope I can help them keep it.

I didn't know it, but I had a hard weekend. The perennial conversation about embracing the chaos or the Silence was very strong in my heart. I was barely aware of it, of course.  Until this morning, that is, when I stepped out  to go to work. I didn't know the darkness in my heart.

Until I heard a small voice behind me.

"Daddy have good day at work!"

I turned. I'd heard that with my ears.

And he was just standing there, waving.

Well, trying to anyway. He's two, so it was more like his hand just bopping all over the place. But gosh he was pumping that hand hard. I stopped and waved back. He was very serious. No smile. I wonder if he knew what was in my heart. I sure didn't, not at the time. But the hand kept pumping. I stopped. He stopped. I waved. He pumped his hand back. I couldn't stop looking at him. So I backed up to the car, waving. He stayed at the door, pumping that hand in every direction he could think to put it.

And then I came to work. Something had just happened, but I'd no idea. And the above song had just been uploaded by Switchfoot.

I'm sitting here on the edge of tears.

Fortunately not all tears are evil.

Just a little further.