When the first few notes of "Blue Train" echo out of my computer speakers, John holds up my room with his saxophone, demanding full attention from the stale, impatient air. I concede the room willingly, but for the time being I remain divided. There I sit silent, backlit by the black light sitting above my television, my thoughts paced by the bottle of Jack on my desk and tempered by the jazz in my left ear.
Through watery eyes I witness a world transformed. Particles of dust dance in syncopation as they mingle and marry with the soft glow of the lamp. The faces on my walls, daylight guardians of my life's pretension, betray their secrets to the conquering melody. Books, games, movies and expensive electronics no longer defend the rational order of my consumer sanity. Here I sit silent as my room celebrates with the smug defiance of a civilization in decline. But I don't much mind at the moment. Afforded the unique calm of intoxication, I contemplate the wretched reality of my amassed wealth and remember the fickle impulses that added each etching to my piecemeal personality. I'll wait a while with my whiskey and join the evaporated symbols of my depth in an orgy of decadence and shame.
Staring across my shelves, I visit my grave. Each movie emits the cheap perfume stench of love letters burning in penance for a failed relationship.
Every punch line, cliché and climactic embrace acts the eternal reminder that all of the mind's plans and the heart's commitments cannot construct lasting happiness upon a foundation of confusion and distress. Once I was a subtle romantic: sensitive, attentive, loving. Now I am a row of movies, an isolated collection of star-struck lovers, action heroes and tragic figures spanning a shelf of broken dreams.
Each book contains fractured epitaph for a decaying experiment in my life. Poetry, politics, literature: I once sought to be these things. Years ago I was Yeats, carving rhyme and passion from the smooth surfaces of lined paper on a half-sized notebook. Later I was Marx, artfully deconstructing society in teacup tirades. Last I was Hemingway, channeling cognac onto the page in short sentences. Now I am a row of books, a haphazard selection of half-formed ideas and forgotten genius arrayed alphabetically in a case.
Ten minutes and three drinks later, I stand at a "Moment's Notice." I have traversed the third-hand manifestations of my second-hand life, and I am left both unfulfilled and uninspired.
Options exhausted, I turn my right ear to the sound that shattered my world and succumb wholeheartedly to the jazz. So long in life I searched for order, for meaning, for structure and for the power that comes from control. And on this search I found many things; things manifested in the dusty rectangles staring out from behind my computer.
Jazz never offered me order. Jazz never offered me meaning. No, jazz offered me the most primitive and maligned of glories: pure unadulterated sensation. Building from simple structures and scales, the music expanded constantly until it enveloped the entire atmosphere. Eyes half-closed, I let the notes soar through my body, conducting through every cell the truth that modern life attempts to deny.
Sensation exists not for the creation of order. Rather, order exists for the maximization of sensation.
Yes, John held up my room and he broke down my soul, but what he left in exchange was perspective. He allowed me to synthesize those disparate and isolated experiences imprisoned in their tidy packages and remember what it was that made them wondrous, intriguing, and powerful. No longer were they outward reminders of failure and incremental disaster. Instead, they were a continuum of sensation, of pleasure, of pain and of life. I no longer needed, these books, these movies, these faces on my wall, they were pretty and orderly and interesting, certainly, but they were not life, and they were not me.
And they were laughing. I was struck with the sudden urge to destroy them, to tear down these relics and burn them in affirming the constructive powers of decadence.
I threw my empty glass to the ground, shattering it in my ecstasy. And as the glass broke the room gasped and ceased its laughter. No further destruction was necessary.
I turned up the music so that it might be heard on the quad and left my room to its own devices and went outside in my pajamas to breathe the cool night air. I walked slowly to the middle of the quad, keeping an ear peeled for the soft sounds of piano and saxophone echoing through campus. Arriving there, I laid myself down on the ground, feeling the soft tickle of the grass and the soaking cold of the evening dew through my clothes. Shivering, I spread out my arms and legs, intent on experiencing every inch of earth within my range. Seeing the stars through my closed eyes, I imagined myself floating through the sky.
In my drifting I recaptured those things years ago resigned away to cardboard boxes and paperbacks. My senses blazed with a passion long neglected but not forgotten by my misled mind. There was a beautiful woman and I kissed her lips deeply, running my fingers lightly down the small of her back.
There was an empty page and I filled it with a poem startling and unfamiliar to my pen. With a swing of my arm or a stab of leg, I conquered lost experiences and unknown pleasures and assimilated them into my burgeoning cloud of experience.
There was no grand plan. I missed nothing. I forgot nothing. I regretted nothing.
And as the last few notes of "Lazy Bird" glided through the night, I opened my eyes and smiled with the knowledge that I had experienced this evening fully, that no wisp of sensation had eluded my insatiable grasp. Walking back towards my room, I couldn't help but wonder: 'What would Miles Davis think about this?"
Andrew Waugh is a Trinity junior. His column appears every other Tuesday.
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