What’s in here, stashed away in the cranium housed in this neatly contained bubble of a head flutters a thousand heartbeats. The ones hammering away in my chest cavity are purely survival, fight or flight, and augmented in tempo, poeticized in cadence, and then strummed into miserable cacophony by my reptilian brain. The truest heartbeats, the beautiful, lyrical Yo La Tengo ones, those guys are pounding like drums and sex and birth up in my mind. Sounding out guitar chords, ensuring a different sort of cord is tied to my heart and your heart and somebody else’s heart out there, wherever that is, whoever they are, that somebody somewhere who should be tied to me, who isn’t yet, but will be.
This is the art of the mind, the rhythm of imagination, our collective possibility, entranced, enraptured and captured. Jailed, more accurately. Like the moment of awakening from a welcome intrusion of a deep, vivid, and sensual dream; within that moment the dream unceremoniously dies. But as you felt it slip away into nothingness, you are stuck with the notion that it was there, and how can this so tangibly, wonderfully, transformingly real thing you just experienced in so extraordinary a fashion vanish as quickly as the realization came?
What’s in my mind, in my heartbeating head, flowing forth from my civilized brain together with its primitive responses creates unspeakable beauty. Unspeakable is the operative word. I’m mute in this art. Amid all the sound and energy and aliveness, I am locked up. We are in this cell together, all beats and rhythms and harmonies intermingled with nothing but chatter and traffic and lo and behold, responsibility and taxes and unfairly high cell phone bills and busted washing machines.
But when I consider it as one measurable unit of beauty, after all, isn’t beauty the strange cousin of ugly? The symmetry that aligns the same shared features, reigns in proportion topped off with something, just one small thing, that’s slightly askew. Beauty is always so close to ugly, so strangely, compellingly imperfect amid its copious perfection. The most beautiful things are always just a bit off. It’s that one off tone key that rings true, that lends hope to the hopeless, that binds us, that fuses the cord of hearts, that writes the chords of loss and longing, that propels us together and then impossibly apart into our own inner worlds. More complete than when we first looked, less sure than when we ventured out to test it. All the more curious, if we dare, and, at once, prying at our heads to pull the truths out.
It is all so unspeakable, this language we utter in ordinary life. Our language isn’t for truly communicating, it’s for relaying information, basic, static, this is broken, this needs fixing, this needs calculating, my hair needs cutting, please put the seat down, turn off the lights, pay the dentist, vaccinate the cat information. It’s within the elusive dream, in the prison-like constructs and confines of our minds, that we are the most free.
Don’t talk. There’s nothing you can say that will be enough. Just feel it here, feel the beating sensation, let it drive you, move you, inspire you. And spend the rest of your life trying, clawing, digging, screaming unheard screams, to share who you are, the you you think you know, the you you’ve made up for everyone to look at and hear, smell, taste, and touch, that earthly you who is now and has always been holed up in the prison of your heartbeating head.
Just try to let them know. Because they’ll never know. Because not even you know. This is the challenge. This is the sadness. And the everything art.
