The Music Playing in the Maze
I remember my first job - Locksmith's apprentice. My first assignment was dispatched from a decrepit toolbox onto our concrete driveway. "Here pick these deadbolt." A day earlier, my father had shown me his arsenal of lock picks and turning wrenches. They were all uniquely bent and crimped to fit just about any cylinder's manifold.
"If you can pick those, I'll show you more." I picked them all and by the time I was 12 years old, I could re-key just about any house lock and completely strip down and reassemble the steering columns for General Motors, American Motors or Ford vehicles.
I loved that my father taught me this trade. There was something exhilarating about it. I was only about 8 years old when he handed me that bag of locks. I used to see him working with locks all the time, and like any child, I pondered what must have been going on inside of those shiny nobs.
Children are good at looking past the surface. When they break things, they are satisfying a longing for knowledge. They're learning. Even if all they've learned is that the thing they've smashed can never be reassembled. Some of us never lose that innocent lust for more. At times in our lives we have smashed through walls and broken precious things; some we know, we'll never be able to reassemble.
Narratives of disassembly and reconstruction run right through the heart of every survivor's story. There is always a thing before us, presented as a finished and established product that we must pull apart. As we progress through our lives, these ideas become muscle memory and we end up turning our curiosities into the ambient music playing in the maze. As we walk the columns of our shared matrix, we hear the music playing, we see some dancing to the melodic drums as they careen into the padded walls of their asylum. Others can cuff their ears with their hands and try to decode the cryptic sounds waves.
We are the listeners, the decoders of the chromatic and diatonic scales. We are those who hear the harmonics.
We heard that song about the length of skirts, refusing blood and the last days. We were listening to the one about that Jehovah's witnesses were involved in covering up child abuse. We know these tones. In our Watchtower afterlife, we find ourselves replaying these 'hits.' The ghosts of our former selves howl these blue hymns in our dead dreams.
Under the light of the moon, we wander this path with our ears budded and our heads nodding. The nostalgia tugging at our pickled personage and immersing us in swinging jazz from a time gone by.
Sometimes we sing these old tunes and only remember half the words, yet we still sing.
They remind us of how far we've come. There's the one about the first time we questioned a teaching or the one about rejecting a summons to a judicial committee. Oh and the one about not grieving the holy spirit, that one has a great chorus and the ending is a chef's kiss!
There is the upbeat track about you writing your disassociation letter and the bravery it took for you to stare down the prospect of losing everyone and everything in order to have your dignity. That one is a true masterpiece.
These are the songs of our summer love and the soundtracks of our awakening, however, there may come a day when we wish to change the music. A time when we may feel that we've outgrown this sound, only to realize that for some of us, this is one station we are unable to change. Are we doomed to give ear to the same tired tunes for eternity? Is this all there is? Yes, it is. You see we are not going to live forever on a paradise earth. We are bound by our years and our life experience is a composition that we are always writing. To remove the tumultuous clashing symbols of our yesteryear would be like removing the sheath of skin from our hearts.
Others may mock us for still listening to the music of our mental youth, but they will never understand the linkage. They cannot read music as information and sound as liberty. They will never understand that we are bound by duty to parse these notes and sort out the tonal subtleties that we see and hear. They cannot know that we have unfolded these musical sheets into the road maps of our exodus.
And so we walk, forward to the beat of truth and the whining frets of fact. From here we follow abstract and varied tablature that leads us to a neon exit.
"If you can pick those, I'll show you more." I picked them all and by the time I was 12 years old, I could re-key just about any house lock and completely strip down and reassemble the steering columns for General Motors, American Motors or Ford vehicles.
I loved that my father taught me this trade. There was something exhilarating about it. I was only about 8 years old when he handed me that bag of locks. I used to see him working with locks all the time, and like any child, I pondered what must have been going on inside of those shiny nobs.
Children are good at looking past the surface. When they break things, they are satisfying a longing for knowledge. They're learning. Even if all they've learned is that the thing they've smashed can never be reassembled. Some of us never lose that innocent lust for more. At times in our lives we have smashed through walls and broken precious things; some we know, we'll never be able to reassemble.
Narratives of disassembly and reconstruction run right through the heart of every survivor's story. There is always a thing before us, presented as a finished and established product that we must pull apart. As we progress through our lives, these ideas become muscle memory and we end up turning our curiosities into the ambient music playing in the maze. As we walk the columns of our shared matrix, we hear the music playing, we see some dancing to the melodic drums as they careen into the padded walls of their asylum. Others can cuff their ears with their hands and try to decode the cryptic sounds waves.
We are the listeners, the decoders of the chromatic and diatonic scales. We are those who hear the harmonics.
We heard that song about the length of skirts, refusing blood and the last days. We were listening to the one about that Jehovah's witnesses were involved in covering up child abuse. We know these tones. In our Watchtower afterlife, we find ourselves replaying these 'hits.' The ghosts of our former selves howl these blue hymns in our dead dreams.
Under the light of the moon, we wander this path with our ears budded and our heads nodding. The nostalgia tugging at our pickled personage and immersing us in swinging jazz from a time gone by.
Sometimes we sing these old tunes and only remember half the words, yet we still sing.
They remind us of how far we've come. There's the one about the first time we questioned a teaching or the one about rejecting a summons to a judicial committee. Oh and the one about not grieving the holy spirit, that one has a great chorus and the ending is a chef's kiss!
There is the upbeat track about you writing your disassociation letter and the bravery it took for you to stare down the prospect of losing everyone and everything in order to have your dignity. That one is a true masterpiece.
These are the songs of our summer love and the soundtracks of our awakening, however, there may come a day when we wish to change the music. A time when we may feel that we've outgrown this sound, only to realize that for some of us, this is one station we are unable to change. Are we doomed to give ear to the same tired tunes for eternity? Is this all there is? Yes, it is. You see we are not going to live forever on a paradise earth. We are bound by our years and our life experience is a composition that we are always writing. To remove the tumultuous clashing symbols of our yesteryear would be like removing the sheath of skin from our hearts.
Others may mock us for still listening to the music of our mental youth, but they will never understand the linkage. They cannot read music as information and sound as liberty. They will never understand that we are bound by duty to parse these notes and sort out the tonal subtleties that we see and hear. They cannot know that we have unfolded these musical sheets into the road maps of our exodus.
And so we walk, forward to the beat of truth and the whining frets of fact. From here we follow abstract and varied tablature that leads us to a neon exit.
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