Escape Velocity and Heavenly Bodies

Last night we went to a Christmas party at a friend's home and they've been going through this very tough, very bitter time, so it's hard sometimes to be around them. The pain they're in spills out onto everyone else and they throw sparks off that leave little scorch marks on all the furniture and the rugs. It's ugly and intractable and heartbreaking. So anyway, there we were all sitting around and they are musicians, so they had a trio: her on the baby grand, him on guitar, and another guy on the cello, and they just sat and played some stuff for the few of us gathered around. It was the most beautiful music and I felt it move right through me, in my bones and in the hollow spaces of my head and all along my skin and I kept looking from one of them to the other, and at all of us together, and it was as if the music was a kind of rope that bound us, or was a physical manifestation of the ties that bound us all together- him to her, them to each other, us to them, etc. There were no words to muddy the emotional truth of it, no way to speak of it and no way to deny it, either. It was as if the music said all that needed to be said and all that could not be spoken.

I wanted to weep for our brokenness and our frail beauty.

It came to me then, suddenly and completely, that we are all of us simply human. And that we fuck up in spectacular ways that are always only ordinary in the end, and that love binds us, love holds us and undoes us and bears all and fails all and like the air we breathe we cannot exist without it. Not because we'd die without it, but because it is there completely independent of us. We serve love, not the other way around.

It was nice music.



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