The Rites of Longing Tommy Chisholm

Every experience is a miniature big bang. Expanding outward away from the initial moment of combustion, moving farther away from where it set motion. Creating endless possibilities, yet only one course of action. Memory is the recording of experience to film. As each miniature bang blows one after another the earliest recordings are muted by sheer overabundance. When we watch the old reels, we find them pockmarked, full of holes. We patch the holes with the piecemeal tape on the cutting room floor. They’re not perfect, but they’re as close as we’re going to get.

It doesn’t matter where I am. At Cowen Park under a big leaf maple I weigh what this inner voice is, what this subconscious mind of mine serves. The late-afternoon sun warms my forearms through a network of leaves and twigging branches. The perpetually damp earth is still saturated after so many months of rain. My ass is damp. But it will be damp biking back uphill regardless. My eyes close. The distant sunlight spit shines my eyelids pink. What is this voice? Where is it coming from? I wonder what it is to even have this ability, how its changed, whether it is the essence of my identity. The real me. The full me. The essence which is ever starting, pausing, moving and morphing. It doesn’t matter where I am. The cotton sheets, thinly striped in blue and white, are cold on my bare skin. I writhe around under the hulking black-walnut brown comforter fortifying each side of my body. With my feet I fold the bottom of the blanket into a pocket, dig in deep with legs reinforcing the pocket into a deep catacomb, and lock in the frozen feet: the ritual now complete. I close my eyes. Every night another hour, or two, or three, of lying here paralyzed, awake. Sleepless despite weariness. Isolated in the binding blanket, in a pitch black bedroom. Am I anything else but voice? Is the voice embodied, does it take physical form in this space? Here in darkness the voice produces no sound. Only in the mirror does the voice take shape. Mirrors, the place where left is right and right is left, the place where I’ve never had the slightest sense of depth, the place where I fixate on unwanted hairs—every unsightly blemish and pore, and yet the plane where my subconscious is born. In the grass or under the covers that voice is always my inmost spectre, laying dormant, hovering over waking life. And this spectre only possesses a face, a body, when I gaze into the mirror.

What is a mirror? In antiquity, mirrors were made from solid sheets of bronze or silver and were prone to corrosion. For the last five hundred odd years, mirrors have been made by applying a metal coating to the backside of a piece of plate glass. Surely, mirrors are objects of vanity: a tool to aid our narcissism as well as our self-loathing. At the domestic intersection of the animal-world and the human, mirrors keep rodent and bird pets company. These puny little guys appear to not have the mental capacity to differentiate between themselves and the image in the mirror, effectively keeping themselves company. The physical body they see is not their own, but that of their only friends and neighbors. I find it a bit haunting, to be kept company by the mirror’s own deception.

Mirrors are carriers of light. They absorb it and bounce it back in new angles; left is right and right is left. Humans share this trait with the mirror. We are all creatures of light. If our universe is truly traceable to a point of extreme density and heat, a point of combustion where all light was born, a point where all light surged away and spread itself across the universe, a point which set our cosmos in motion; then we are all decedents of light. Light which pierces abyssal darkness and momentarily forces it away. This is our affinity to light and our aversion to darkness. We are like moths to flames. As carriers of the light it is our nature to traverse the unknown and illuminate it. The light bearers won’t stand for unending darkness; as carriers—creatures—of the light, the ones who must blind darkness itself, they’re gift is in reinterpreting the light, making it their own and shinning it back into the void. Where left becomes right and right can become left. Though mirrors are carriers of light, they’re kinship is stronger with non- human animals. Much like the lowly chameleon, that reptile incapable of an authentic self, a mirror is only capable of replicating its surroundings. Then what happens when two chameleon-light-bearers face one another? I imagine two mirrors pressed together at their wooden frames, holding a negative space between the two panes, where all light escapes. Their lack of reflection is nothingness and in the darkness they are one with the lightlessness. Do they fail to function, or is this chameleon kiss, this lovers embrace drenched in the dark, only meant for two? Mirrors are secret keepers. A spy’s accessory for stealthily seeing around corners. In the negative plane between the coated plate glass, does the mirror take on any physicality? Is it possible to steal a glance? I know no way to shine, to sneak a light, onto their embrace without the two just chameling, reflecting that bulb, flame, or chemiluminescence. When I meet the spectre in the mirror I plug into a linear path. I piece my past together, up to the present. I was born, I grew into the person staring there, and I will die—and I always assume I’m in the middle of the path. It’s hard to make sense of it as a linear path: the more I try to sequence the events of my own history, the more skeptical I become. Whenever I visualize the timeline, the more I feel like I’m repeating words ad-nauseum and losing all sense of meaning. And yet I return to the mirror to organize time, time and again.

Walking down the hall I catch my young reflection in the bathroom mirror. I enter Lindsay’s room, stepping into the carpeted bedroom from the basement’s cold cement floor. Standing at the foot of her dresser, the top right corner of the mirror reads, I LOVE STEVEN, in purple puff paint. My eyes descend into the image staring back, and still descending, meet the sink, and notice a pair of scissors left of the porcelain. The room is dim and the lights aren’t needed. The dull afternoon sun throws shade down the hallway, into the bedrooms, the bathroom. I pick up the scissors with my right hand. I look back at my shadowed complexion, pull a tuft of bangs upward, chop, and let the bowl cut fall back into place. My forehead looks like its missing a tooth. I put down the scissors and worry that it’s going to be noticeable. I brush the hair from side to side; I decide, nobody will probably even notice. In doubt I wonder how to repair the damage.

Make more cuts? It’s not that bad right? Mom won’t even notice. I hope she won’t. Is my hair getting darker? Is it getting red? I really hope I’m not getting red hair. Please just turn a normal color like brown. Didn’t it used to be an even lighter blond? When did the color change? Have my eyes always been blue? When did I get this tall? I don’t ever feel like I’m growing, but I used to be shorter. I used to be a baby. But I don’t remember being a baby. How did a baby become me? Is that really the person I’ve always been? This is the body I’ve always had. But how do I really know I’m me? That that is the person I’ve been all my life.

I stand in front of the mirror. Replay my first peek. In this gaze I exist out of time. I am simultaneously a mischievous child and a dumbfounded adult: standing on two planes. Once I’ve seen that spectre, I can’t unsee it. Surely, I’m just strange and nobody else stares in mirrors wondering who they are. I back away from the dresser nervously; wipe up the hair from the countertop, flush it down the toilet.

The confrontation with self in a mirror happens continuously throughout life. It’s an experience I seldom seek, but the confrontation is available at every reflection of my image. I do have the ability to ignore the spectre, but on occasion it catches me while shaving, while plucking unibrow hairs, while popping zits. I catch myself staring. Still asking the same questions. Still having no answers. Still bearing isolation. Still suspecting myself extraordinary. Still shying away in anxiousness.

Mining the past, while examining the present, I’m struck by the fiction my mind creates. The moment I stood in front of a mirror, cut a piece of my own hair, worried about the consequences, and discovered the spectre, is a collection of memories strung together. I’m simultaneously in a bathroom and my big sister’s bedroom, physically impossible, but completely feasible in the unreliable realm of associative memory. What’s even more telling is that in writing this memory, rewriting, editing, revising; reading it publicly, and agonizing over every minute detail, I’ve come to accept it as actual, as factual. A memory as real as the day I got my first car. I spent so much time agonizing on getting the memory right, on making it sound poetic enough, and making it relevant to what I wanted to write, that I had to stop and tell myself: this is not real, this did not happen. I was able to watch my own film reel fill with holes. I patched it with paper drawings, but somehow forgot when the paper ran through the reel. But of course, light wouldn’t project through the paper, and eventually I caught on.

I remember the first funeral I went to. My mom’s Uncle Pepper. I almost remember him alive. It’s not an interaction I remember, but a moment at a family party: he sat at a table of adults in a smoky basement, the television light flickering by—a football game, the surrounding tables covered in casseroles, Polish food; I’m on the floor—so much smaller than the rest. In church, my parents, siblings, and I take up an entire pew. Shoulders coated in dark blazers, shoulder pads, bald spots, and teased up hairdos all too tall to see over. Squirming in my seat I can make out the open casket. I tell my big brother that I saw he got to be a pallbearer, and he scolds me for having no remorse. I just knew there was a gothic pro-wrestling figure named Paul Bearer and that I liked watching wrestling with my brother. You don’t get to be a pallbearer. It’s not something to be exited about, or brag about. It’s just something you have to do. Maybe I still had faith, or maybe I just couldn’t grasp the magnitude of death. For my teenage brother the funeral carried deep weight. Donny was able to comprehend that a person he knew personally, though they weren’t close, had died. It’s awful to lose anybody, but what a funeral-goer experiences on top of loss, is the reminder that I will one day die too. Day to day most people don’t have to stop and contemplate the fact that they’re going to die. Donny was dealing with the funeral on two levels and I—more conflicted with boredom than anything else—may as well not have been there. I can’t pinpoint the moment I came to recognize death’s all consuming mouth. It must have been after Uncle Pepper’s funeral. As a child with enough of the faith to get you into heaven, it didn’t seem so bad.

My first pocketknife had a lock-blade and a wood finished handle. It was my Dad’s knife; I found it while nosing around his workbench in the garage. I used to check out the blade for afternoons and return it before he came home from work. The more it was taken out, the less returned. I carried it all summer, and accidentally stained the wood with Spaghetti-O sauce. Standing in the doorway of my bedroom, Dad sees the knife on my Fisher- Price desk. I see myself reflected back in the dresser mirror. The spectre’s eyes half open, half awake, and he’s smiling ever so subtly. Dad’s voice is erased, on mute, but his eyes, gestures, body language, say to be careful with his knife—that I can keep it. I shake my head in acknowledgment, look back to the sleepy spectre, look back to the entrance, and my father’s gone. I turn back to the spectre and the mirror’s covered in condensation, only a shadow is visible behind the fog. I turn out the light. I close the door behind me. In a corner of the basement beside the dirty shower no one dares to use, I test the blades sharpness like Dad does, by combing it across a fingertip. Lacking grace, the skin brakes and I bleed. As the blood begins to surface, tears stream down my face, wailing in pain, and in fear of my prized possession being taken away. Running up the pale blue linoleum stairs, red-faced and drumming up a lie: I tripped and scraped my hand on the cement floor. The patchwork footage rolls through the reels, mechanically humming like a baseball card in the spokes of a single speed. After school, after dinner, between TV time and bedtime, I sit on the corner of my bed. I open the knife. I stare at the scab. The lock-blade knife was once an object of masculine fashion. If I carried it around with me it made me more manly, more grown up. I thought tools were toys. The injury, minor as it was, left an overbearing knowledge of a knife’s capability.

It’s a weapon. I could fight off bad guys with it. I could kill bad guys with it. It kills. I could kill. I kill. With it I could kill. I could kill myself. With it. I’d push it into my chest. And die. I could. Should? I don’t want to die. But I can. I can kill. I could kill. Me. If I wanted to. But I don’t.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera postulates on the mental experience of Vertigo:

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

In Kundera’s words it seems as though it’s a great challenge to resist vertigo: the voice of the emptiness. As someone whose not suicidal, the voice is only that, a voice. It’s heard and then there is only silence. In the silence my next thoughts emerge and take control of my consciousness. The voice of the emptiness is akin to the spectre in the mirror. They are familial. They are the psychic ghosts one collects throughout life. They manifest in the objects of daily life, creeping up, without any warning.

I used to not know that I was capable of taking my own life. And ever since that discovery, the option has always creeped. Routine drives seem to be made on muscle memory alone. When the muscles make the trek, when the car speeds passed seventy miles an hour in the left lane, suicide speaks.

Heading up East I-94 in the silver Monte Carlo I’d bought just a few months before, I assure myself I know what I’m doing behind the wheel. Yet I can count the times I’ve driven on the freeway with two hands. The dash says 1:23am and I take the opportunity to see what six cylinders can do on an empty road. The black and white speed sign, in its highway gothic reads: SPEED LIMIT 75. I take it up to 80. The RPM meter flicks up to three then back down to two. I push the pedal even further down, reaching 85 and then 90. At 90 miles per hour I can feel the gravity of the cars momentum, as I take the wide curve of freeway between the 8 Mile Rd. and 9 Mile Rd. It scares me—my body tense in the driver’s seat, my hands clutching the steering wheel—yet thrills me. Music has been blaring out of the stereo the entire time, but I can’t hear a lick while this deeply focused. As I clear the bend in the freeway, keeping the wheel turned to the right, it dawns on me that all I have to do is throw the wheel left, as quickly as possible, and I will collide with the concrete sound barrier—killing myself. I will full stop. It is that simple.

But that’s not what I want. But I could. I wield the power with this automobile. It gives me the power to take life. But that’s not what I want. But it’s right there waiting for me.

It makes me smirk, because of course I won’t. I’d never. But the impulse still rose up and for a few seconds I was undecided. Does anyone ever take the impulsive plunge? Or is the morbid action always coldly calculated?

I let the vehicle coast back down to 75mph. Under the orange and yellow glow of freeway lights, the music fades out and I’m caught up in silence. I start to feel a certain kind of inexplicable sadness. The ennui of a twenty-something who fails to see all that they have in life to look forward to. There is a part of me that takes joy in fully absorbing this melancholy, despite how miserable it feels. Embracing that feeling, I dig through a stack of CD’s for just the right soundtrack to what I can only describe as heartache. I put the disk in and skip to TRACK 2.

“I wish I could eat the salt off of your last faded lips We can cap the old times make playing only logical harm We can top the old lines clay-making that nothing else will change.”

“Obstacle 1” isn’t even ten years old yet. But it’s a song from my adolescence. An era still on the horizon, yet out of reach; it’s already slipped through my fingertips.

“It's different now that I'm poor and aging, I'll never see this face again You go stabbing yourself in the neck And we can find new ways of living make playing only logical harm And we can top the old times, clay-making that nothing else will change.”

The song’s repetitive, driving guitar riff is enough to make my heart swell and ache. But it’s the lyrics, “I’m poor and aging”, written by a twenty-four year old man, I can relate with. For the first time in my life I a part of my youth has passed me by. Entering adulthood means aging. Though I’m very young, I’m fearful of the day that the entirety of my youth is behind me. And I’m broke, all the money I had went into this stupid car. How am I even supposed to make it to old age?

“It's in the way that she posed it's in the things that she puts in my head Her stories are boring and stuff. She's always calling my bluff. She puts the weights into my little heart, And she gets in my room and she takes it apart. She puts the weights into my little heart, I said she puts the weights into my little heart. She packs it away”

“She” is every attempt at romance. A reminder of every romantic opportunity being a failure. She’s never gotten into my room and taken it apart. She’s never deliberately put the weights into my little heart. She’s eating at me, every time the lyric gets repeated.

“It's in the way that she walks Her heaven is never enough She puts the weights in my heart She puts, oh she puts the weights into my little heart.”

I can visualize her sass, and her strut. She has no face, yet I long for her like she’s already left me. This, the song's closing refrain, shouted out by the vocalist is where my levee for tears breaks. Small teardrops slowly drip down my beat-red face. It’s really hard for me to cry, especially because of a song. For me, crying is an extreme reaction usually reserved for actual tragedy. As the tears trickle down my cheeks I can’t help but think to myself, shouting inside my mind, “I MISS… I MISS…”. It? I’m perplexed at this guttural, inaudible, reaction. It’s not just screams. It’s a statement. I have no idea what it is that “I miss” when my emotions get so caught up in this song, inside this speeding car. Is it the my brief moments of romance? Maybe in part. I suspect what I miss is the point in my life when this was a popular pop song. When I was a twelve year old boy, not nearly as lustful, poor, or lonely.

Normally, when I listen to “Obstacle 1” it takes me to this specific point in time: the living room, early evening, the sun all the way down, warm summer air wafting through every open window and door; dial up internet moving at a snail’s pace downloading music and comedic videos. Behind me MTV2—which was also once dedicated solely to music videos, blares “Obstacle 1”; the light from the television and the computer are the only light sources in the room, and the light oscillates in blues and bounces from wall to wall. I can hear my parents and their friends conversing on the front porch over cigarettes and cans of beer. Yet this exact moment never happened, all of these moments happened separately. These old film reels in my mind tend to congeal and take on new imagery. They become their own singular aesthetic, when wrapped up in and held together by the song. The dancing blue light of the screens on a summer evening, the parents in the background, the warm breeze drifting through the house, all discarded memories. The song has concocted a new reel entirely out of the pieces on the cutting room floor.

The song “Obstacle 1” by the rock group Interpol is what I’ve dubbed a Nostalgic Trigger. A nostalgic trigger is usually an artifact of a bygone time. A tangible thing experienced by the senses. Examples include songs, films, televisions shows, commercials, fashion, literature, etc. They are cultural things that are come in contact with, by choice or by accident, which throw a person into a state of deep longing. Longing is the regretful desire to return to a bygone time—the time that the artifact is associated with. Longing is an experience of timelessness. When something in the past is remembered in an overly idyllic fashion, the present becomes negated. If the present is perpetually negated by an imagined image of the past, then the past, which was once the present, couldn’t actually have been as positive as it’s remembered to be. If one could truly return to the moment the artifact invokes, what’s likely to be discovered is a memory which is either complete fiction, or that the self in that past-present was actually wishful for another even further bygone time. The cyclical spell of nostalgia results in a failure to live and be contented with the present, which is, tangibly, all there is to be. When nostalgia is given into, the film through the reels runs rose-red.

On the highway, in the Monte Carlo that’s barely older than the album in the disk drive, TRACK 2 comes to an end with its abrupt drum fill and TRACK 3 begins.

“I had seven faces Thought I knew which one to wear But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights Training myself not to care The subway is a porno The pavements they are a mess I know you've supported me for a long time Somehow I'm not impressed

But New York cares Got to be some more change in my life”

“NYC” is a song illustrating a man’s discontent with New York City, while also paying homage to the place that’s provided so much to him. Written in the wake of 9/11, I consider it a personal anthem for the days, weeks, and months following that traumatic day—despite the fact that the song was released nearly a year after that heartbreaking morning. I am actually nostalgic for 9/11. Not the day in question, but the aftermath. The focal point of that experience is being an adolescent boy, which is what I truly yearn for. I long for what the world felt like as a twelve-year-old boy; a world so full of oppression which I was so completely oblivious to. The point where I stood on the precipice of adulthood; where I last felt innocent and ignorant to the world. Growing up brings on an awareness of the oceanic oppression outside. We all balance the oppression in different ways. With our actions or within our consciousness, with our ignorance or our innocence. I do not wish to relive trauma, if anything I’d wish it all undone. I long for what the world felt like as a twelve-year-old boy. And The shadow of 9/11 towers over that whole point in my life. The aftermath of the event was years long. By the time the United States had fully processed it, I was nearing adulthood, and just beginning to understand it. The era I’m nostalgic for just so happened to be an America in the wake of 9/11. An America with another new wave of rock music coming through radio, with a budding internet changing our daily lives, and just before an endless war on the phantoms of terrorism. Yet if given the opportunity to relive that point in my life, I would not. A static experience is one without conscious growth, an existence drowned under the waves of nostalgia. Though I would never wish my nostalgia away either, as it is too much a part of my identity, my experience.

“It’s up to me now turn on the bright lights.”

Influences

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

• The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald

• On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

• My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgård

• “Turn on the Bright Lights” by Interpol (Matador Records 2002)