The Directionless Everywhere
I stare at the ceiling, angry at the brain’s fragility. Its impenetrable mystery. For all its astonishing capability, extraordinary intricacy, and remarkable resilience, it is also temperamental. Without warning or ceremony, it can simply stop working as it should.
Time. I know it has something to do with time. The song, that is.
My current angst over the brain’s susceptibility to malfunction with age, slowly stealing those we love, is compounded by my own neural failing in the moment. It’s somewhere in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep — worry has kept me awake all week — so I’m reading to pass the obsidian-stained small hours. The “calm” playlist I’m streaming is full of tinny, whinging piano that is distracting me. I need something else.
My mind latches to an artist, a song. It came into my world in what seems like another lifetime. There was a man. His appetite for music was as voracious as mine. Songs and albums flowed between us, each offered up to coincide with moments inside, and outside, our connection. Music was the way we said “I love you” simply in a complicated situation.
The word “time” returns an onslaught in Spotify. Time what? Traveller? Scape? Dimension?
I go back to my book. If I stop thinking about it, the song will come to me. It’s the brain’s enigmatic way. But my mind drifts. I smile thinking about how songs would trip days’ long discussions between us, some memory of joy or grief stirred. About our glee at discovering a shared love of some obscure B-side. About having a beloved artist sign the cover of a new vinyl pressing for him. About my confession that Michael Nyman’s “The Heart Asks Pleasure First” makes me tremble and his revelation that he often did his difficult and intricate job, which required steely nerves and steady hands, to that very soundtrack from The Piano.
My head snaps up. “Suite”? A Suite for Time? A Song for Time? I can feel it, right there. So close. But still elusive. I can even see the colours of the album cover. Chartreuse and orange.
He gave me a photograph he took of the sky: the Milky Way stretched over a tree. When I saw it, I said the first thing that came into my mind: “The Directionless Everywhere.” He had the image enlarged and framed, and before giving it to me, he inscribed my words on the back. It sat in my closet for years. It was too hard for me to look at. Last year I hung it in my living room, and it brings me joy every day when I see it. It also strikes me as a fitting title for how it feels to be lost inside our own minds sometimes.
The letter “E” surfaces. The artist. Something ethereal? No. Elysium? There is a artist with that name in a different spelling. But no again. And then…
Eluvium.
I punch the letters into the search field. And there it is. The album with colours I recognize. I read the track listing. “Prelude for Time Feelers.” That’s it.
I love the idea of touching time. It must have textures we have no words for. I wish I could reach into it and hold certain pieces — feel their weight and contours.
If I could hold those pieces of time in my hands, maybe it would mean my brain could never lose them.
