Shut up and fly

Dear reader!

This is a love letter and I invite you, to join me in admiration of my muse.

Don’t worry if you’re the jealous type: she’s promiscuous, perhaps, but that’s just generosity that will undoubtedly rub off on you, if indeed you also grow to desire her. If so, there is one thing I can absolutely assure you: she will love you back with equal intensity, for ever ready and willing to warm your chilly heart.

She is a symphony.

I remember the first time I came across this masterpiece, six years ago at the least. It often seems I was an entirely different person then, which I cannot utter without a measure of nostalgia - melancholia, even. One thing to remind me that I’m still EXACTLY who I’ve always been, though, I have found in this blissful immortalized moment, which I happily give in to whenever I feel its pull, and (more impressively) also always allow to drift away again without attempting to cling to it, to drown myself in its richness to the point of oversaturation - like I tend to do with awe-some music. I am so careful, because I am so grateful to have it in my life. I hope you will allow me to share with you.

You will find what I’m talking about on YouTube, when you search for the following: ”Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm live improvisation at Roter Salo”.

There she awaits you. And she deserves your full attention too, yet I know that eventually she will grab a hold of you regardless, and show you that you were not going to be done with her after the first exploratory date(s) anyway. If you are like me, she will give you wings, and you will wish to fly.

Clearly, this will be especially liberating for whoever gravity drags down the most.

I, for one, can certainly get horribly stuck in the relentless, merciless feedback-loop-vortex, certainly fucking WAY more often than I used to. And I recognize it in my peers, too. Let us be frank and just admit it: We walk the earth with eyes wide shut. There is more beauty on this planet than we could experience in a thousand lifetimes, and yet we spend most of our time looking at our own reflection, counting and recounting again our possessions and our debts. That sad treasury of failure and accomplishment is just another room, though, and a dark one, that will never see the light of day.

What Olafur and Nils managed to do, for me, is to show something of infinite worth, something that will never be locked away in a cage of fiction. Because it is true, even in the Cartesian sense: behind all the concepts, all the strife and worries and uncertainty, lies something that is simply, undeniably true, and I feel it take a hold of me whenever I watch them perform. That’s precisely what it is, actually: a feeling, undiluted, inexplicable, revitalizing. It burns bright and hot, but it never hurts - unless you try to touch it. It lifts me up as long as I allow it to flow freely through my veins, fills my lungs with soft excitement and my mind with a lucid, concentrated sense of peace. Under its spell, I begin to wonder: What the hell are we afraid of? That we’ll never find the words? Get rid of them! Be quiet instead, listen.

We’re all dialogues, after all.

Are we not so busy building and nourishing our sense of “self”, that we forget we are also “other”? If every man is an island, they are at least islands of driftwood. Self is a synthesis of others! We exist in an ocean of parallel universes, each face a single drop of water. Those nearest to our hearts are at once our greatest source of security and our greatest source of confusion. So close and yet so far... Michelangelo understood! We require each other’s ghostly touch like we do food and drink. Therein lies the grave danger, the mortal sin of vanity: the vain man slowly starves himself to death with his cocky smile... You can just hear the sad jangling of bones as our fellow skeletons switch poses in front of their shiny mirrors, wondering why they feel so empty inside.

Look at a stranger and see yourself. Is this not precisely what Ólafur and Nils are doing? The fact that they are improvising on the spot is stunning. Their performance is like a carefully choreographed dance, yet it is not. It simply appears, crystallizing seemingly out of thin air, suddenly perfect, like a snowflake on a windshield. And what precedes it is equally impressive, as a feat of mutual attentiveness, a careful, conscious interaction between two artists who attempt to forget themselves as their universes come to revolve around anticipation of the other’s patterns. Oh, sweet empathy! Only by means of such unwavering focus and openness were they able to reach the ultimate climactic high, where finally their minds really collide to create something that transcends them both, something singular and unique that spreads its arms lovingly, offering only to make you whole again.

Will you accept?