Paul Cézanne – Le lac d’AnnecyAll the Walls – Courtney Brown
An unnamed village somewhere in Latin America. It is the rainy season, which means a late afternoon deluge that bleeds into a cool, quiet evening. I sit back in a gently swinging hammock, drink in my hand, and watch the quarter moon peak in and out from the strands of clouds. The only sound is the distant crash of the waves on the rocks and the few fluttering bugs that brave the still-damp air, occasionally seen but mostly registered through the gentle fluttering of their wings.
Why am I here? There is no simple answer. Fear? Perhaps. Maybe it is simply a desire for solitude that can only be achieved in a land where time often seems to stand completely still – where there is no past or future but only a limitless now. Maybe here, amid the gentle skittering percussion, a moment of respite can be found.
It is a dangerous thing: to seek to forget. Who are we if not our memories? Existence is a physical presence, but my being is locked inside my head in an endless chain of equivalences and memories. My body resides in this moment, but I only truly live in the past. To forget is to erase my self, to become forever lost in the haze.
Perhaps there is something beautiful about that – about sacrificing identity and ego and transcending this mortal existence. But I am not prepared to disappear. The pain cuts deeply, but I cannot let it go. It is become part of me. I came here to escape, but find myself all the more trapped.
And now, these random sounds of bugs and waves and the flickering of old light bulbs coalesce, and where once there was only chaos, patterns begin to emerge. Noise becomes music. And I discover that although I sought temporary solace, I do not really wish to forget. Rather, I wish to be forgotten, to pass out of history, to live inside the song, where memory is pure and untouched by reality of loss.
Ordinary – Courtney Brown
Is this purely fiction? Of course, but then, what isn’t? We lie to ourselves every second of every day in our belief that meaning is there to be found. But it is a necessary lie. Noise becomes sound, endless chaos becomes life, and it is precisely our stubbornness – our refusal to accept the basic truth of entropy – that enables our existence. Our lies are monumental in scope and entirely mundane in practice, and so it must always be.
And so I remember – what else can I do?
Courtney Brown is a graduate student in the Electroacoustic music program at Dartmouth.