A few weeks ago, I rented a car to drive upstate to bring my daughter back to Brooklyn. Hertz gave me a modest Volkswagen four-door. Running errands around the neighborhood before hitting the highway, I discovered that the air conditioner wasn’t working. The temperature that day was approaching 100. So I drove back to Hertz and tried not to throw too big of a fit. They quickly switched me out with a luxurious Ford Edge with a great sound system.
I have always made this drive to the Catskills with the family. If we listened to anything at all, it was something everyone could tolerate. Nothing too challenging. I was on the Palisades before it hit me that I could listen to whatever I wanted to without torturing my wife and kids.
Three or so hours in the car would give me a chance to play most of Kali Malone’s “Does Spring Hide Its Joy?” The music is called a “durational composition.” What this means for the civilian is that the tracks are each about an hour long and are exclusively “drones” – long, long, looooonnnggg unbroken tones intertwining. The humming from a sine wave oscillator played by Malone, bowed notes on a cello played by Lucy Railton and strings on Stephan O’Malley’s guitar vibrating under a device called an e-bow.
In the sphere of this type of music, Malone is famous for creating durational soundscapes on old church organs in Sweden – with deep tubular moans blowing from the giant old pipes.
I suspect that the ability to appreciate such music is congenital. I was born wired to enjoy listening to someone click marbles or crinkle a paper bag. I have blissful early memories of my father chiseling sculptures out of rosewood, the soft tap of the mallet and the crackle of the scoop-shaped shavings peeling off. If you aren’t wired this way, I can’t imagine that any fancy terms like “durational composition” or any encouragement to follow the interplay of microtones will give you the patience to listen to drones for three hours in the car.
Halfway through the Highway 17 leg of my drive, with Malone’s composition buzzing and humming around me, I started feeling moody. I’m rarely left alone with my thoughts, and I began reflecting on my daughter’s life.
She is 19 and taking a break from college. She’d gone up to her grandmother’s house way up a gravel road in the Catskills outside of a little town called Bloomville. She was spending her days playing the piano and watching bunnies hop around in the yard when it wasn’t raining constantly.
She’s struggling with a general anxiety disorder as well as a general what-to-do-with-her-life disorder.
When your child is a young adult with existential worries, it’s a benchmark of sorts.
Recently an ad popped up on my phone playing a serious orchestral version of “Part of Your World” from the “The Little Mermaid.” When she was very small, my daughter would sing every word of the song.
I wanna be where the people are
I wanna see ‘em, se ‘em dancin’
Walkin’ around on those, what do you call’em?
Oh, feet
The formality of the orchestral version was like the grownup version of the song in the same way that my anxiety-wracked daughter is the grownup version of that toddler. As I zoomed along 17, I felt overwhelmed by the swiftness with which that transformation occurred. The tiny creature making her toys dance to her singing was now hiding out in the middle of nowhere listening to the rain on the roof as she practiced “grounding exercises” to keep from disassociating.
Up where they walk, up where they run
Up where they stay all day in the sun
Wanderin’ free, wish I could be
Part of that world
This wish too has transformed, from a cartoon mermaid’s fantasy of having legs to a painful struggle for the minimal ability to engage with life and the world.
At that point on 17, new mountain vistas appear after every curve. Malone’s droning served as a soundtrack for the gradual emergence of each new landscape, as though the mountains were swelling up out of the earth.
I stopped for gas in Roscoe. A big trout fishing destination. By the road, a large wooden trout sculpture swam on thin poles among some low hedges. It looked like it was made of mud, a cocoa brown in the afternoon sun. As I held down the trigger on the gas nozzle, I couldn’t stop wondering at this fish and picturing myself wading into a cold stream with a fly rod.
As I wound on the two-lane up into the mountains, I noticed the white flower dots in the fields. The sight reminded me of the feeling I got when I first read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” in high school, with the classroom door open to the marching band drilling on the football field. Twisting down the mountain with those drones playing, I spoke that phrase “host of golden daffodils” in my mind. And I felt the same delicious loneliness, just as fresh, the same ineffable sensation of recalling a past life where I wandered by the same lake where Wordsworth saw that sea of yellow, the same sense of a cool blue world down between the wet stems. I pictured this as I followed the sharp curves between Downsville and the intersection with Highway 10.
By the time I reached the last leg of the drive, gently climbing and descending the hills between Hamden and Bloomville, I had fallen into a rumination about … well … the reality of reality, about how beyond a veil that perpetually falls over the mind, the world as the only world in this moment is “there.” Every moment, your consciousness substitutes a fiction of that world, a copy. Every moment, you drift into a dream of reality. I’m looking at my dream of a mountain instead of the mountain itself. But reality is “there” – that old house with the rusted green chairs on the porch, that weird bush that looks like a fountain of leaves shooting out of the ground.
By the time I crunched up to the house in the slant of late sun and saw my daughter on the porch, I felt that I had stepped through a door into “the real.” I was moving around in a world beyond the veil, outside of the dream.
The irony of trying to describe this experience is that I kept saying, “Nothing I’ve ever read has described this.” The most profound spiritual or philosophical writing I could think of all seemed to refer to the substitute reality, the imagined reality that can be shaped to fit theories and fictions about the REAL reality that lay beyond language. As I sat on the porch looking up at the REAL moon in the REAL sky beyond REAL clouds as a REAL planet twinkled into view, it was as though everyone throughout history had been writing about a crude two-dimensional drawing of an evening sky.
Now here I am failing at the same task, writing about a crude drawing of the real evening sky I was looking at.
This state of consciousness persisted until I passed out in the upstairs bedroom. In my last waking moments, I thought, well, maybe Meister Eckhart is the exception and dialed up something on the phone:
Everything hangs on the little word “here” and its sibling “now.” YOU wait for me to come home to your now which is beyond past and future and return to your here which is present before beginning and beyond every ending.
In the morning, I woke up rested in a regular state of mind and recognized, with a thrill, that I had experienced a true state of altered consciousness. And listening to hours of buzzing and humming drones is a perfectly reasonable cause. People have used music to induce altered states for thousands of years. But I have never believed that you could really trip just from listening to music without drinking or smoking something, that your mind really changes states.
It’s like hypnosis. No matter how much you tell me that it works, I don’t believe you. Sure, if I really listen to instructions spoken in a mesmerizing voice, I might feel somewhat open to suggestion. I might feel suggestible. Why, yes, I can picture a red balloon tied to my wrist. Yes, I have a slight sensation that my arm wants to rise. Cool. Do I believe that you can make me cluck like a chicken or rob a bank? No. And, sure, listening to trippy music will put me in a trippy mood. I might feel inclined to indulge mystical thoughts. But will it put me in a truly altered state of consciousness? Nah. Not if I don’t at least smoke some weed.
But this is exactly what happened to my mind on my drive with Kali Malone, while I remained sober as a judge. She made me trip.
Imagine a blend of LSD that triggers the full mystical state of consciousness you experience on an acid trip without disorienting side effects. My biggest complaint about being stoned is being stoned. What I don’t like about tripping is the trip. With drugs, obviously you’re putting something in your system that physically changes you. The trip is your body being fucked with. What if you could take a hit of something that made you understand that you’re part of one universal consciousness or that colors sing without making you forget where you put the car keys, without making you laugh uncontrollably at stupid things like how hard it is to tie your shoes, without making you perceive The Karate Kid as a work of genius.
And imagine that this drug made you experience mystical knowledge as real knowledge. As simple truth. With drugs, however intense and profound the ideas you get while tripping, the fact that chemicals are producing these ideas inserts a huge “as if” in front of every transcendental revelation. It is “as if” you’re vibrating in harmony with the trees in the park. But not “really.” Because it’s just the acid fucking with your brain.
What if this imaginary drug just made you feel the frequency of the tree molecules? You simply noticed the vibration that was there to be noticed like the flash of the leaf undersides fluttering in the breeze.
I find that weed makes dumb TV really funny. But I always feel like I’m watching through a haze. The laughter feels hysterical. In contrast, I once tried … when I was fully sober … laughing along with “the studio audience” on an especially stupid sitcom like Full House or Family Matters. Every time the audience laughed, I forced out a purely mechanical imitation of a laugh. Hahaha. After five minutes of this experiment, the show became genuinely funny. I was laughing in earnest at Urkle’s actual lines. I was laughing with the show rather than at it. The show was making me laugh, not the altered chemistry of my brain.
What if our imaginary drug simply made you notice what was funny or fascinating in this same natural way? You simply notice a congo drum buried in the music instead of fixating on it and feeling like you can hear nothing else and never will.
Ecstasy made me experience nirvana. And I believe it was actual nirvana, which is to say that the MDMA made my brain produce the same psychological experience as that felt by Gautama under the bodhi tree. Meister Eckhart says the kingdom of God is near. It is “within.” Ecstasy makes the brain access that layer of the psyche corresponding to this “kingdom.” But I always felt that a panic was lying under the soothing influence of the MDMA. The bliss of nirvana from X felt crazy. A form of insanity. Suzuki says that true nirvana is like walking an inch above the ground. X makes nirvana feel like walking in the sky.
What if our imaginary drug made the truth of nirvana seem obvious and natural? An inch above the ground.
Moreover, the effect of this imaginary drug should hit you gradually like an edible. So it feels like the drift of your thoughts naturally lead you to a perception of transcendental truth. Something that just occurred to you.
All of this, more or less, is what listening to Malone did to my brain.
I haven’t had a chance to repeat the experiment since that drive.
My daughter is back home in Brooklyn now. She’s a good cook, and her taking care of dinner has made me develop an evening cocktail ritual. I kick back with a gin and tonic, sniff the sizzling garlic and wait to be fed.
All of this ruminating about altered states makes me realize how familiar inebriation is. When they legalized weed in New York, I thought that I’d turn into a raving maryjane freak like someone from Reefer Madness with goggled eyes and crazed rictus. In my younger, freer days, weed was all around me, so I just took a hit on whatever was passed around. Then, boom, I’m a middle-aged dad in Park Slope. Figuring out how to score had become just enough trouble to make it seem stupid. And the idea that the one time I decided to buy a little weed would just happen to be when a cop decided to prove a point or make a quota was a deterrent. Talk about feeling stupid. Once you could just step into a shop and buy a joint like a pack of gum, I expected to see myself yield to a whole portfolio of latent stoner behavior. Yet here I am with my gin and tonic enjoying the comfortable familiarity of the alcohol buzz.
An old alcoholic friend told me that back in his day they’d say that some people were two drinks under par. “Oh, Connie’s okay, she just needs her Vodka on the rocks. She’s two drinks under par.” Although I don’t worry that I have a drinking problem, I do feel like I’m two drinks under par. Inebriation hits me as a truth. A corrective vision, like putting on spiritual glasses that see through the bullshit for just a flash before steaming over.
When I had a chance to listen to “Does Spring Hide Its Joy” while indulging my evening constitutional, I heard three musicians making music. I don’t know how composed the pieces are. Maybe the musicians are following one of those avant-garde scores with geometric shapes floating over a customized staff where the composer describes a series of parameters within which the players make random choices, but it just sounds like three people with a deep understanding of this style of music jamming the same way as when I met up with friends as a kid in Mississippi and played “Free Bird” for an hour.
Malone starts with a tone. O’Malley joins with another at some weird but harmonious interval. And they just hold it there like dewy grass singing in the morning sun. And they hold it. Just when you think they’ll hold it forever, the bowed sawing from the cello opens out some cosmic chord and you feel them all swell the volume in perfect timing. Oh, but now O’Malley adds a different tone! And here comes another note from Malone! Now it’s Railton trying to steal second base! But Malone throws! O’Malley leaps for the ball! Railton slides and … she’s safe at second!
What sounded in the car like a single, undulating wave is now a dance of kinetic particles. The music is as wild and unpredictable as Dolphy at the Five Spot.
The gift of the gin is an indifference to polarities. Malone’s music is both wave and particle. My daughter is both deeply unhappy and creating her own reality. Wave and particle. Reality itself is both wave and particle. It’s all just a question of where I turn my ears.
Don’t know if that makes sense. I’m drunk.
Kenny Nowell 