There was a lot to get used to

Sometime mid-last year I got that bed-ridden sorta sickness that happens a lot in year 12; a heady mixture of germs, hormones, anxiety and just plain tiredies! Lying in a pit of sorry-for-myself surrounded by bits of essays and old Panadol packets, I put on this CD...

...Insomnia by Megan Washington - heady, melancholy, truly bitter and sweet, it floated and threaded itself in and out of my consciousness as I lay there dazed, watching the stars of my low-iron body glitter in time. It was a strange concoction of experience, somehow completely outer-body, but also so not - I was so in tune with how full my head was of both sick-gunk and the lyrics to Sentimental Education, so aware of how hard it was to breathe through phlegmy lungs and a concrete-blocked nose. 


I'm having trouble describing what it was about those first few listens to that collection of songs that was so amazing to me - there is something so appealing about the crossing over of the senses, I think, that most artists try to capture at least once. I mean how many times have you heard about the synaesthetic folk? I guess for me it just makes sense, to try and engage more than one of the senses at any given time. Listening to that tragic music in a self-indulgent state of flu enriched the whole experience, by turning it into an experience in itself. 

Last night I got off a footy fan-packed train, dressed like a woodland nymph and shaking a little in the cold and in the highly strung way my brain works when sandwiched between sports fans on packed carriages. Sipping chamomile tea and waiting for my man like a Jane Austen novel, city people with places to be and cigarettes to smoke wove in and out and all around as I sat outside Starbucks burning my tongue. 


And standing on the roof of the bar clinging to the fences way above everything ever I wondered about how hard it is to join up physical things with sound and art, like so many people have tried to do, like I've tried to do before, like it's been done to me with Insomnia and sickness, and concerts and heavy bass and startling horns that bring the people to their knees...how do you get your man's closed-mouth smile in a melody? How do you make other people understand how beautiful it is to watch when a loved one sits in front of the sun on the train, and the light stems out from behind them like some kind of crown, framing their perfect face? How do you sing that?


I'm really asking!!