Everyday transcendence

This week I’ve been listening to Aoife Nessa Frances’ new album “Protector,” on repeat. It’s gorgeous and aching and accepting all at once. Give it a spin:

Speaking of aching, I’ve been thinking about pain and physical sensation as transcendence. This week I got a tattoo on a rainy afternoon, the kind of rain that sounds like white noise. The tattoo studio was a nineteenth century Prenzlauerberg storefront with gorgeous original tiling on every surface – white with ornate illustrations of dark green plants, ceiling to floor. There was also a jungle of plants inside the space, and with the rain and the darkness, everything felt moody and lush. I was thinking about the liquid skipping sound that rain water makes when it hits off my bike tires; the audio spectral density of the rain outside the studio window; the buzzing of the electric needle – the hypnotic blend of these frequencies. Neither of us spoke much during the session so it became kind of meditative, allowing me to focus more intently on sound and sensation.

The blistering feeling on my skin was soothing, maybe even kind of arousing in the gentle way that post-floss throbbing gums can be. Even the metallic taste of blood has a sort of sonic resonance, a clang that accompanies the pulsation of the flesh. With the tattoo pain, the sensation of the needle entering a point in my skin, and traveling down my arm and into my torso via webbed pathways made me think about meridians and acupuncture and about how my body is this immensely complex thing that surprises me in sensory ways all the time. I’m always getting to know it better and simultaneously it’s constantly evolving, changing state, illusive but tangible. Letting go of any resistance and following the pathways of sensation throughout my body with curiosity illuminated areas of my physical being that I hadn’t consciously perceived before in a sensory way. The feeling of physical release was transcendent, weightless.

This weightless feeling I felt in the studio reminded me of lying in the bath with my ears submerged and my legs resting on the wall in front of me, something I’ve been doing most nights before bed. I breathe the moist air into my torso and my ribs feel like the body of a boat, my lungs are the sail. I watch my belly rise in the water, shimmering foam clinging to my skin changing colour slowly in the alternating lights of my ravey dehumidifier. If I concentrate for long enough my belly button begins to undulate and I feel suspended in a warm vacuum, a sort of womb-like bliss. I recently read a personal essay by Melissa Border that starts with this:

You and the infinite. I read this and thought about how the realization that existence is finite, at least in this form of consciousness, can be so confronting, and I’ve had a habit of dissociating from reality in order to lull myself into the illusion of infinity. A stranger repeated the same thing to me again last night in a bar. I was talking to this guy who asked me if I’d had that moment in my life yet where my perspective shifted, where I’d stopped seeing time as expansive. He said in his twenties everything in front of him was limitless future, now his life was spread out in front of him like an enormous football field, and somewhere in the distance he could see the goal posts. He could see his death on the horizon. I’ve definitely had this moment of shift and whereas it scared me in the beginning, it really doesn’t scare me that much anymore. What scares me more is the idea that I could have gone on not seeing it, or rather, willfully ignoring it.

Something that this conversation reminded me of was the film “Fire of Love” which I saw mid-week at Wolf Kino on Weserstraße. I found out after watching it that it came out on my birthday this year – January 20th. If your actual birthday is one goal post, and death is the other, then this film is all about how you play the game from post to post, and that scoring the goal can be so fucking transcendent. Spoiler alert: The film describes itself as an extraordinary love story of intrepid French scientists, who died as they lived – capturing the most spectacular imagery ever recorded of their greatest passion: erupting volcanoes.

I recommended the film to someone who said they were worried it would be tragic. I didn’t find it tragic at all. These two people lived so intensely, their lives were so imbued with meaning and purpose. They were entirely accepting of the fact that their passion might kill them, and they died together in a volcanic eruption having spent decades in love with each other, with their lives, and with the living breathing earth beneath them. I think too often we forget that there is a fire ball in the center of this rock we’re spinning on and that the ground beneath us is literally alive and active and moving and breathing. It’s incredible. It reminded me of another moment of transcendence I felt earlier in the week when reading “The Shared Patio” by Miranda July, a short story in her collection, “No one belongs here more than you.” I was sitting outside a cafe, the sun on my face, eating apple pie with one hand, reading the story with the other. She writes:

“Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”

Death scares me less than a life unlived. And the fact that the future has a boundary, an event horizon that is slowly sucking us back into an unknowable but certain void, is less scary to me when I remind myself of how enthralling the everyday can be. Especially when I’m engrossed in the artistic output of others – the light within each person. This film, this album, this book, it’s so moving to me that people create beautiful things for no real reason other than to share little morsels of themselves with others.