The Song & the Sight

It was New Orleans in ’96, but back then, I played a fiddle. I’d been playing for awhile, hat in hand at this point, trying to see straight, as people, looking baffled, put money in my case and in my hat. Nothing smaller than twenties, an uncommon occurrence.

I started thinking straight the minute I saw the money, it had a really grounding effect in that way. Good thing too because I really needed to get off the street with all this exposed scratch, and fast. I also needed to process what had just happened, it was crazier than absinthe and acid.

It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There was the time I was on the bus and suddenly I could hear what everyone was thinking, kind of all at once. It was pretty freaky, thank God for my Walkman and my Tears for Fears tape. It was Songs from the Big Chair, it was brand new, and it was soothing and blocked out the voices.

Once I got off the bus I walked into the front door of the school and straight out the back while the song ‘Shout” played in my ears. That was the first time I heard the thoughts of the living like voices in my head as easily as I had always heard the dead.

At that moment, in New Orleans, I remember packing up my shit and heading for the hills, it was easy to do back then. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t ever see this pre-Katrina New Orleans again. While I was camping, I played my fiddle again, just for the trees, to see if anything happened.

That day on the street had been heady, thoughts had come most intensely while I was playing. I gathered at the end from the looks on the faces of the audience that I had shared space, it hadn’t been the first time for that either.

I did some of my best playing in trance, sometimes it’s like sharing sight, looks a little like possession but it isn’t, it’s someone I know and trust in here with me and only from time to time, I decide, so s’all good.

Over a time-span of a few days it all came back to me, the forest always brings me clarity. I remembered setting up, drinking water, placing my fiddle under my chin and starting with Ochi Chernye, trying to play like Yoska, it brings folks in like mad and it’s the only song I’ve played so many times I’m really good at it.

To be fair, it’s a little misleading as it’s the only song I play really well, I just need to draw them in though. Pretty much everything else I play is mediocre at best, but no one notices after that. All part of the magic of music, I guess, among other things.

So, as I got into it, I closed my eyes and I could hear them, not unusual, but then I could see them. I saw a married couple getting ready for work, he’s dropping off his kid, they argue about a video game and homework. There’s a bribe made over an upcoming test score.

I saw a woman packing up a suitcase and hiding it under her bed, she goes into the kitchen, I see her husband and I know why she has that suitcase packed. I see them all again when I open my eyes, they’re all here.

The woman with the suitcase under her bed seemingly happy on the arm of that same husband who likes to hit her with a broom. The man is there too, the one who dropped off his kid at school and there’s a woman, cozy on his arm. Hey, that isn’t his wife.

He was the one who looked the most baffled when the song was over. It was around the time I opened my eyes and saw them all there in the present, unexpectedly out of context, that I noticed gaps in my memory of what had happened.

Now that the pieces of the puzzle were putting themselves together it was clear that I had seen something. It’s one thing to know what a person is thinking, it’s another to see into their lives, it seemed more invasive somehow.

Sometimes when I am in that state I tell people things they need to hear, sometimes they don’t like it. Come to think of it, they don’t like it much when I’m not in trance either. In this case it was clear the affair had somehow been exposed. Was it the song? Had I said it directly? Did the man hear the song the same way as everyone else? Was he overcome with a feeling? I cleared out before I found out.

Point is, I put away my fiddle not long after that. I held onto it for years but never played it like that again. I finally donated it a few years ago. Music is important to me, I have found it to be the best therapy I could imagine during hard times and the best way to express the good times.

Time and experience have proven to me that while I can trust music, I can’t trust people and unlike people, music is always there for me. In that moment back in 1996 on a side street somewhere in the French Quarter I felt betrayed by music and I felt betrayed by the ‘sight’ which had taken years for me to hone. Now I had to learn to listen to music in an entirely new way. Challenge accepted.

There are a million moments in life to step up to the plate, challenges galore. What makes a thing “impossible” to achieve? Don’t get carried away, I’m not talking about jumping off a building to fly, but what about honing the skill of astral travel? You could jump off all the buildings you want then.

The biggest limitation people tend to have is themselves, but you already knew that.