We're here to see an old ritual start again, built from preserved schematics and sewn from a continuous thread of anguish and pain. We've all brought our own pain and we're here to offer it up, some of us more stylishly than others, some of us older and further still from grace, some of us fatter and with more hair, hair in awkward and fearsome places, hair that makes us think of death.
JD expresses concern for the health of the performers; they are technicians, they are precision drivers into radiant discord, and they also look a little like our aging parents. Their actions are to be held close now in memory, because they cannot last forever. If this be some mislaid and freakish tribe, these are (if not elders) then our most senior warriors, scarred and broken, precise from the memory of a thousand futile hunts.
I offer DX a Sour Patch Kid and he refuses. I think to myself that I'm getting old too, that the time comes when a man must put down Sour Patch Kids. When I was young, I thought of childish things. Now that I'm old, I like sour things. I think about buying (but do not buy) a second pack.
The opening act a kind of mis-adventure; leading with the promise of gorgeous accordion that fills the old and lonely hall with sorrow, with pain remembered from across the sea, long ago. Followed by (it sounded) the ramblings of a charmless troubadour, the one you always end up stuck talking to at the party. A nice enough person, I'm sure.
From this you fear that order will never appear but out of the din arises Thor, sturdy and true, down-laying a blanket or better a sea of bells. Now the water is put to fire, now the angels fly from it, their eyes alit too; now they are burning, lighting the night sky with the pain of lost love.
This is a first show, this is a holding together, the eyes of the band locked to the central drummer, he and the bassist with the whole band and the whole audience hanging on each move. We are wishing, we are holding together and praying and by some point we are angels too, transported, on fire, over the ocean.
When Thor takes off his shirt you know you have arrived, but don't let it distract you. The man obviously goes to the gym; a nod to health, to health's need, to the rule of the body. Gira (this really happened) describes his naked body as ice cream on a stick, with "a little thing sticking out." Near the end of the show the thread is nearly lost, the rhythm section must rally. Gira implores, the table nearly skews but for its near loss the fire burns only moreso higher, only moreso killing and scalding and renewing, moreso branding or tattooing us in our shared pain.
At shows I retreat to my head and listen too technically, for mistakes, for chord progressions, for melody in its fluid parameters, a million ways to listen and stay in my head, detached, barely dancing, always self conscious. But at some point in this show I am really transported, non-technical, lost in time in a way that has never happened to me before, set into a pinball collage of old memories of pain.
I remember a boy a long time ago, a young boy just a little older than my son, remember his confused pain and all the pain that followed it a bit predictably, stupidly, unconsciously, the pain I've felt, the myriad and shameful pain I've caused. All I can remember is pain, stupid pain, futile and ridiculous pain, and I feel sorry for that boy at a distance, as if he were another person I remembered.
All around the room you see faces intent, offering, all of us here to offer our pain, here with the hope that it can be channeled in this ritual, poured out of us and into the loud air, blown free and leaving our spirits lighter, more alive, less drowning in time and memory, for God so loved the world he gave his only son.
Why do the angels hide their eyes from the light, graceless and ashamed, aloft in a stellar column, awaiting heaven's fire. What do they remember of their sin, what of it did they cherish, for what is their skin full of memory, their mouths, their fingers alive with the memory of fire.
Why do they mis-hang their heads, their limbs, why are their eyes so without life, what do they share of their last dreams, their pain, the looks of the ones they knew, or loved. Once there were their mouths, their fingers, kissing fire from tongue to tongue, once they lived.
Swans show @ the Trocadero, 9/28/10.
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