The Double Bass is a God Damned Miracle
Yesterday I found myself skipping down the sidewalk after I had just bought some art supplies. As I was nearing the end of my street, I saw a small figure sitting on a chair, which was under an old modest oak tree. I immediately recognised this person as the Italian nonna I had stopped to talk to a week or two ago. And it broke my heart a little that she seemed to sit there all day, every day, waiting for passerbys to stop so that she could strike up a conversation. I think it must take a lot of loneliness and boredom to barely be able to speak a sentence of English and still sit out there all day waiting for someone to talk to. From what I recall, the language barrier was a little too imposing for an accurate transfer of what we were trying to say to each other. I believe I communicated to her that I was getting married tomorrow, and that I was walking home to eat the box of charcoal sticks I was carrying, as if she was speaking to the god damn arch nemesis of father christmas himself. I figured that there was no law against being the type of human she was perceiving me to be, and so we said our ciaos and I blew her a kiss and went on my unmerry way.
But something was clinging onto the back of my mind for the rest of the day after that conversation. Something deeply troubling that I just couldn’t shake no matter how much you know what I smoked. It was a craving for a sweet Italian affogato. Now an affogato, for those who are uninitiated or stupid, is not to be confused with an avocado. I’ve made that mistake many times ordering at a bar. An avocado (commonly known as grinch balls, jungle bombs, goblin closets) is a disgusting wartish pear with a rock and evil green goop in the middle, and was invented in the 1990s (Jacques Ellul wrote a fantastic book on this). An affogato, on the other hand, is a scoop of ice cream with a shot of coffee on the side that you get to pour over it, and is usually had in a serving vessel. You start the process by having a spoon of ice cream with a hint of coffee, and then slowly the warmth of the coffee deflates the scoop until you have a cold coffee thick shake elixir for the second half. It’s god damn delicious. Anyways, by now, it had gotten dark, and I knew exactly where I could find one of these – so I headed to the jazz café.
The waiter sat me down on a sunken and cracked red leather couch right up close to the stage and brought me an affogato before I had even asked. He could just tell by my body language that I wanted one. I had to sit on my singing-hot little paws to prevent them from picking him up by the collar when I heard that I had to pay for it, but that is the world now, and there is no denying it was worth every penny in the end. I mean it was just a god damn great affogato I had been given here. Something beckoned my attention rather quickly into my drinking journey though once the jazz band had taken their places on stage. As I upturned my gaze in mystery, the source of the call revealed itself to me in all its holiness – it was a double bass, the most beautiful instrument created by man.
The double bass is a mammoth of an instrument. When I look at one, I see an ancient Viking ship, needing no bow, and charging right into the deepest sound waves of the roaring black oceans. And only the brightest ambassadors of morning are picked to helm these bastards. You think the universe lets someone like you or me get our fingers on these monuments? Hell no and thank god for that. The man helming this ship, let’s just call him Pete (because that was his name for Christ’s sake), on the other hand, was the man just for the job. Our very own martyr for the glowing mahogany beholding us. He knew his shit – his index pressed on top of his middle finger as he cast each one of those strings into the bottom-most trenches of the song to generate maximum strength, and when he reeled out a note, everyone single one of us was blessed with the sweet fruits of his gamble. Every note was perfect and every one of us was crying. Pete fluttered up and away into the night sky at the end of the set, with the corners of his lips ever so subtly and peacefully turned towards the heavens. Like most nights after a night of Pete and his double bass, the only sound remaining was the clink of cutlery being placed down and a murmur of sniffles.
If I am reincarnated as a human, I would like to be a double bass player, and if I am reincarnated as an object, I hope I am born crooning and croaking and creaking out miraculous music while the midwife cries “it is a double bass!”. I would be a wooden saint and everyone else would be a sinner.
Anywhere we run the bass runs before us, the source of all warm vibrations arching among us
The Keeper
When I was younger I ended up on an oil rig far out at sea. It seemed, to me, to be an adventure worth taking part in. It must have been the most remote deep sea drill in the world. For months I helped prepare food, wash the dishes and clean the cafeteria area for all 152 crew members. On the weekends I would watch them play cards and listen to CDs. I enjoyed watching some of them go to the gym. I never tried to do the exercises though. I have always been very wiry.
One morning I awoke to an empty oil rig. It seemed that sometime during the night or early morning they had simply vanished. I checked each and every cabin. Not a single person remained, nor had anyone taken any of their belongings with them. There were certainly some signs of a commotion. On the outside platform, hand-held radios and battery lights lay strewn on the floor. All of the platform windows exposed to the air, including the ones through which I used to look out and watch the storms roll in, had been broken. I had evidently slept through it all. Why had no one woken me up? I never saw or heard from another crew member again.
I cannot say how long I have stayed on the rig. Time, at least to me, has not seemed to move in a way that I have learned of. The present just occurs. Instances just appear. That is the best way I can describe what it is to be on this rig to you. During the periods I have spent alone, observing the waves whisper and glide below my feet, I have experienced many strange encounters.
My first encounter was by far the most boring of all to me. It was a middle-aged man with a gaunt face and darkly tanned skin. I spotted him clinging to a buoy quite close to the rig, and so I helped him get onto the rig by throwing a rope out to him. Aboard, wrapped in the towel I had given him, he explained to me that he was the leader of a country from far, far away, and had been swept out beyond the horizon while going on his morning swim. He was so passionate and adamant that his people needed him back – that I was the only hope for the survival of his life’s cause and for getting him back to where he belonged. I explained to him that there are no communications that exist to and from this rig and that I don’t really know anything about politics. I showed him to the engineer’s cabin, which I thought he would enjoy because it had a desk, paper, and some pencils for him to work on his writing. As I stood in the doorway, for reasons I cannot explain, he became fixated on a book lying on a shelf. He seemed so sure that the man on the face of that book was in fact a photo of himself altered in some way to make him seem older. He accused me of words involving trickery that I could not understand, nor can I recall them now. The longer I did not answer his accusations, the more I saw a panic develop in his eyes. Eventually, he slammed the door, as if to prevent me from coming in, and I heard the clicks of the locks. Sometimes, over the years, I have heard the sound of him pacing, but I have not heard the sound of any of those locks click open.
Another day I was smoking a cigarette for the first time very poorly. It was approaching sunset when I watched a very large ship roll in towards my rig. It seemed very very old, with upward-protruding funnels much like the ones I had seen in the great war documentaries of the early century that I liked to watch in the T.V. room. As I viewed the navy-dressed crew of the ship through my binoculars, I noticed them motioning to direct the ship away from my rig. Many looked frantic in their motions. As the ship adjusted course away from me, I noticed a huge eye crudely painted in white on the side of their ship. The lower half of it was deeply worn and faded from the sea and speckled with barnacles and rust. The sense of weariness coming from this eye, looking right at me, was too much to bear, and so I let my cigarette fall into the sea, and I went back to my cabin.
One morning I woke up to a knocking on my open cabin door and the sight of a lady who seemed a lot older than me, standing in the doorway, dripping wet in a soaked, heavy black coat. As she pulled handfuls and handfuls of rocks out of her pocket and placed them on my counter, she apologised for waking me but explained that she was awfully cold and was wondering if I may know where any spare clothes might be for her. Later that night, after I had found her a room to get rested and warm, I boiled a soup for the two of us and she explained to me just how she’d found herself here. I learned that her name was Mary, that she once loved to write, and had decided one day that she was so sad and scared that she did not want to live. She walked into a river with her coat pockets filled with rocks, and recalled that she had opened her eyes to come out of a sort of static at the top of the ladder on my platform. I grew to enjoy her company very much. She helped me change my journal scribblings into real sentences. On some evenings Mary would retell a poem that she knew from the endless list in her mind. She often repeated one passage to me: A simple child / That lightly draws its breath / And feels its life in every limb / What should it know of death? I never could understand why she loved that one. I couldn’t understand a lot of the poems she read, but I loved the way she read them. Sometimes I would point out the different fish in the sea to her on the platform down the ladder. Later at night she would get a terrible anxiety and panic. She would ask me “what if it comes back again?” And each night I would hug her for as long as I possibly could, until it went away and she drifted into sleep. She is as smart and kind and beautiful as anyone I have ever met. One morning she did not wake from her sleep, and I have not woken her. I wonder what she dreams about – she looks so peaceful. Mary is not dead.
Once I saw two sailors in a wooden rowboat very slowly making their way to the ladder platform. What I notice is that this is in no way intentional. The two appeared to be rowing in opposite directions, hurling obscenities at each other, in obvious disagreement over which direction they should be heading. I made my way down to sea-level and asked if they need help. One of them explained that their ship was stranded months ago, and before telling me more, the other interrupted to question whether I could be trusted. What if I am the same person who got them into this mess? They begin to once again yell and row in unison, one towards me, and the other away. The waves took them far away to continue their journey. I hope I didn’t get them into a mess.
There was a woman who had floated to the rig in an empty bathtub. She was one of the strangest people I met. She described how one candlelit evening had turned into what she called a nightmare. She was bathing in the very same tub and sunk her head under the water with her eyes closed – something she told me she had always loved to do. When she rose from the water she found herself flowing out the mouth of a river in the middle of the night into the sea – still in her tub. She screamed and yelled for help towards the orange lamp-lit houses, but there was no one home and so the current carried her out as she watched the glow of light shrink further and further until it was just her and the murmurs of the dark. She stayed with me a few nights and behaved in ways that left me confused. Although talking to me seemed to take a great deal of effort, she often told me of the one she loved, who had been left behind. She asks me how long he’s been waiting, and how many years she’s been drifting. I cannot find an answer. She tells me that no matter how many times she finds me, she knows that it’s not the real me. I can tell it brings her a lot of pain to say these words out loud.
Only a few nights later I gave her an oar from one of the life rafts and I watched her depart in her bathtub again. I remember she ran her fingers down my forearm and told me that no matter what, she will keep searching for me. She repeated no matter what. I watched her silhouette fade under the moonlight as she rowed away. I heard her whimpers scatter with the waves in the darkness. I now know this must have been when I first felt a sadness. Mary once told me that some people use a word called a longing. I wondered what she would call this.
Once I heard the sound of a guitar and the grizzled voice of a man singing. He sounded as though he was from what they call the old west. In his cream-coloured rowboat, he tilted and shifted his body and guitar along to the rhythms of the waves, while his voice curled from the lowest to the highest peaks to pronounce his favourite lines. As he pointed his face up to howl one particular chorus of his song, I watched as lightning flashed down to end his song and cremate him in the same instant. I did not hear from him again. I did not know things like that can happen from time to time. I wonder if he knew that was his final chorus?
The last of my encounters was my most confusing one I think. She was a young girl I thought to be my age, and she entered my sight as I was observing the clashing of white and blue below my dangled feet. She had no boat, no vessel, and seemed completely content to be floating on her back, allowing the tide to wash her in whichever direction it pleased. She hesitated, but agreed when I invited her onto the rig. She had long red hair and pale, freckled skin. For the first time I had the feeling of my skin going warm when I looked at her dark eyes. She revealed to me that she had been lolling through the swells on her back this way for many years. She talked of the 1980s. She believed in never making a choice and that the moment you choose, you lose what she called freedom. She told me about a writer from a place called Denmark, and she had decided that a farmer could not slaughter any lamb drifting at sea. I did not understand much, but I agreed that I have not seen any farmers here.
She asked me a lot about myself, and when I told her why I was alone on this rig, I noticed that tears had begun to well in her eyes. She told me I had been left here alone for a long time – that I must get lonely. It was something that I had not thought of, and I asked her what she meant when she talked about loneliness. I watched tears spill down her cheeks and she wiped them away. She agreed with me, and told me that it’s unimportant to feel sadness over the things we do not have. I remember she held my hand in both of hers as she said this. I wondered how something that makes you cry could be unimportant?
The same night I watched her slide back into the waves and I saw the water take her away. Mary would call this sadness I think. I feel all the sadness in the world blowing across the sea. I wonder why she chose to leave? It sounds like the waves are hissing and laughing at me.
I have spent the last few nights in Mary’s room. I hug her tightly and wish she would choose to wake up.
