I may even remember the song. "Sweetness Follows" by REM. A low bellow sounding the intro, sustained organ underneath lines sung in an echo chamber: "Yeah, we were altogether lost in our little lives." Standing with my face against the speaker singing the words back until I was lost in them, learning to become the song. What was that? I couldn't get it to happen every time. It was not that song, or singing, it was simply disappearing in something. For a fragment of minutes every single cell of me was that performance. But why? And how come I could not control when it happened and when it didn't? When it didn't I was self-conscious, alone there in the living room, fretting about what was going wrong. I was thinking too hard, that was why I couldn't relax into it. But how not to think about thinking too hard? Or I was relying on the sound of someone else's voice, not my own. But what was my own voice supposed to sound like if I was singing someone else's song?
I did not see how these moments resembled those in what I am doing now, resting my hands on a computer keyboard and letting letters run off my fingers onto the screen. The words, I can't think about them. If I do, they are gone, and I am left fretting, and the fretting makes things worse and worse. But when I am not thinking about it, or rather when I'm doing the right sort of thinking--because "not thinking" makes it sound like this is idiot time--the words bubble from the spring. But it's so hard to get in that mode, and harder still to stay there.
Singing, writing. Other times, too. Dancing--in my socks in the living room, vaulting up and down to a Led Zeppelin mandolin song like a ballet dancer on speed. Sometimes it takes over--the dancing takes over--and there is more grace in my movements than I really ought to possess. But if I am trying to attain it, it will not come. It is either there or it isn't. I dance to be ready for when it is.
I am searching out words for what is wordless, or beyond words. Because that's when it flies away too--the instant my mind tries to catch what is happening in a description. It is the undescribed. It Is.
But if my efforts get in the way, how can I get to it? Is it possible to get better at reaching the tipping point, the moment before I know nothing but song or words or dance?
It is all I want because it is pure and has no fear and has no failure. Fear of getting caught dancing in my socks in the living room exists outside of it, as does the numbing frustration of the wrong word in the wrong place on the page. It is what I want at every moment, not just in snatched instants that give off heat even in memory.