P A M E L A L U
__________________________from AMBIENT PARKING LOT
Before ambient parking, the quiet we observed had been a convicted quiet, full of long sighs, sleeps, and rude awakenings to the petty disregard for compassion that characterized the slighting, day-to-day behaviors of our neighbors. We suffered each our private affliction for many years, in pure solitude and secrecy, composing missives to the editors of Faith and Absolute Music , which we never sent. It was a breezy day when at last we found each other, standing by the jukebox of anonymous sympathy with an open beer in one hand and a volume of Mary Shelley in the other. From the start it was clear we intended to remake our moral philosophy together. And so we walked arm in arm, unformed, into the night. We paraded our youth to the stars and the avenues, we stepped in time to the sparkle of polished city machinery. We drank freely. We sang. We memorized the portent of our dawning incandescence. We poured out expressions of clumsy self-importance but did not judge ourselves for them. We postured. We searched. We followed our passions into a confederacy of weakness. We hid our feelings in a warehouse of impressive statements. We made cutting remarks. We looked to the landscape for materials to restore our languishing spirits with. Oh, but for a part in this theater of reconciliation, ‘ere we faded! We proceeded with a courage built on a partially embraced acceptance of ourselves. For a time we dreamt of nothing else. Yet the more we dared approach the cause, the more it retreated from us. Was this an art? Was this the emptiness we had waited all our lives for, to be called to answer for, to fill the outer reaches of with our desires, our pains, our toils? The art would not look like anything else. It would take no shape but the smoky, curled-up shape that unfurled the cinema of our inner ear. We believed in the affirmative indications of this movement. We believed that the historicized feeling would lift us out of disaffection and open us up to a new intimate relation with all who had lived and died in the grounds where we now were standing, as transients. When we turned, with our jaws sore from habitual, ready-set determination, to discover staring out at us from the mirror a face, fierce or brooding or fearful, shifting with concern for the flaws and triumphs of the unprejudiced soul, we knew then that we had arrived at a turning point beyond reach of our earlier illusions. A reevaluation of our energies would be required, replete with stumblings and mistakes, toward a bolder and plainer aesthetic of unselfish understanding. It was true that such endeavors might lead to failure, or worse yet, enact damage on our radically softened sensibilities, shadowed as we were by the perpetual danger of feeling disappointed in the people and principles concerned, and of misunderstanding whom or what to trust. Oftentimes we doubted. Oftentimes we did not trust ourselves to know when to trust. And it was true also that our efforts might be taken in the wrong vein and looked upon, by some future tense of enhanced sophistry, as paradigms of a naïve and elaborate self-deception motivated by an unwillingness to drop ideals of purity, but we were prepared to accept this risk. We were ready to pack our things and stake the next third of our lives on our project's potential to respond to our modulating needs, even as we plunged deeper inside the subtleties of the landscape of sound which haunted us that day and forever, for no matter how much we struggled or how badly we fell, it was clear then and there that our commitment was inevitable: we would never stop working, never stop hoping.
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