MY FIRST STORY - THE FOOL
“The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.”
Terence McKenna
1 - IN THE BEGINNING
A vast desert landscape.
The sky is foggy, and the features of the place fade into a blur in every direction, making it seem without limits.
A young man slowly emerges from the distance, walking barefoot across the sand.
He wears an orange robe and carries a staff in his right hand.
His face seems old.
His head is shaven.
His gaze clear.
The young man comes to a halt, raises his staff, and parts his lips.
A slow, constant tone builds up from deep within his lungs, resonates through his throat, and spreads out across the landscape.
As the sound grows louder, the grains of sand begin to move, and rise up into the air.
Gradually, different formations emerge all around him.
The shapes flicker in and out of form, then begin to glow in colourful patterns, as his voice rises to unbelievable strength.
And then everything snaps into existence.
As I'm walking through the city today, I have forgotten all of the above.
4 - MY FIRST STORY (THE FOOL)
My story is simple, really.
I was born in a small arctic town.
Back in the sixties.
My father was a captain at sea, while my mom was at home looking after me and my two brothers.
I had a fairly pleasant childhood, though I found it a bit empty and lonely at times.
So when I reached my teens, my main ambition was to get away.
And become someone else.
But I never left this place.
In fact, I still live only a stone’s throw from the red brick building where I was born.
Every time I tried to get away, some unexpected obstacle would appear, and prevent me from going anywhere.
Almost mysteriously, like at the hand of some invisible ghost.
My urge to dream up a new existence wasn’t because the one I had was unbearable in any way.
It was just that my life seemed to provide the perfect canvas to create something new upon.
So at 18, I decided that the best thing would be to leave and start again somewhere else.
I attempted to move south, to the big city.
It seemed like a place of opportunity.
I got myself a job as a mailman, and spent most of the money I earned on buying records, and going out to see bands.
But I soon got caught in a loop, and after a few months I couldn’t get up in the morning, and just stopped turning up to work.
Needless to say, I was fired, and money soon ran out.
I decided that this was the wrong city for me, and returned to my hometown.
Back home, I got myself a new job as a salesman in a local record store.
We were selling 12-inch dance singles to DJ’s, and progressive rock LP’s to middle-aged men.
And cassette tapes with mainstream eighties pop to teenagers.
It was a job I quite enjoyed.
After all, music was my main passion at the time.
But because I bought so many records for myself, I still didn’t earn much money.
One month, when I went to pick up my paycheque, an amused manager told me that I actually owned HIM money, due to the amount of records I’d picked out for myself.
So I left his office as broke as I entered.
Even if life was pretty good, due to the job, and the fact that I was in a nice relationship with a new girlfriend, I still didn’t think the setup was right for me.
So I made new plans.
This time, I set my eyes on Berlin.
It seemed to be the European city where the most interesting music was coming from at the time, and maybe a good place to live, due to its placement as this strange island situated deep inside the Eastern Bloc.
Before the wall fell.
So I quit my job and sold most of my stuff, and told my girlfriend that I needed some space, and that we would have to see how things went.
She agreed.
But just as I was about to leave, she told me that she was pregnant.
So I stayed.
As any decent man would.
5 - THE PRESENT
I am working my way up the mountain hillside where the cable car runs on wires high above, like I’ve done so many times before.
As I gain altitude, the city draws itself out beneath me.
I love these mountains.
Always have.
I try to walk up here daily, now that I have all the time in the world again.
You see, the situation I’m in is a pretty new one.
Not like before the door opened.
After my oldest son was born, he’s 32 now, I went back to study.
To become a wireman.
At the local Polytechnic.
My interest in electronics had been with me since childhood.
I used to sit in my room and assemble little electronic kits, burning my fingers on my soldering iron.
The smell of molten lead is one of the fondest memories from that time.
Vaporised lead.
And burned skin.
I eventually got myself a job in repair and installation.
It’s been a career I’ve quite enjoyed, if not spectacular in any way.
I got married, we bought a house near my parents’ house, then we had two more kids over the years to follow.
My interest in music stayed with me as a passion for a while, and my record collection eventually craved its own room in the house.
I loved that room.
It’s all in storage now.
As I reach the plateau at the top of the trail, I enter the small cafe at the cable-car docking station.
I buy myself a cup of green tea.
Trying to give up coffee.
There are quite a few tourists in the cafe.
They’re looking through postcards with pictures of the northern lights, our most valued natural resource.
I like that.
Magnetic shifts in the ionosphere.
Solar winds bombarding the earth.
It’s a pity they can’t be harvested, like fossil fuels.
Or maybe someday they can.
Magnetic storms could prove to be a great source of energy.
I’m sure Tesla had a plan.
Nicola.
I sit down by a table near the window.
I can see the whole city from here
Flickering lights.
It’s starting to get dark, even if it’s just 2PM.
November.
Sunless days.
But still brighter than five years ago.
When everything crashed.
For all I know, I should have seen it coming.
It’s not that anything had drastically changed, but little signs had emerged.
I had, for instance, taken up martial arts.
An old childhood dream.
And a clear sign of mid-life crisis, I’m sure.
In parallel, at the other side of the spectrum, I had become a part-time smoker again, after more than two decades without a single cigarette.
I guess I found both these activities liberating, at some tiny scale.
But none of these changes could warn me about what came next.
It all started one seemingly normal morning.
I got up at 0645, went downstairs and made myself coffee, as any other morning.
After a quick glance through the usual websites and social media over a couple of slices of bread with cheese, I got dressed and left for work.
My wife worked shifts, so she was still fast asleep, and all the kids had moved out by then, which left me to enjoy the solitude surrounding my daily ritual.
Just as I was about to leave the house, I saw it.
The door.
At first I just stood there, staring at it.
We have lived in this house for almost two decades.
And there has never been a door there before.
This might sound unbelievable to you, and I’m not going to lie to you;
I will lie to you.
Lies are part of my story.
Like they’re part of the stories of most people I know.
But what I’m telling you now is true.
A door had appeared on the wall of our entryway, where before there had only been a small mirror, and a couple of framed family photos in black and white.
As my initial puzzlement passed, I came to my senses, and chose to ignore it.
I hurried past it, caught my coat, left the house, and went to work, like nothing unusual had happened.
Something I would later regret.
6 - ANOTHER EXIT
In the days following the new door incident, I tried my best to forget the whole thing.
I had become quite good at ignoring irrelevant details over the years.
But this one turned out to be a tricky one to leave behind.
One evening, after I had cleaned the kitchen and was about to go to bed, I went downstairs to turn off the lights in the entryway.
As I did, and everything went dark, I saw it again.
The door was back, and this time a bright light was seeping out around it, as if there was daylight on the other side.
I froze and stared at the door.
Not because I was scared, strangely enough, but because this didn’t fit in with the idea I had about my life.
The concept of me.
Up until this point, everything had its own place, and nothing unexpected ever happened.
Sure I might slip on the ice from time to time when out shopping groceries, but wearing spikes would easily take care of such unforeseen and unwanted events, and I would never get seriously injured or break anything.
Bills were paid in time, family relationships were stable, if somewhat uneventful, and my health was pretty good for my age.
The door simply didn’t fit in, and the daylight behind it added to the feeling of disharmony.
As I stood there staring at it, the glow from around its edges slowly faded, and it was gone again.
Again, I chose to ignore it, and again, I probably added to the impact of the powers that were waiting for me just around the corner.
Behind the door, to be more exact.
I went to bed, hoping it would go away and not come back.
A few days passed with nothing strange happening, and then it struck again.
It was a Monday.
I hadn’t slept very well.
I usually try to get a good rest before the start of a new week, but as I had gone to bed the night before, I just couldn’t rest.
All kinds of thoughts kept racing through my mind.
People I hadn’t seen in decades and totally had forgotten existed, suddenly popped up in my memory.
Unimportant events from different parts of my life materialised before my inner eye.
Without any apparent reason.
When I eventually fell asleep, it was the middle of the night, and the last thing I remember thinking was that the next day would be rough.
It turned out to be an accurate prediction.
After my morning ritual, which was followed by an extra double espresso this particular morning, I went downstairs to put my coat and shoes on, and leave for work.
As I was kneeling down to tie my laces, I got an eerie feeling of being watched from behind.
I turned around, still squatting on the floor, and stared at the wall where the mirror should have been.
Again, I froze.
The door was wide open.
Behind it, a bright light beamed out and blinded me.
I instinctively put one hand in front of my face, and after adjusting to the light, I could see that something was standing in the doorway.
At first I thought it was a small person, or an animal.
It felt very much alive.
But there, in a new doorway in what used to be my familiar entryway, a red, shiny, triangular shape was now hovering in front of me.
Floating in the air.
Slowly spinning.
As it did, it revealed four perfectly shaped triangular sides.
I kept staring at it for what seemed like minutes.
Still kneeling, with one shoe on.
Then, to my surprise, the hovering shape said: “Come!”
And before I could process the command, or think of a good answer, I got sucked up from the floor, lifted across the room, and swallowed by the formation in the doorway.
In no time, I was inside a small, red room.
The bowels of the thing.
It was both claustrophobically small and endlessly vast at the same time.
I couldn’t grasp where the walls began or ended, they had a kind of gradient quality to them.
Suddenly it felt as if I was moving vertically at high speed, but I couldn’t see anything that I could relate my position to.
I kept my mouth shut, as I was still too puzzled to speak.
But after a while I managed to open it and ask: “Where are we going?”
“To the source”, the shape answered.
Strangely content with the answer, I kept quiet for the rest of the time that it felt like we were moving.
Then the feeling of movement abruptly stopped.
And then, without warning, the walls of the room dissolved.
That’s when I got scared.
I now found myself hanging in thin air, several hundred meters above the city.
I could see the cable-car’s upper terminal far below, and scattered clouds both around me and above me.
It was freezing cold, as if to remind me that I was physically present, and not just dreaming.
The voice appeared again, this time from inside my head.
“This is all you have.”, it said.
“A unique perspective.”
“You own nothing, not even your own personality.”
“All the ideas you have about who you are, are constructions.”
And then it repeated:
“You only have this.”
Gasping in the cold air, paralysed by vertigo, I found no response.
“Let’s take a closer look.”, the voice said, and I instantly fell towards the ground.
I tried to scream, but there was no sound.
I felt totally powerless.
Just as I thought I was about to hit a rooftop that came zooming towards me, I stopped mid-air, just a few meters above the roof.
I recognised the house beneath it.
It was my own.
But it was different somehow.
For a start, the house seemed to be about double the size of what it actually should be.
Then, as if by magic, the roof dissolved and disappeared.
I could now see the layout of the different rooms inside, and everything seemed familiar.
I looked closer, and saw that all the rooms were correctly laid out.
I had been involved in both drawing and building this house, so I knew it very well.
All the rooms were there.
All the furniture.
All the familiar mess.
Except that the outer wall facing East had been changed.
Instead of being the outer end of the house, this wall had now been replaced with a higher and much thicker inner wall.
On the other side of this new wall, the building continued for what seemed like the exact length of the original house.
And I realised that this other part was identical, only it was mirrored.
I quickly scanned all the rooms in this new part of the house to see if all the details were correct there, as if that would confirm its existence.
Then I turned my attention to the original part of the house again.
And that’s when I saw it.
In our bedroom, someone was lying on my bed.
It was me.
I quickly shifted my focus to the other side of the house.
In the mirrored bedroom, on the side of the bed that would be mine in an inverted world, someone was lying, too.
Just as I tried to focus on the person’s face, I was violently dragged back into the air.
It felt like I was sucked into a vacuum, and in a split second I found myself back inside the triangular shape with the red walls.
It raced upwards through the air, and after a roller-coaster ride, it stopped, and spat me out through the new door in my entryway, which quickly faded and disappeared.
Very confused, I found myself back where I’d been, wearing only one shoe.
I sat down on the floor.
I must have been sitting there for half an hour when I picked up my cellphone and called in to work to report that I wouldn’t be coming in today.
Afterwards, I undressed and went back to bed.
Something I had never done before.
7 - AND MEN MUST FALL
A couple of weeks had passed since the incident with the new door opening and the flying red triangle abducting me in my entryway.
The first few days after it happened, I just felt totally robbed of all energy.
I slept a lot, and only got up to eat very light meals.
I didn’t even feel like drinking coffee, which was very unusual.
I reassured my wife that I had probably just caught a light flu or something, and that I just needed to rest a little.
I told her nothing about the actual incident.
She was content with my explanation, even if she found it a bit surprising that I should be sick so suddenly, as it didn’t happen very often.
To make things seem more natural, and to buy myself some time, I called my doctor and had him write a medical certificate to send off to work.
Towards the end of the week, I started feeling better, but somehow I couldn’t get myself back into focusing on my usual routines.
I felt that I had to try and understand what had happened to me, however surreal it was.
My approach to life has always been quite rational, and I found the only way to attack this situation was to try and make sense out of it.
At first, I had to decide whether I had been hallucinating , due to some unknown medical reason, or whether what happened to me was as real as anything else I experienced.
However real that was.
I believed the latter was most likely, as all my senses had been intact throughout the experience, and because I could remember every little detail.
For some reason I was very preoccupied with the peculiar shape of the thing that had encapsulated me, and elevated me into the skies that morning.
I felt that it was of essential importance.
So I sat down by my computer and started searching for more information on geometrical shapes.
Even though I have a basic understanding of geometry, I discovered that there was a lot to learn.
I learned that a triangular object where all sides and angles are equal, is called a Tetrahedron, and that this is the first of the five fundamental shapes known as the Platonic Solids.
And I learned that The Platonic Solids are the only five objects in three-dimensional space where all sides and angles are equal.
I found this very interesting, especially as I hadn’t been aware of it before.
It sounded like very basic knowledge about the world we live in.
But even after I had read about the Platonic Solids for hours, there was no indication that any of them were supposed to talk to you, or abduct you from your entryway in the morning.
That part was still a grey area.
The weekend passed.
I felt that I needed more time, and called my doctor again on Monday morning to ask for another week to rejuvenate.
This time he sounded a little more concerned, and asked me if I could come down to his office and do some tests.
But after I reassured him that this felt like nothing more than a light flu, and that I could already feel it loosening its grip, he agreed to write an extended medical report for work.
After the call, I put on some loose and comfy clothes, and made myself a cup of weak coffee.
Then I sat down by my desk in the small office that we had converted our oldest’s son’s room into when he moved out.
The day was spent reading more and gradually getting lost in a rabbit hole of suspicious websites linking geometrical shapes to frequency spectrums and levitating boulders.
Some claimed that any form in the universe functions as an “antenna” for specific “energies”.
Needless to say, to someone with a thirty year career working with electronics, relating to the basic laws of electricity and electromagnetism every day, this sounded pretty out there, and probably was.
But it was still not as crazy as my own experience from the previous Monday would sound to anyone with a basic understanding of psychology.
I kept reading and followed any lead I could find, as weird as they came, until the entire day had passed and my wife came home from her days shift.
I could see her surprise at finding me in the clothes I was wearing.
I didn’t often wear comfy clothes, not even at home.
She showed some real concern when I told her I still hadn’t gone to work.
“But you always go to work. You’re an always going to work person!”, she said over dinner.
I thought about this, how I was defined only by my habits, and not by how I experienced the world.
It somehow felt unfair.
“Maybe I’m more than one person?”, I heard myself answer.
She stared at me.
“You realise that that’s a very strange thing to say?”.
She gave me a cold look, as if I had betrayed her in some way.
Maybe I had.
I avoided talking about the subject for the rest of the evening, and waited until she went upstair to go to bed.
After another couple of hours in front of the computer, I was too tired to take in any more information, and decided to go to bed too.
The last thing I do before brushing my teeth, is turning off all the lights in the house.
This includes going down the stairs to the entryway on the ground floor, and check the switch for the outdoor lamp, and double-check if the door is locked.
It usually is.
As I switched off the light and turned around to go back up, I stopped mid-movement.
A dim, greenish glow drew up an outline of the new door on the wall.
It gradually got more and more intense, until the door was penetrated by beams of light and eventually dissolved.
In the doorway, a rotating, green cube appeared.
“This is not who you are.”, it said, and then I was lifted across the room and was sucked into its interior, just like the Tetrahedron had done the previous Monday.
Confined inside the cube, I could see that it had the same gradient quality as the Tetrahedron, as if its walls were made up by fog.
Again, the feeling of movement started.
I wouldn’t suggest that I had gotten used to the experience in any way, but this time I felt a little calmer.
The shaking and moving went on for much longer than in my previous experience, and I decided it was best to just keep quiet and wait for whatever destination I was headed for.
As I sat there, I noticed a subtle humming sound, like a low frequency drone, probably less than one hundred cycles per second.
It felt as if it was coming from all directions, from the very fabric of the cube.
This, combined with the green glow made me feel surprisingly comfortable.
Maybe I was getting used to the experience, and even a little excited about what would come next.
After a while the humming sound dropped in frequency until it was below the listening spectre.
Simultaneously, the sense of movement ended.
And everything went still.
I kept looking at the walls, and noticed that they had turned semi-transparent.
Outside, I could see that it was dark, and that I was sat in an open, grassy field.
Above me a starry sky opened up, and at the edges of the field I could see trees, and also some buildings in the distance.
There was also glow of light from behind the buildings that gave me the impression that I was not totally out in the wilderness, but rather at the outskirts of a city.
Eventually the walls of the cube dissolved completely, and I now found myself sitting on the grass, which felt warm and comfortable.
It puzzled me to find myself in a hot summer’s evening, a far cry from the snowy November night I had just been in back home.
I rose to my feet, and looked around.
The sound of insects provided a suitable soundtrack to the setting.
The cube was nowhere to be seen now, and no voices spoke neither inside or outside my head.
I felt strangely at ease, and wondered what to make of all this.
Then, as an impulse coming from somewhere totally unknown to me, I started moving on the grass.
At first, I just swayed in the warm breeze, but then I started swirling around.
I was dancing.
Still wearing my pyjamas, with no shoes on, the sensation of the grass under my feet got more and more intense, and eventually made me feel that I was being caressed by the earth, returning its love by dancing, like a child would.
An unimaginable joy rose inside me, and I started smiling and giggling uncontrollably.
I swirled and danced with a sense of freedom that I couldn’t recall having felt ever before.
I looked at my hands, and discovered that there were beams of light shining out of them in the most brilliant colours I’ve ever seen.
I gazed at the apparent magic unfolding before my eyes, and saw that as I made gestures with my hands, the light-beams would form little wheels of light in radiant colours.
I started throwing the light-wheels out into the air.
A complete and utter happiness filled me, and for the first time I could recall, I sensed a near endless love for everything inside and around me.
The colour-wheels flew across the meadow, over the trees and towards the buildings in the city in the distance.
I laughed aloud, and moved like floating in warm, liquid air.
Looking at my feet, I watched the grass pressing up around them as I moved, and a feeling of love for the ground beneath me swelled up inside me.
I stopped dancing and knelt down, spreading my arms as I laid down on my belly.
I realised that the love I felt was for the planet below me.
A warm, breathing, living thing that provided me with everything I could ever wish for.
Unconditionally.
As I hugged the earth, I started crying.
I laid there, holding on to the Earth, hoping this moment would last for an eternity.
Then, without warning, I was lifted up and sucked back into the cube, which was now placed in the middle of the field.
I could hear my own desperate cries, as if coming from a child being separated from its mother, but in no time I found myself back inside the green cube.
It started moving, and the humming sound returned.
The voice inside me also returned, and said: “THAT is who you are!”
Whereby I was spat out back onto the chilly stone floor of my entryway.
Helpless as a newborn, I curled up and started sobbing uncontrollably on the cold floor.
11 - REACHING IN
It was morning when I eventually woke up, still curled up on the cold stone floor of my entryway.
My wife stood beside me, looking down at me with a stern mine.
I sat up, and tried to open my mouth, but before I could say anything, she told me to go upstairs and make myself representable, as we were going to see my doctor.
Which I did.
Looking into the bathroom mirror, it struck me that the person staring back at me had changed a great deal over the last couple of weeks.
My hair was all over the place, and the more than a week-old stubble made me look different.
Unkempt.
Like another category of person.
The kind of category that me and my wife had always agreed to not bear any resemblance to.
I quickly washed and shaved, picked out a new shirt and a clean pair of trousers from the wardrobe, and hurried out to the waiting car.
As I got in the car, I was met with silence.
After driving for a while, she said: “This can’t continue. We will have to sort you out.”
I nodded quietly, fully understanding her reaction.
Ever since we met, our relationship had depended on both of us keeping things together, making life as predictable as possible for the other.
This could only be done by nurturing a strict, mutual agreement on who we were, both as in the idea we had of ourselves, but also how we viewed each other.
If one of us strayed from the path, it would affect our coalition.
There were surely times when I struggled with this concept, but I always returned to the conclusion that it was the only way to stay sane, and eradicate any doubts surrounding our partnership.
A partnership that was fragile from the start.
Not that we didn’t fall in love when we first met.
We did.
Initially, we both enjoyed exploring the mysteries that we represented to eachother.
We were very young, and unexperienced.
But after being together for a while, it seemed that we both felt a slight unease in the relationship.
As if we were a puzzle made up of pieces from two different sets of puzzles.
Soon we were both being pulled between this sense of never being able to relax, and the convenience of having someone to be with.
Not ideal by any means, but none of us were too idealistic at heart to begin with.
We were actually in the process of re-evaluating our whole relationship, and even talked about going separate ways when we discovered that our oldest son was on his way.
And so, as our rather fragile bond was sealed by the pregnancy, all feelings of doubt had to be ignored.
Pushed back into the deep, replaced by a strict framework for our relationship as well as for our individual personalities.
All things that didn’t fit into the alliance simply had to be cut away.
Like some emotional bonzai practise.
This also required us to exclude any thoughts that threatened the characters we had agreed to stay true to.
Strange new thoughts might have developed new sides of ourselves, sides that would eventually make us strangers to each other.
In reality, that’s probably what this whole strategy ended up making us.
Strangers.
Confined in the same prison cell.
I caught myself thinking these new thoughts, and instantly felt guilty.
I straightened up in the passenger seat, and hoped we would arrive at my doctor’s office without too much traffic delay.
That way I would be able to avoid more of my own thoughts, as well as any unwanted conversation.
Luckily, we soon arrived and parked the car, and I thought of how I would deal with the questions I knew would be coming from my doctor.
For some reason I didn’t want to tell him any details about what had happened over the last week.
It felt as if all my new experiences were of a most private kind.
I quickly made a plan on how to keep him at an arms distance, but at the same time make sure I got a green light to stay home from work, and continue exploring the new world that had opened up to me.
I decided to blame it all on some unexplainable, general feeling of fatigue.
It felt vague enough, but also believable.
He knew that my physical health was quite good for my age, and that I exercised regularly.
He didn’t know about the cigarettes, but I only smoked when I drank alcohol, and that was limited to the occasional bottle of vintage wine.
And anyway, a sporadic intake of nicotine could hardly be blamed for the kind of behaviour I had shown over the last few weeks.
I would focus on feeling powerless, and an unusual craving for sleep.
That would fit in with the sleeping on the floor.
We entered my doctor’s office.
My wife greeted my doctor, who nodded towards me, before she started explaining what was going on, how unlike me it all was, and how it must be down to some temporary infection or something similar.
I listened, then answered the questions that followed from my doctor, all according to my plan.
My wife answered some of them, according to hers.
After the consultation and a quick check-up on my blood-pressure and pulse, my doctor concluded that there didn’t seem to be anything seriously wrong with me, and that I was probably just suffering from general fatigue, and that it could have something to do with the darkness this time of year.
He recommended I should take another week off work, boost my intake of Vitamin D, drink more water, and take one day at a time.
Silently cheering inside, I thanked him, said goodbye and left, after my wife had done the same.
We drove back home without further conversation.
She was already late for work.
After she dropped me off at the house, I went back inside, straight to my desk and opened the computer.
I did some a few more searches on Platonic Solids, and found some interesting reads on the concept of “Sacred Geometry”.
Going through a few articles, I found that the geometry concerned didn’t seem very sacred at all, but more like a rather strange way of describing relations between frequency and form.
Like the metrics of sound and space.
Something anyone with a slight knowledge of accoustics would be able to relate to.
The focus on numbers instantly appealed to me.
Pure Mathematics.
A language I love.
A language without ornamentation.
Stripped of unnecessary imagery and wordplay, which most of the time served to conceal any real meaning, if there ever was any to begin with.
Timeless code.
I found the presence of these kind of ideas in metaphysical texts very peculiar, as I’ve always considered mathematics to be as far from mythology as you can get.
On the totally opposite side of the spectrum of fairy tales.
It was almost as if the tag “sacred” was applied only to repel the attention of any rational mind, who would automatically dismiss all this as nonsense.
Someone like myself.
But reading through these articles, it was surprisingly easy to look beyond the noise, and into the more essential information they contained.
This was something I had never experienced before.
One article linked the five Platonic Solids to atomic structures, challenging most traditional definitions of the building-blocks of physical matter.
A theory called “The Electric Universe” disregarded the forces of gravity altogether in favour of those of electricity and magnetism, suggesting that the entire universe was built on electric charges working along energy grids following structural laws based on simple geometry, and that all physical matter was a consequence of the behaviour of these forces and forms.
I found it all highly interesting, and the electrician in me immediately started comparing these theories to my own understanding of electricity.
After all, there was an apparent link between the structure of crystals and vibration that I could immediately relate to, in that I’d been using crystals in electronic circuits since my early schooldays.
Building simple FM-receivers and other radio equipment.
Crystals are everywhere in electronics, and is used to tune radio channels to different frequencies, and keep digital clocking in most computers.
Everyone who have any basic understanding of electronics knows that.
Most people don’t, though.
I leaned back, and thought about how I’d been so fascinated with electricity from an early age.
The age of wireless.
As I let my mind wander, I suddenly remembered the joys of playing with these forces as a child, and later as a teenager, with my music machines.
Modulating pulses.
Oscillating circuits.
Vibrations locked in form.
I suddenly got a strong urge to re-live these memories, and before I knew it I’d gotten up from my chair and climbed the ladder into the attic.
Behind piles of boxes full of useless stuff, I worked my way into the far corner of the room, and there it was.
My old Korg MS-20 synthesizer.
Full of dust, and with one broken key, but otherwise apparently intact.
Next to it, in another box, I found my Roland TR-606 Drumatix drum machine.
It was still inside its black plastic carrying bag with leather straps on, so you could keep it around your neck while performing.
Beneath it, wrapped in an old towel, was my old 4-track Portastudio.
I grabbed a plastic bag full of cables from the same box, and carried all the gear down to the office.
Setting up was surprisingly easy, considering it had been more than three decades since the last time I did it.
With both the synth and drum machine going through the portastudio, I connected my headphones to it.
Then switched everything on.
And lost myself in sound and play.
I’m not sure how long I’d been sitting there, but it must have been hours when I got up to get a glass of water from the kitchen.
Back in the chair, just as I was about to put my headphones back on, I heard someone entering the house downstairs.
I realised it was my wife locking herself in, which meant that she’d finished work, which in turn meant I’d been sitting at my desk for a full working day.
Hypnotised.
I quickly switched everything off, got up, and went downstairs to meet her.
She asked if I felt better.
I told her yes, and eagerly started talking about my discoveries since she left me this morning.
She listened with half an ear, then suggested I should maybe take things a little easy for a quicker recovery.
After all, we didn’t want this to linger on, and would rather like things to return to normal, no?
I thought maybe no.
12 - DREAMS LESS SWEET
I wake up in the middle of the night.
It’s very quiet, and the house feels empty.
I get out of bed and walk downstairs, as if I know I will find something of importance there.
I walk down the stairs to the main floor, but can’t see that anything unusual.
I walk down the next flight of stairs to the entryway.
It’s dark, and no beaming lights are coming out of the walls.
But there is a new door on the wall.
It looks different this time.
This one is a normal wooden door, with a key stuck in the keyhole.
I hesitate, then turn the key and open it.
It leads to a dark, spacious room that smells of mold and of being shut for a long time.
Somehow it feels familiar, as if I’ve been here before, although I can’t place the memory.
I get a strong feeling that behind this room there are several other rooms.
A bookshelf fills an entire wall, and against the wall I can see boxes full of the kind of stuff that families acquire over time, but don’t know where to dispose of.
At the other end there is a large, wooden desk.
I’m thinking it would be a nice place to work from, instead of sitting in my son’s old bedroom.
All it would take is some detergent and an hour’s work to get it clean and habitable.
I decide to return to bed and decide upon it later.
I lock the door, and put the key in my pyjama pocket.
On my way up the stairs, I feel exited, as if an extraordinary opportunity has presented itself.
13 - THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
A week had passed since we went to see my doctor.
My wife worked days, which meant I was alone in the house for the most part.
I spent my time either obsessively playing with my re-discovered musical toys, or reading myself further down the rabbit-hole of new ideas that I’d stumbled upon online.
The tinkering with the synthesizer had brought me new energy, and the strange events that hurled me into this new direction were almost forgotten when I lost myself to my music machines.
I’d even found a box of blank tapes in the attic, and had began recording onto them with my 4-track.
Not that I knew what to use the recordings for.
It just felt good to make them.
A justification that wouldn’t be of much value to the person I was just a couple of weeks back.
Reading-wise, I was fascinated by the sheer mass of alternative information available online.
My reading habits of recent years had mainly been focused on the same news outlets that I’d always been following, even pre digital.
I usually found time for some sports updates, too, and the odd crime novel, whenever we were on holiday, but to be honest, most of my brain’s capacity was used on work-related technical updates.
Updates of a far more boring kind than the ones I was reading now.
Up until now, I had always believed that I possessed a fairly good overview of my professional field, and that I knew the technical knowledge I needed to know.
But now I felt a nagging, sore feeling because I hadn’t opened up to this alternative world of ideas before.
It was as if my brain had been let out of a cage.
Studying felt exciting again.
As I was watching a video on particle entaglement in relation to magnetic resonance, I once again ended up at the Platonic Solids, and once again found myself pondering whether there was any significance to the shapes that had abducted me from my entryway.
Or if there were any significance to the experiences whatsoever.
The Tetrahedron and Hexahedron were two out of five possible ways you could organise equally shaped geometric forms in three dimensional space.
I still found this astonishing.
Why five?
Why not more?
The mess that is this world has always seemed rather endless to my eyes, where even the most simplistic thing would eventually become unfathomably complex at some point.
Given time.
And human interference.
I did some more searches, and found that the facts about Platonic Solids was a validated piece of knowledge, even in the most traditional scientific circles.
Hard science.
The keepers of the Truth.
According to what I’d been raised to believe.
By following the comments beneath the video, some totally crazy, of course, I found more links to new theories on the relations between frequencies of vibration and the laws of geometry.
One independent researcher suggested that these relations laid at the base of every phenomenon perceivable to us in the entire universe.
A bold statement, as I’d never heard anything near it before, not even in the surreal exercise that is quantum physics theory.
On the website, a chart on the electromagnetic spectrum showed a linear representation of different wavelengths.
From the slow waves of sound, moving up through radio waves, microwaves, light, and finally ending with radiation.
I studied it, and found myself staring at the range between wi-fi and infrared light, as if I instinctively expected to find something of value there.
I didn’t.
So I did a search on frequencies between ten to the power of thirteen and ten to the power of fourteen, and found that these were frequencies in the range of atomic vibrations.
The wavelengths of physical reality.
I closed my eyes, and let my mind drift, and saw a vibrating grid of atomic structures with kaleidoscopic forms that danced around in spacetime.
Then heatwaves entered the same space.
They were of different wavelengths, but close enough to start modulating the atomic frequencies, changing their speed.
It made me smile.
My mind swimming in a sea of waves
I must have been a child last time I let my mind flow like this, making inner pictures that my conscious self didn’t seem to have any control over.
Suddenly it struck me that this was exactly what my synthesizer was all about.
Frequencies modulating other frequencies.
Oscillators having conversations with each other.
I opened my eyes, straightened in my chair, and reached for a bunch of patch-cables for the MS-20.
The Low Frequency Oscillator had to play the part of the microwave, and the two oscillators a simple atomic structure.
Patching the LFO to pitch and filter controls, I began sweeping the knobs subtly to look for sweet spots.
The sounds were droney and slowly varying in pitch, making a kind of sad ensemble.
But it was a perfect audible presentation of what I had just imagined.
I put down a few minutes of my noodling to a track on the Portastudio, then rewound the tape, selected the next track, and repeated the procedure.
I went on until I had filled three tracks, then bounced them down to the fourth and started over again until I ran out of tracks, due to the amount of noise and distortion produced in the process.
Not that it was unpleasant in any way, but there was no more space for detail after a while.
Listening back, the tones appeared as a vast field of interchanging waves, modulating eachother in various ways.
I thought it sounded very nice, considering the limitations of the old equipment.
My only concern was that I would love to add even more tracks with different pitches, but realised that it would be difficult to do something more complex with my dated and dusty hardware.
I decided to look for more contemporary music technology, just to see what was available.
And instantly got swallowed by another online rabbit-hole.
The products and possibilities seemed endless.
It was as if the amount of music-making machinery on offer, hardware and software, surpassed the sum of all the artists I’d ever heard of, or imagined to exist.
I felt dizzy.
But still excited.
Losing myself in browsing around webstores and youtube tutorials, another couple of hours disappeared, and when I finally glanced at the time on the upper right corner of my computer I saw that my wife would be home in not too long, and thought that I should knock it on the head and go prepare some dinner for us.
As I switched the equipment off, I contemplated on what a great day it had been.
I was re-vitalised, and the last thing I wanted was to go back to work.
Or back to any part of my old life, to be honest.
I was simply happy.
For the first time in a long time.
I sat back in my chair, and felt a buzzing feeling, as if being brushed by soft feathers from within.
I closed my eyes to cherish the emotion, then gradually got pulled out of my soothing state by a low, humming sound coming from behind me.
The sound grew louder, and I started to panic as I realised there was no way I could escape.
I shrieked as I turned around and faced the hovering, spinning Octahedron, shining its orange glow onto my paralyzed face.
Within a fraction of a second, the shape swallowed me, and hurled me through space.
This time I tried to scream, as if protesting was of any use.
I no longer accepted being pushed around this way.
But to no avail.
Instead, a calming voice in my mind said: “Relax! You’ll want to see this.”
Upon which I relaxed a little.
The humming was sligtly higher in pitch now, more of a ringing sound than a bass tone.
I found the sound somehow reassuring.
However strange an experience this was, this made me believe that it must still be rooted in reality in one way or another, as I’d never dreamt sounds before.
The movement slowed down, and the sound dropped in frequency again, and eventually stopped.
As the walls of the Octahedron gradually became transparent, I expected to see some new unknown surroundings, but felt slightly betrayed to see that there was nothing but dark, empty space surrounding me.
What happened next, was this:
I am floating in an empty space.
I am naked, but not cold.
Curled up, like a foetus in a mother’s womb.
I can see myself from the outside, but still feel my body from the inside, as if I’m both inside and outside of myself at the same time.
I am filled with the most overwhelming sensation of warmth and comfort.
I feel completely safe floating around in this nothingness, and if I could choose, I would stay here forever.
A sense of being loved fills me to the extent that I almost break up in tears of joy.
Then something happens.
At first, it appears as a small beam of light coming from an enormous distance.
The lightbeam grows as it approaches, and the closer it gets, I can see that it is more than a light.
It looks as if it’s made of glass.
The purest glass I’ve ever laid my eyes on.
As it gets up close, I can see that the light comes out of a crystal-shaped form, but a form unlike anything I’ve seen before.
It’s as if it is wrapped around itself in some ineffable way, both revealing its insides as well as its outsides simultaneously.
I stare at it in awe.
It is the most beautiful thing.
The light shines back at me more intensely, and I get the feeling of being watched by it.
Connected, in a very profound way.
It shines brighter and brighter
And then explodes.
An unbelievably bright beam suddenly rushes out of me and meets the one coming from the crystal.
My soul breaks into a million colours, like white light splitting through a prism.
The swarm of fragmented rainbow particles that was me just a second ago, get shattered across the dark space.
Millions upon millions of “I”’s look bewildered at each other as we all tumble into the abyss.
We try to scream, and a multitude of voices ring across the universe.
The plasticity of reality and my own identity seems total, and everything I thought I knew about my existence is wiped out in an instant.
Then, the expanding movement slows down, and I find myself gradually re-composing to the body I had before entering this place.
Once again, I am confined inside the orange shape that brought me here.
Shocked at the core.
It starts moving again.
An unknown period of time passes by, and I finally return to my house.
I find myself lying on the floor beside the chair I’d been sitting in.
Shaking.
In the doorway, my wife stands, staring at me with an expression mid-way between empathic concern and anger.
And I have totally forgotten who I am.
19 - NEW AWAKENINGS
I woke up in a hospital bed.
The room was bright and clean, and the winter sun was shining through the window.
My body was numb and completely exhausted, but my mind was totally at ease, as if I finally had let go of a heavy burden.
At first, I just lay as still as I could in order to adjust to the situation.
It felt as if I had been away for days.
Even weeks.
Then it struck me that I didn’t have a clue of how I got here, and felt a slight panic rise in my chest.
I took a few deep breaths, and managed to calm myself down.
Slowly, it all dawned on me, and I recalled fragments of what had happened.
The explosion of light.
The ringing sound.
The sorrow of being back.
As myself.
Then I discovered that there was someone else present in the room.
My heart skipped a beat, as if I’d been caught thinking forbidden thoughts.
As I, in a sense, had.
It was my eldest son.
He was sitting in a chair in a dark corner at the foot of my bed.
“Hi dad”, he said, leaning forward with an empathic expression on his face.
“Hi”, I replied, slightly embarrassed.
Not that I felt any need to maintain some kind of senior authority, or keep up any mask when facing my son.
In our relationship he has always been the strong part.
I relaxed at the revelation of seeing him.
“What on earth happened to you?”, he asked.
Concerned but caring.
“I’m not really sure”, I answered, or rather put out as a second question for any of us to deal with.
“I got quite worried when mom called.”
Something I understood perfectly, as he would have had to take time off his job and leave the family down south in order to sit in this room with me.
And anyway, his mom never called unless there was something quite serious going on.
After a quick exchange of details on the sequence of events, none of which revealed my strange visions but rather kept focus on the narrative of fatigue and a general lack of motivation, we agreed that it was best for all concerned that I’d try to take better care of myself.
In order to turn things around a little.
Fresh air.
Healthy food.
Time to reflect.
Maybe take a longer break from work.
Those sort of things.
He told me that his mother had filled him in on the details concerning my behaviour over the last few weeks.
As observed from the outside.
Through a very different lens.
We are, after all, close, but not connected, me and his mother.
As my son, it’s a different story.
I’ve always felt that he can see right through me.
All my attempts at fatherly role-playing have failed, ever since he was little.
We were equals at best.
In my brightest moments.
“Of course I know that there’s far more to it than what I’ve been told”, he said, smiling.
I nodded, and we decided to talk more when we had time to dive properly into the matter.
For now, he suggested I should focus on getting my strength back.
Good advice, as always.
He bid his goodbyes, and told me he would stay in town as long as it took, and that he would be back at the hospital during the next visiting hours.
As he walked out the door, I felt a wave of warm feelings swell up in my chest.
Then I cried a little, before falling asleep again.
20 - MOVING ON
A week had passed since I woke up in the hospital.
I’d been discharged after a couple of days, and had gone home to continue my rehabilitation there.
My son had moved into his old room to stay with us for a bit, among the mess of synths and cables that I’d set up in there.
He insisted it wouldn’t be a problem as long as he could get in and out of bed without tripping over and destroying anything.
I was thankful that I didn’t have to see the machines go back into storage.
Upon which I realised it meant quite a lot to me that I’d finally rediscovered the passion of my younger days.
Adolescent days, before real life hit me and rendered such useless activities something of the past.
But a past, it turned out, that had eventually caught up with me and hit me in the face.
At great velocity.
My wife spent most days working, and seemed happy that reinforcements had come in to help us solve my problems.
Problems that she, one morning during breakfast, swiftly determined were surely of a most temporary nature, and what a relief it would be when this had all blown over and everything would return to normal.
This triggered a sore sense of panic rising in my stomach.
I didn’t want the old normal back.
After she’d left, my son suggested we go for a walk up the old path behind the house.
The one beneath the cable-car wires that led to the top of the mountain.
Actually the very place I’m sitting on the grass right now, years later, drinking tea from a thermo cup, telling you my story.
As we walked, we chatted about little things.
Memories shared.
Fun stories.
He asked me about the synths and gear that I’d set up in his old room, puzzled by the fact that I’d kept it from being smashed by the hands of eager children decades ago, or dumped at a charity shop during one of the major clean-ups of the attic.
I told him I didn’t have a clear answer, but that it was as if the gear had somehow stayed invisible over the years.
As if it knew it had a purpose.
My son has always been fond of music, and ever since he showed an early interest I’d made sure that he always had a good hi-fi system to play his CD’s on when he was little.
It felt as the least I could do as an electrician dad.
Who also used to be into music.
And anyway, picking up defect amplifiers and fixing them with free components I nicked from work cost me next to nothing in terms of effort.
Except love.
Which in the case of my kids was abundant.
I told him about the sudden urge I felt had to delve into the old machines, how I’d discovered all these new theories online about sound and frequency, and how, for the first time in a long time, I felt naturally energised by enthusing over something.
We took a break to catch our breath in the hillside, where the path is pretty steep.
As we shared a few sips of water, I glanced over his shoulder, and saw that we had stopped right next to the old cabin that lies inside the woods next to the path.
It had always struck me as a mysterious place.
The place was too close to civilisation to function as a sanctuary of solitude, but still far enough from town to be disconnected to other people.
I found it fascinating, and somehow attractive.
Of course I didn’t know at that point in time that it would later become a place of greater importance in my life.
But that was a further couple of months down the lane.
We walked on, and talked on.
He updated me on his family affairs.
He had two kids, whose mother was the most wonderful companion to him.
It had always struck me that the happiness he’d found in his relationship posed such a stark contrast to my own, but that it almost felt as if it was all down to coincidence.
I’d always felt happy for him because of this, and really enjoyed the times I flew down to visit them for a few days on my own - usually when I had something to do with work down in the capitol.
Funnily enough, we talked so freely about things that it didn’t even strike me that I should share the strange experiences I’d had.
Instead, we talked about the new interests they had triggered in me.
After letting me download a near endless string of theories I’d been reading about, he replied to every one of them with eager interest and positively critical questions.
Not once did he make me feel ridiculous or small, or dismiss my newfound enthusiasm.
I felt so thankful, and realised that there was anything I needed in my life at this moment, it was this kind of treatment.
As we got close to the summit, I stopped and turned around to watch the view.
My town looked peaceful and still, and the only activities I could spot was the odd ship gliding slowly through the sound down below.
I felt so at ease that I decided to try and make this walk a daily routine from now on.
A decision I’ve followed up on almost one hundred percent.
Almost.
We walked the last stretch in silence, and then sat down on the reindeer skin pads we’d brought with us as we reached the plateau at the top.
The ground was still covered in patches of snow, even if the days were brighter and the sun had returned from being absent through the winter months.
I picked up my thermos from my rucksack, and then we drank hot coffee in silence while admiring the view.
I could breathe between sips.
Back at the house that evening, after having dinner together all three of us, my wife left for bed early, exhausted from work.
Me and my son had opened a bottle of red wine for the meal, and after finishing it, went to get another one after cleaning the dishes off the table.
We moved into his old room, as that’s where my computer was, and as he wanted to show me something on it.
Some new music, he said.
Up to this point I’d been listening to music half consciously for a long time.
My Spotify account revealed a lot of post punk and electronic golden oldies having been played on repeat, without too many new additions. Except for the work of algorithms.
Eighties synth pop.
Alternative rock from when rock was alternative.
A middle-aged man’s playlist, I thought, somehow half-ashamed.
My son told me that even though he spent a lot of his time on numerous websites posting and writing about new music, he still couldn’t find everything they introduced through the more mainstream music services.
He showed me the more alternative platforms he followed like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and helped me set up my own accounts, hoping it would open up for discovering some new and interesting music.
Also, he explained, a model like Bandcamp’s made sure that the artists actually received the majority of the money I paid to listen to their work, in stark contrast to platforms like Spotify and Youtube, where only the biggest names were paid proper shares due to a lack of “pay per play” functionality.
It amazed me that thus was the case, as nothing would be easier than to implement such functionality with today’s technologies.
He pointed me to some “electronic experimental” and “ambient” artists that he reckoned I’d find interesting in connection to the stuff we’d been talking about during our walk earlier.
It turned out that there were quite a few artists experimenting with alternative tunings and frequencies based on the ideas I’d been reading about.
Not that I’d heard about any of them before.
Obscure artists with otherworldly names.
We added a few of them to my “following” list.
Then we sat listening to music and drinking wine until we got so tired that we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.
As I stumbled into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, it was as if I was swimming on a bed of soft cotton clouds.
Then I drifted away.
That night I dreamt that I was back up on the mountain.
I had brought a pair of binoculars with me.
I sat on the grass, on the same spot that I’d sat on earlier in the day, in the woken world.
But this time it was dark outside, all the snow was gone, and the ground was covered with bright purple grass.
I put the binoculars to my eyes, and did a swipe across the city.
Then I spotted our house down below, and immediately saw that there was light in the part of it that didn’t exist.
The mirror part.
Where the other me resided.
This time I didn’t find the experience odd at all, but was rather curious to see how things were going with the man beyond the dream wall.
He was moving around.
Doing stuff.
My life was changing, but for the first time in ages, it felt for the better.
28 - GETTING BACK TO WORK
After a few days of recovery, my son was of the opinion that I was well enough to take care of myself again, and decided it was time for him to go back south and catch up with work and family.
I agreed, as I felt a lot better.
Better than in a long time, actually.
Even though I was still on sick leave from my job.
Possibly one of the reasons I felt as I did.
The first few days after he left, I enjoyed having the house for myself again.
Most hours were spent in his old room, the office that turned more and more into a music studio as the days passed.
I had walked across the bridge into town several days in row in the last week, to browse the gear in music store in the city centre.
This had resulted in the purchase of a small 8-channel analog mixing desk, a few stomp-boxes made for use with guitar, but also very useful with an MS-20.
I spent the evenings recording layer upon layer on my porta-studio, running each layer through a series of effects, changing the sequence and parameters of the pedals every time.
This meant that I could create quite full-sounding walls of sound with very simple means.
A monophonic synthesizer through flanger, saturation and digital delays suddenly turned into a wide-sounding texture when multiplied tenfold like this.
I’d also started browsing the web for more tools.
Or toys, as my wife would call them.
There had been a revolution in the field of modular synthesizer systems over the last few years.
From the early pioneering work of a German called Dieter Doepfer, who was of the opinion that the large modular systems that were more or less abandoned as the seventies became the eighties, was the best solution for flexible electronic sound creation.
From a handful of manufacturers on the early scene of Modular 2.0, there seemed to have been an explosion of creators both making and buying these new products, and I was almost getting totally lost in the multitude of generator modules, modulators, effects and utilities on offer.
Also, the way one would create patches using small mini-jack cables between modules appealed a lot to my wireman-DNA, giving me flashbacks of childhood days spent connecting stuff together.
A far cry from the software modelling processes that had taken over most of my daily duties at work over the years.
Chores.
I found a Czech company named Bastl Instruments especially interesting.
Their company structure was more of an artist collective than a tech manufacturer, which I found attractive, and whereas most modules from other producers came in metal or black-painted faceplates, Bastl’s modules came with wooden front-panels.
This made their systems look perfect for keeping on your lap while playing when sitting on a rock in the woods, powered by solar power, or on a mountain-top with a power bank in your rucksack.
Maybe it was just a silly, romantic thought, but it was nevertheless something that made me desire one of these machines.
But their cheapest system, “Rumburak”, cost more than I could defend using out of the strictly scheduled family budget.
Not that we didn’t have enough savings in the bank, it was more a question of being in control of one’s spending, preventing impulses or changes of habits from appearing.
I twisted my head to try and find a way around the rigid financial structure of my private life.
Maybe I could sell something?
Not that I owned that many personal items of value.
I had my computer, but obviously needed that.
Some of my outdoor equipment might be re-sellable, but then I’d taken to spend so much time in the woods and on the mountains again that it wouldn’t make sense to get rid of stuff I was using more and more.
But then there was the car.
We had bought the extra car years ago so that my wife could be sure that I didn’t run off with hers.
A car that started out as “ours”.
As if I would disappear in some kind of whim suddenly.
The second car was an old Toyota that we bought cheap from an old man down the road who was getting too old to drive.
He was very sad to get rid of it.
It must have been very important to him to be able to get around on his own.
But to be honest it had just been parked down in the driveway all these years.
I’d rather walk.
The idea seemed to get better and better the more I though about it, and before I knew it, I had put it up for sale.
29 - CHANGES
The Toyota was sold within days.
I immediately ordered the modular system, and felt super excited, checking the shipment tracking app several times a day.
Feeling excited was in itself an exciting experience.
A self-amplifying emotion.
At first my wife didn’t notice that the car was missing, something I found strange.
She usually had an overview of everything that was inside and around the house.
To be honest, she had been acting a bit unusual, a little beside herself, ever since I returned from hospital.
Absent-minded.
Lost in deep thoughts.
Not normal.
I went for daily walks up the mountainside as I waited for the machine to arrive, and without understanding why, I stopped by the cabin in the hillside every time.
There was some kind of strange attraction to the place.
As if it was important to me.
One of the times I stopped outside, I met an old man, about to leave when I arrived.
It turned out he was the owner of the place.
He told me that he would no longer make any use of it, as he was about to move to Spain.
“To live the easy life.”
As if life ever was easy.
I couldn’t put my finger on why, but this information also felt exciting.
An opportunity of sorts.
I just didn’t understand it fully at that point.
Later in the week, the modular arrived.
Like a kid, I half ran down to the post office and picked it up.
I didn’t even care about the extra cost I had to fork out for customs and VAT.
Back in the house, I unboxed it and placed it atop my desk next to the other music gear.
It was a thing of beauty.
At first I just sat there and admired its wooden varnish and inviting patch-points, and didn’t even think about wiring it up, but initially I connected the power to the wall socket and the lines out to the mixer.
Then I picked up some patch cables and started connecting modules to see and hear what it could do.
The next thing I knew, it was the middle of the night, and hours had passed without me even getting up to go to the toilet.
When I finally did, it was like coming out of a trance.
I passed by the kitchen and grabbed some food, and then spent another couple of hours patching and getting lost in the sound, before falling asleep by the desk.
I came to the next day as my wife entered the room.
She looked sad.
A kind of sadness I hadn’t seen in her in decades.
Almost vulnerable.
She didn’t say anything, but just walked in and sat down on the sofa bed next to the desk.
Then she looked at me for a long time, and finally said:
“This is not who we are anymore.”
The words came out in a contained but near desperate manner, as if she was about to crack open and show me a side of herself that I don’t think I’d ever seen in her before.
But then she fell silent again.
After a moment of sitting together in tranquility, sharing a peace we hadn’t been able to share in each other’s presence in memorable times, she got up, and left the room.
I heard the door shut behind her as she left, and then the house was silent.
And I could breathe again.
30 - RELEASED
I spent the next day alone in the house, getting lost in the modular system.
Exploring possibilities.
Returning from my morning walk the following day, I found a note on the kitchen table.
It was from her.
It contained a list of suggestions on how to solve practical issues ahead, and was written in a far less stern tone than I was used to.
To the extent that a list can contain any emotional communication.
There was no need to explain any further.
We both understood.
She suggested we’d sell the house and find separate, and less expensive housing for both of us, which made me feel grateful.
I though about it, and knew how much the house still meant to the kids when they were visiting, and how much it meant to her, and I immediately decided that I would rather suggest that I moved out and left it all to the rest of the family.
Under the circumstances, it seemed the most fair.
After all, I was the one that had gone weird.
And to be honest, I didn’t have many belongings that I was personally attached to.
Well, apart from the new modular system and the other music gear, plus a few books and some outdoor equipment.
I decided to write a note back with some counter-suggestions, in the same warm tone that it suddenly felt so easy to use between us.
I proposed that we should immediately hand out most of our savings to the kids, as it was now they needed the money, and not when we were gone, and they probably had struggled their way into the kind of middle-age wealth that most people in this country seemed to eventually reach.
Most people, but far from all.
I suggested we split whatever was left after the handout 50/50.
That way I could buy more music equipment, and keep myself alive for a while.
After writing the note to my wife, I sat down by the computer and sent off an email to my employer, asking to be released from my position.
With immediate effect.
There was no way I was going back.
Even to clean my desk.
As the whooshing sound of the email disappeared into the digital void, I felt an indescribable joy.
The joy of freedom.
Afterwards, I went straight to the task of looking through all my belongings.
I picked out everything I instantly felt that I would need, and put it in a pile on the floor.
Then I made a second pile of stuff I wasn’t sure about, and finally threw the rest into binbags and carried them out to the garage for later riddance.
It was as if my body lost weight in the process.
Not because it was hard work.
When I finished, I made a sandwich and returned to the synths.
I recorded a couple of tracks that sounded like nothing I’d done before, and kept listening back over and over.
This was good.
Almost as if someone else had made it.
And I had bought it to listen to.
For the first time I though my music worthy of sharing.
But how to do that?
Back when my son was here, I’d ordered a subscription of The Wire magazine on his recommendation.
They covered artists and composers I had never heard of before, and probably would never hear of if I didn’t read about it there.
I liked the magazine a lot.
It reminded me of my teens, when I used to buy the New Musical Express, back when it was a weekly newspaper-style magazine, and covered all the new and interesting bands.
The local newsagent only kept two copies in stock each week, so me and one of my friends used to race about who could secure a copy every Tuesday.
I usually won.
But that was long ago, and up until a few weeks back I hadn’t even remembered that music had played such a big and passionate part in my life before.
Strange how big changes can affect not only the present, but also the past in some way.
The ad section in The Wire contained some ads from obscure labels promoting their releases, and I did some quick searches to see if it was possible to get in touch with any of these in order to send a demo of some of my tracks.
But I quickly got the feeling that I was too far outside the network they represented.
Here was a 50 year old electrician, with no earlier track record of even attempting to be a musician, all of a sudden sending demos to people firmly rooted in the alternative art world.
It made me feel as if I tried to chat up a 25 year old girl at a party.
Beyond embarrassing.
No, I would definitely have to find another way.
And then I though about Bandcamp.
Up until now, I had only bought other people’s music through the platform, and it hadn’t struck me that I didn’t need any invitation or permit from anyone in order to set up my own artist page.
So that’s what I did.
Then I recorded the tracks that I thought sounded most representable from the porta-studio into the computer, so that they could be uploaded to my new page.
As I hadn’t named any of them I just recorded them all in one go as a long file, with no pauses between tracks.
The next obstacle was when I was asked to name the artist in question.
Using my own name felt too nerve-wrecking.
So I thought about it for a second, without coming up with any good ideas.
As I was about to give up, I looked at the newly digitised music on the editor program on the screen.
A blue waveform, slowly moving up and down, with short spikes drawn out wherever there was any short sounds present in the recordings.
There weren’t that many, to be honest.
“Waveform!”, I thought, and possibly also said out loud, to the empty house.
But then as I tried to save it as my user name, I got a warning that there were about ten other Waveforms on Bandcamp.
I got a sinking sensation in my stomach.
This was my waveform, regardless of how many others had come up with the same name.
I glanced at the patch-cables on the desk, and saw that one of the longer ones had accidentally landed in the shape of a double, horisontal loop.
The infinity symbol.
Borderless.
Eternal.
I loved it.
So I typed in “Wave”, followed by the symbol, followed by “Form”, and saved it, to no protest.
And I felt great.
Then I uploaded the continuous mix of tracks, with an old picture I’d taken at a work seminar trip to Svalbard years ago as artwork.
The photo was of an old abandoned crane in the harbour, once used to load coal from the mines onto ships.
It looked gloomy, but I liked it a lot.
When the screen read “published”, I got up from the chair, stretched both arms up in the air, and shouted “Yes!” at the top of my voice.
No-one answered, but it was fine.
TO BE CONTINUED