Review of The Organist - Just what I need

Just what I need

☆

“I’m what people call a night owl. When everyone is deep asleep, I am most awake. After midnight, everything feels more clarified and rich, more conducive to digestion. I write at night. I read at night. I watch movies and the occasional TV show. Around 1 or 2, I enjoy a cigarette on my balcony while listening to something melancholy like The Cure, or Depeche Mode, or—if I’m feeling particularly sentimental—The Beach Boys. I usually don’t crawl into bed until 4 or 5. I’m in Vermont at the moment, at an artist residency, with woods and mountains surrounding me, brooks and creeks and probably caves somewhere, and for two weeks now, I’ve been taking walks at night by the water or under trees and listening to The Organist. Cigarettes in my pocket, unlit flashlight at the ready, both earbuds in. A few nights ago, The Organist was playing when I tripped over a rock and fell to the ground, right along the bank of a nearby stream. My earbuds popped out and I found myself suddenly and entirely alone, cut off from those tranquil voices and whatever weirdness of the world they were elucidating. I sat there on the ground for some moments, taking in the moonlit tops of the trees along the opposite bank, the murmuring water between us. Another sound reached me then, from somewhere nearby. Like someone humming to themselves. It could have easily been another resident doing the same thing I was. I stood up and lit a cigarette and put my earbuds back in. The familiar voices returned, but I was no longer listening. On the other side of the stream, facing me in the darkness of the trees, I saw what looked like the glow of a cigarette, a red eye suspended in that blackness continuously appearing, then vanishing. This is too symmetrical, I thought, too symbolic, standing here in the night across the waters from some other version of myself. It made me think of Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and now I imagined this version of myself smoking naked there amid the trees, perhaps after a midnight skinny-dip in the stream. I thought of ticks and chiggers, poison ivy, sharp rocks cutting wet bare feet. I flicked on my flashlight and shined it across the way. Nothing but swaying tree branches. I turned it off, waited. A minute later, the red eye returned, an eternal ember in the night. The breeze swept goosebumps across my arms and legs, but I don’t remember feeling afraid. It was something more like annoyance, that something was interrupting my aloneness, even if that something was some shade of myself. I turned up the volume on my phone until I could no longer hear the stream or my own thoughts, and flicked my cigarette into the water. On the walk back to my room, The Organist filled my ears and I thought of nothing else. It wasn’t until I was lying in bed that I realized my knee had been badly scraped, that blood had trickled down my leg in two thin streams and had dried like paint. I didn’t clean it off. I just closed my eyes and continued listening to The Organist. The scrape on my knee bloomed into a soothing kind of pain, and as I trailed off to sleep, I remember feeling more alive than I had felt in some time.”

vutopia via Apple Podcasts · United States of America · 06/28/17

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