everything that stands - prose
Everything That Stands-
He had such an expressive face, but I got the impression that it was never that which he was really feeling that he allowed to show on his face. Rather, the mask he chose to present to the world was one of soft-faced curiosity and opaque wonder. The only time you really got a glimpse of what was hiding, lurking, damaging, at the very focal point of his being was when he was on stage. Performing. It was what he did and he was the best at what he did, or the worst, or maybe he was so everything he defied definition. He poured so much of himself into his song that it was impossible for him to keep up his façade of normalcy. When he decided he would be a musician, creating music in its purest form, you caught a glimpse of the frightening intensity beneath. You saw that beneath the leather pants and the swagger and the boots, he was a preternatural creature. Like an angel and a devil both, like an 18th century man and an immortal, like a vampire, bleeding you dry until all there was left was this broken, bleeding, pulsing existential mass of nothingness and everything all at once, until you felt you would die from the sheer otherworldly numbness that would suck you in and hold you under. I tell you, if you gave yourself up to his art, his music entirely, there would be nothing left of you by the end of it. If you were lucky, you would merely come back a different person. If you weren’t, you didn’t come back at all. It was like the ‘60’s that way. It was an experience.
The stage belonged to driving guitar, starry-eyed lyrics and sparkling ivory delusions. He inhabited the stage like it was his living room. He swayed or danced or screamed or just stood there - and when he was just standing there, somehow, he was just as striking as when he was contorting his body around the microphone and dancing to thrill his audience.
The music, though, what happened when he started singing? It was a rare breed of thing, art at its highest pedigree. No matter how he sounded, though, it was at the very least misleading, at the very most a blatant lie. What he was saying, it wasn’t really for anybody but himself, no matter how many other people could find some solace or emotion or anger in the words he crafted into melodies so flawlessly, no matter how many of millions of people he performed for in a week or a month, no matter how many people’s souls he stole and was forced to return. Morals were relative with that man.
He could convince you of anything if only you just looked at him too closely for one moment. He could turn his eyes on you and pass judgment on you and convince you to give your life up to him that way. He looked at you, it was sensual. His eyes were half-lidded drops of greenblue emotion. It got frightening, sometimes, when he was feeling angry or depressed or just abstract. In those moments, you didn’t get lost in his eyes. You got pillaged and stripped raw in them.
Society frustrated him. He understood many things, but not how to restrain himself. In anything he did, he reinvented it and revitalized it and made it his own without even trying, so then, he failed to see how normal people worked at their jobs, walked down the street, sang or danced or existed by anyone else’s rules. He maybe even abhorred society for this: After all, to a man such as this, what could be more unnatural than living and thinking by standards that were set unconsciously by groups of people and followed by other groups of the same people?
I remember all this about him, vividly, but I remember one other thing and perhaps it was the climax of the most crucial act in the Greek tragedy that was his life, I knew this even if I didn’t understand it at all during those days of lust and redemption: Up close, under the smoky no-light of the bar, I remember that his eyes looked as if they belonged to a man who had been too long searching the Dark for answers and secrets that no man ever had pass to know, and that maybe he had found them.
Beautiful. Magnificent. World without end, amen.
~
I originally wrote this with Jim Morrison of The Doors in mind, although the final interpretation is yours.