Sometimes when driving, or riding the bus, or walking around in some park, I will try to get an image in my head of what the land around me would have looked like 400 years ago. The same hills, the same landscape, but in my mind I'll cover it in nothing and wonder what it was like to be the first man to chance upon it. This is always useless to me. There is so much wonder in this world, but I always have trouble getting past our influence, our disasters and clumsy systems. And even in those places where there is some real beauty, like down at Golden Gardens, or on the Olympic Peninsula, or my grandparents' cabin in Wenatchee when it's deep in snowdrifts, all I have to do is take one look at the skyline in the distance, or the cement path I'm walking on, or the white car parked in the gravel driveway to take me out of the tenuous illusion and put me back in reality.
We are constantly tethered to some safety line. There is always a lantern, or a map, or a screen, or a cell phone. These things guarantee that whatever experience we're having is just an attempt at connecting to something foreign and old, that it's not real, no matter how real it looks. We've sketched out a new world over the old, and they are in two separate universes. The old is lost despite the remnants of it we see everyday. If properly prepared, one could live entire decades indoors, in a world of their own creation.
Sometimes I'll stay indoors for days at a time, talking to no one and doing nothing of value. Once I do go outside after a long stretch like that, it still feels fake, like some slide in front of my eyes. At a certain point, I'll have to tell myself, "This is actually real and I am actually here. That dog or building or mountain range in the distance is a real thing inhabiting the same space that I am." I think that must be a very modern sensation, that of having to convince onesself of reality. What a weird feeling.
A very smart and gifted friend of mine told me once that music is a kind of replacement for the natural world. That, before civilization or whatever, the world must have seemed a place of such immense wonder and confusion, so terrifying in a way, unthinkably massive and majestic. And that that feeling of mystery and amazement, is somehow hardwired into us. Once the world became commonplace, mapped, and conquered, that mystery left our common mind and we needed something to replace it with and then along came music. I think she's right, music is magic to me, transportative and full of wonder in a way that I have trouble getting from the natural world. All the human things that make the natural world so hard to connect with just aren't there with music.
I don't really know what I"m trying to say with this. It's not good to romanticize a time of great hardship, hardship I've never known and am not conditioned to understand. I'm also not interested in a "back to nature" thing. As nature as it was is gone for the time being and it would take a very big leap of faith and common sense to ignore that. But, music to me is just as awe-bringing as the world maybe once [was], and I just love it a lot.
Thomas Jefferson
January 2008
New York City New York- inside jacket, Fleet Foxes Sun Giant EP
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