paljas

Sitting down,awaiting the band, I started feeling a bit weird. I looked around me and everyone was staring at a stage full of lights and electronic equipment. We were expectantly sitting and collectively focussed on this stage with no one on it. We come and stare at stage for the longest time, trusting that we’ll be entertained. I found this strange.  Strange to be part of this gathering. I wondered to myself what this experience was giving me and why I was doing it. What are the moments before a show, whether it be theatre, music or anything else? It’s anticipation, yes, but that energy and naive belief of entertainment…

Anyway, the opening band started playing so I got up and started jiving to the music. I felt very aware of people around me. Couples holding hands with awkward fingers, someone else’s legs rubbing up against my thighs, each and everyone’s boots, short skirts and bangles. All of us had arrived in relationship to whoever we were there with but also to each other for we all shared the love of this particular band and we were all there to cement it. 

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros eventually came on at about 8pm. And I was immediately pulled out of the world and into the music by their lead vocalist, Alex Ebert. It became theatre. There was a unique interaction with the audience, including the audience with everything being done on stage, then turning away from the audience and interacting with the band alone. Alex Ebert would move around making circles on the stage and in his natural body conveyed a sense of openness and universality. He had the stage presence of a guru. And there was something in his eyes. He had experience and newness in those bright eyes.The band was its own character, singing heartily in the appropriate places interacting like a big family with Alex Ebert leading their humour and sense of fun onstage. 

I felt it was a spiritual occasion. I was moved by the music, but the performance and the human connection I felt to the performers was something I haven’t felt at a music performance yet. I was part of the performance,not only in the union of performer and spectator, but I felt Iwas a performer- meaning that the whole concert including security guards was a performance. A few hours of a collective energy. I felt the bands sense of self permeating through the crowd and because of its sincerity, it was so much more accessible and it echoed within me. I was struck with the immediate need to be better than I was at performing. To be myself and to keep becoming better at being me everyday.

Rereading “The Catcher in the Rye”by J.D Salinger is like calling up an old friend from High School and catching up. You have this long one-sided conversation with Holden Caulfield and at the end of it he sort of tells you he misses you, ” Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

I was fifteen and at a private boarding school when I read the book for the first time in an English class. Some people couldn’t finish the book, some hated Holden, some thought it was sort of okay and I just loved it. The stream of consciousness style of writing was new to me, but I read the book like a windmill turning. The fact that Holden and I were both at these rich private schools made me feel a kinship towards him. But unlike Holden I didn’t believe anyone around me was a “phony” at the time. I had friends and I was happy. I got along fine with adults and nobody I knew had died.

My feelings towards Holden grew when I read it the second time when I was nineteen. I had finished High school and I had moved to a foreign country with my family and I didn’t like it. I understood his deep hatred of things. I started university and I had friends, but somewhere inside of me I could feel loneliness. The loneliness of someone with secluded thoughts and someone who seemed to miss a lot of things. I learnt what a “phony” was the hard way. I felt like I was a phony and I wanted to change. I was confused. But I read the book with happiness, because I was talking to my old friend Holden. Holden was right there with me and he could not leave. But somewhere along the way, I realized, that I had gone over the edge off the cliff like in the book and my innocence could not be taken back. I had to come to reality, there was no catcher in the rye for me.

I read it now and I feel like I can walk along the streets of New York with Holden, having felt the way he has and having a similar story. I have learnt and felt the word ” depressed” he uses so frequently. I have learnt that it is not synonymous with “sad”, it is darkness with no hope of light and it is a feeling that is like the bottom of a black pot in the middle of your soul and you don’t know how to crawl out of it. I can look back and talk about the “phonies”, about the teachers that cared for me, about the time I wanted to run away and about my “friends”… 

I cannot, however, talk about death. Here Holden has his own struggle and I wish I could climb into the book and make it better for him. He has an obsession with his dead brother  Allie’ baseball mitt, he talks to him on the street and when asked what’s the one thing he liked, it’s Allie. He’s also always pretending he’s just been shot and he has to hold on to his guts to stay alive. Holden can’t even talk about it, but it is clear that his brother’s death bothers him.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is about Holden Caulfield and the retelling of his struggle with the loss of innocence.  When he finds the words “fuck you” written on a wall at his kid sister’s school he is disturbed and rubs it off. He says that he wants to be a catcher in the rye so that little kids don’t go off the edge of the cliff whilst playing in a field of rye. I too want to be a catcher in the rye because when you realize you’re off the cliff, falling can be the hardest thing you’ll ever do. 

Needless to say, it was a much needed phone-call with an old friend.