A Requiem of Running Water

A man is whatever room he is in. In an airport, I am a traveler. In the classroom, I am a student. At home, I am a resident. In the dark, I am Jude Held. 

At 9:15 on Tuesday nights, I walk home alone. Outside, the night is mysterious, yet tame. My solitude is interrupted by light, showing its disfigured face through the windows of buildings. I bury my face deep below the sight of God. A framework of manufactured illumination smothers me with each step. 

At 9:18, a solemn blanket of darkness covers my room. Normally, I turn on a light or two, maybe try to provide some semblance of orientation. But today, on Tuesday at 9:18, I keep them off. I remove my clothes and simply lay them on my bed; that matter can be attended to later in the evening. Naked and vulnerable, I enter the bathroom with no more than my speaker and phone in hand.

Something inside calls me to this space. A calling so intense that it can only emanate from a single source: memory. As a child, my Dad would often leave me at home alone in the evening. When I was especially young, he would embark on a brief journey to the closest grocery store to purchase the night’s dinner. However, as I grew older, the absences extended to hours at a time. In these moments, as the night drew on and the moon cast an inquisitive eye towards the window, I chose to bask in the darkness. 

For many, darkness is synonymous with innate human fears: blindness, the unknown, or the monster that hides under the bed. For a select few, though, it provides an environment of pure liberation. The opportunity to free the mind of distraction, capitalizing on limitations in sight and channeling brain power towards an enhancement of the remaining senses. Music resonates deeper. Smells become more pungent. At surface level, this relationship with darkness can be conducive to productivity and relaxation, a heightened ability to think critically and interact with the world. If it is utilized with purpose, however, the process by which creativity culminates can be advanced to otherwise unattainable levels.

The experience is as much an act of physical elimination as it is spiritual removal. Setting the scene, per se. Before visual stimuli are reduced, the sonic environment must be accounted for. I place my speaker tactically on the outer lip of the sink. Sound waves are given space to reflect off the tight linoleum walls, transforming the bathroom into a tunnel of vibration and intensity. At 9:22, the lights are off, the water is running, and I enter the shower.

Movement 1:

For this specific occasion, I have decided on The Velvet Underground and Nico to accompany me through my vision: heavy, dynamic, and abstract. Once I close the curtain, I could be anywhere, but I am nowhere. An ethereal canvas coated in black paint. My only context is the rain that smashes against my neck and escapes down my back. But for the first two songs, this is simply a shower in the dark. Normal shower proceedings are carried out: lathering and rinsing. Ten minutes go by before the first sights appear. At this point, I have been standing aimlessly for an extended period of time, exploring a chasm of thoughts I now have the opportunity to work through. In a moment, “European Son” begins. John Cale plucks the bass: dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum. As I stand with eyes wide open, the first workings of a blue tsunami roll in. It begins from the edges of the dark expanse, rushing methodically inward before disappearing and repeating. The only worthwhile comparison I can fathom is the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which David floats through an abstract expanse of rushing color. He is stretched and contorted. At this moment, I, too, am stretched and contorted. I am moving, somewhere unfamiliar, but water continues running down my back. With each distorted screech of the guitar, the light grows more frantic. The thoughts that once plagued my mind have disappeared, as I gaze in wonder at what lies before me.

Movement 2:

In an instant, I am in a dark apartment. It is not my dorm room, but another that I have not seen before. I hear “European Son” descend into chaos, I still feel the water running down my back, but my eyes and mind are in this place. Movement is not possible, but I am able to look around. My eyes pan across the room, beginning right and working slowly left. A living room. I can barely make out the outline of a couch, a table, and a television. A small dining table with four chairs. Just left of this table, in the middle of a fairly distant door frame, are a pair of eyes. Stark in their whiteness, with black pits that extend. I am frozen in this night; water runs down my back. In an instant, I am on the couch. The program on the TV is neither interesting nor relevant to me, but I watch it anyway. Still, there remains a deep curiosity within. I turn my head left towards a pair of French doors. With the aid of the faint light of the television, I can see the eyes through the shallow glass panes, framed in two individual squares like a Klee or Picasso. “European Son” lacks structure. As the distortion whirs, I am locked in a contest with a pair of eyes.

Movement 3:

I am returning now. “Venus in Furs” is playing. I don’t feel so distant. I can make out the ripples of the shower curtain before me, smooth yet negative. Slowly, the ripples of the curtain morph into a flowing wave of light. No color, just white. A requiem of uninhibited emotion. As I look around at the lack of landscape before me, individual eyes begin to appear in all directions. One is green, staring at me from the outer bank of my visual periphery. It peers down at me in judgment. Another, red, appears below with a gaze of indistinguishable reverence. Lou Reed continues with his prose, almost pungent. “A thousand dreams that would awake me / Different colors made of tears.” The eyes disappear, and the night’s inspiration reveals itself to me. An eye, a woman’s, glancing upward in sheer curiosity. I am a camera, pointed upwards at this siren. This vision remains, briefly. I feel an internal obligation to make note of this for later, so I do. In correspondence with my note-taking, this vision disappears as soon as I am confident that I will remember it. “Venus in Furs” concludes, light vanishes, and I find myself wet. Soaked, even.

I want to feel exclusive in this. To potentially position myself on a higher plane for having discovered a unique and revealing experience. It is human nature, and I do not feel guilty for it. Unfortunately, at least for my own ego, it is as much the property of universal human experience and unexplainable divinity as it is mine. Rather, I should say it is the power of the millions of neurons that work thanklessly in our brains. These neurons become accustomed to our complex lives, human-like in many ways. They grow bored and confused when deprived of external stimuli. Thus, in their unrelenting boredom, they grow frantic. Neural noise is amplified in an effort to restore normalcy. In doing this, the neurons produce hallucinations that can take the form of color or, in more extreme cases of uninterrupted silence, noise. This explanation was coined the “Ganzfeld Effect”, “Ganzfeld” directly translating in German to “whole field”. 

I have some trouble with this justification. Nothing about sporadic color feels “whole”.  It feels fairly incomplete. Completeness results from the conclusion of something profound, a limitation of sorts. A painting is complete, confined to a canvas, on which there are brushstrokes of smooth paint. It does not extend endlessly. It is, maybe, twenty-six inches tall and fourteen inches wide, no larger. When subjected to the will of my own imagination in the fabricated cave, I am restricted only to the scope of my worldview. I struggle to believe that such an idea can be explained by “neural noise”. I prefer the idea that the visions stem from the soul. Subjective and unique from person to person. The possession of some internal divinity. A jazz player would travel to an underground speakeasy. He would find himself fixated on an unknown man smashing the keys of a piano, black as night. In this, he would discover his inspiration, just as I observed the wandering eye. There is a threshold that separates the scientific from the divine. It is delicate, yet potent.

At 9:30 the next morning, I wake up. The evening prior was uneventful. After my shower, I sat at my desk for a few moments. I finally got around to putting the clothes on my bed away. Folded them in eerie silence and draped them over hangers. Went to bed fifteen minutes later. It was a dark night. I could tell even through the closed blinds that it was a dark night. Evidently, though, the night’s darkness made way for the creeping sun to enter my window. Not inquisitively, but ferociously. As I look up from my recently interrupted slumber, I notice two luminous strokes on the ceiling. Bright and radiant. They come from my window, and I can see particles of dust floating through the beam of light. One line works horizontally, bending at will to the dip of the halogen light attached above. Another, vertical, pierces the horizontal line, straight as an arrow. A disfigured cross tattooed onto my room. For a moment, I lay and peer at this mystical symbol. I do not even bother to turn my head, I simply peer to my right, gazing in deep suspicion. But, after a moment, I settle and turn. 

There is an adage in Christianity and across faiths of all origins: when one sees a sign, there is no doubt that remains. Once I saw this cross on my ceiling in its entirety, I referred back to the night prior. Questions, both scientific and sacred, returned to the forefront. But as I lay here on this Wednesday morning, a cross burned into this plastered ceiling above me, an odd sensation within tells me that these questions have been answered. Questions of the dark, and questions of the morning light. I am not an overtly religious man. But in this moment, I understood a deeply relevant truth. This cross that burned above me was brought forth by the same source who drowned me in the flowing waves of the deep blue tsunami. Who placed me in the dark apartment, face to face with an entity of unknown intent. Who surrounded me with eyes of judgement and apathy. 

For a few minutes, the cross remains. I sit in introspective silence. Eventually, the sun moves behind a tree, and the strokes are extinguished. The room reverts to a pale darkness. With this, I arise.