Machine emotion

I've just had something of a breakthrough. First I'll explain the course of the evening, before it happened.

Today, as I was returning home from uni (my very last day - of this degree, at least) I felt particularly flat, drab, dull and emotionless. I'm not sure why. Sometimes the world surrounding me throws a heavy blanket over my moving body and weighs me down, and I'm never sure where it comes from. Usually it lasts for a while and then slowly begins to lift, or quickly whips itself up into the air, if I see a brilliant sky or something that distracts me - but this time it was unmoving, stubborn.

Not having eaten since breakfast, I walked home very hungry; having just smoked I had the taste of cigarette in my mouth, and for some reason I began to feel quite anxious and a little aggravated. A kind of anger began to push up against me, nudging like a cat against the side of my brain. It's quite often that I feel pressures building up like walls, suspended across parts of my plane of vision, they are difficult both to explain and to understand, I am knowingly unfamiliar with their recurrence, if that makes sense. Maybe I'll write more about these 'pressures' in the future - it's something personal and something I seldom talk about.

Anyway, when I arrived home I was markedly irritable, and irritable at that, that I couldn't know why. Relaxing and lightening up were ideas that were simply, honestly, not available. I wanted to be cocooned, under the ground and away from light or up in heavy clouds that would rumble and disguise me, to morph into a fluid so I could slip into other objects and vacate my existence, for a while.

I am not an angry person, but now I felt like a weird, unsettled child, ready to throw a tantrum, ready to grind myself into the floor and cry - except I didn't know whether crying would do - it was more like a confused, heavy fire surging inside that took on a melancholic weight as it grew in anger and momentum.

Usually these are times when something else completely takes control and you end up submitting to forces outside of yourself; emotions take reign and lead you to places regardless of whether you want to follow; you become an agent of feeling, a conduit. And so this emotional surge bubbled up in spheres that rose inside me and the next few moments saw me move towards the piano. For the piano, arms extending, not intending for fingers to touch keys, shuffling wanting touch heavy wooden glide to embrace keys inside that have sound in them, oh this compulsion drawing me in and I sit on the stool and begin to play D, D, D -- D, with my left hand then a chord with my right, then notes growing up from the piano sprouting out like leaves dripping silver into soft harmonic interplay and I slide down from the stool to the floor while my hands remained atop the keys, and now I am on the floor, and now I close my eyes to find this dark recess , behind the wall of the upright piano, I am away from the world, my hands are still in the world, my ears are somewhere in between and I am away from the world and the sound connects us,

- and that's when I really play, I see pictures and move freely over notes, between chords light and heavy are columns of an old villa with grass in between - I'm in the water, eyes shut and I'm paddling and on the floor in this room I'm pedalling still with my right foot as I crouch and curl and let my hands find the sounds that string out like flesh across the darkness, lights that slide and slip over my eyelids reflect off the sound that reflects off the light in the view of this landscape while I sit protected behind this giant heavy barricade machine.

Honestly, this was the hugest freedom I've felt in a long while. Not being able to see the notes gave rise to an unimaginably vast landscape of sound, I am engulfed, surrounded by sound, no longer restrained by my eye's knowledge of the piano keyboard at all, free to open up and flower out trusting ears and feelings alone.


I went on like that for hours. It was like sleeping.


This has been incredible. The aftermath of this is still resonating inside me, a new self introduction, and I'll be glad to see anger again if there's a piano around.