(THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY PERSONAL ESSAY. I INTEND ON SHARING THIS ON REDDIT ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE ALBUM THIS YEAR. I WANT THIS TO BE A PARABLE. Drink water, get sleep, and be mindful of your mental health.)
“A Soft Slide Into Madness:
Or
How Radiohead Trigged A Psychotic Delusion and the Importance of Sleep and Ego Death.”
by
Daniel Louis Krone.
Music has a unique way of digging up memories hiding in dark places in the subconscious.
I wouldn’t begin to know how the human mind works exactly. That’s nowhere near my field of expertise. But I do know there is a place somewhere lodged deep in the base of human consciousness where the music dwells and it’s that deep primal tribal mind where the love of music hides.
I wonder if there is a word out their for that sublime connection people get when they hear just the right song at the right moment in time and it shatters the ego and sheds memories like old dead skin deeper than any kind of recreational drug could. You know the feeling I’m talking about right? Maybe a riff, maybe the right lyric, or maybe it is just a beautiful voice that melts your consciousness and touches you in crevices that you may not have known your mind had.
I know that feeling. I know that feeling all too well. Oftentimes when I have nothing to do I’ll just sit and listen to music and let my mind wander and slide about the lyrics and soundscapes into places my imagination didn’t previously know were possibilities.
Back in May 2016, approaching my 30th, what I’m told is an important birthday, Radiohead’s 9th album “A Moon Shaped Pool” dropped. Radiohead fans went INSANE! I know this because I happen to be a recently converted one. Early morning we (My roommate and I) were woken up with a bird chirping on Instagram. An intriguing tease after they’d recently deleted their entire social media past. Then BAM! “Burn the Witch” appeared. It was a delightfully sinister and playfully animated music video that brought about feelings of nostalgia and an openness to whatever this new sound was.
Radiohead was back baby! Ring the bells, light the fires, let them know. Radiohead is back!
It wasn’t until shortly after that the album dropped and I was, to put it mildly, stunned by what I heard. “Burn the Witch” opens the album with its piercingly haunting violins and then builds into a nightmarish storm of clashing violins and then all of a sudden to an astounding shift in tone and tempo into “Daydreaming” as a haunting piano pushes along into the soothing arms of Thom’s more calm and quiet voice. A tone shift of this magnitude I’ve not heard in an album since Aphex Twin’s masterpiece “Come to Daddy” and its insane shift from the intensity of “Come to Daddy” to the calming playful tones of “Flim”. And it wasn’t until the line “This goes beyond me…beyond you…” in the opus “Daydreaming” that it dawned on me that listening to this album might be a journey into a new kind of masterpiece. I’d already noticed the fan favorite “True Loves Waits”, a song that had been previously played only live, listed as the final track on the album and knew no matter what this was something very special I was about to listen to.
“A Moon Shaped Pool” is a memory box. Only a handful of songs on the album had not previously appeared in other forms. But it’s not that that makes it more of a memory box for me. Listening to the album front to back was like opening my own box of memories inside of my head. The soundscapes are so vast and nuanced on each track I cannot imagine the type of person that could listen to it and it not manage to snag at least one memory from the back of your head. But for me listening to this album was as if I’d heard it before, I knew that was impossible, but the deepest feelings of nostalgia and waves of memories came with every note on first listen. It wasn’t just a fishhook catching memories at the bottom of my subconscious it was a net filled with hooks dredging up things from the depths barely recognizable as memories. They were strange and exotic things with glowing teeth. Each track was another deep emotional tug. It was like the combination of Yorke’s lyrics with the other surrounding music was some kind of symphony composed specifically for my own unique human experience.
The creature that emerged from the depths was something I’d tried to hide down there. It was something I knew would get me in trouble one day. It was my ego, my pride, my arrogance, my fuck your shitty wings Icarus I’ve got a sun proof rocket-ship..and then a spark happened. It was all so simple. Everything in life was so simple. The whole world was the simplest thing. You could solve all the world’s problems with one simple and easy move…building a time-machine.
But how could I get the funding for people to believe that idea?
….and another spark happened. No one has ever been able to beat “The James Randi Educational Fund Foundation Challenge”. If you could prove the existence of a supernatural claim under scientific scrutiny you’d win a million dollars! It was all so maddeningly simple. You don’t have to prove any kind of supernatural anything to win you simply have to come up with a magic trick so darn convincingly brilliant it could fool the foundation’s challenge. How would I begin to do that? And another spark and another and another. They came rapid fire with the fervor of a chain-gun slicing through my mind. It was some kind of high and some kind of deep pain. I laugh at my own perpetual fear of failure. This could actually work!
I won’t bore you with every bit of the tedious minutiae that happened on the way to that soft slide into madness. Needless to say I’d found myself several hours or maybe a day after that epiphany in a gas station parking lot on the phone with my twin brother a few hours prior whom I’d tried to convince I had simultaneously figured out how to build a time machine and beat the JREF challenge and asked rather nervously if I had died and which direction I needed to take to cross over.
I was lost and couldn’t find my way you see. I’d figured he’d know the way. He was a very smart man after all. After all I must be dead everything now was so bright, colorful, and suddenly less like reality and more like some dream I was floating about in. During my stumbling daze in the gas station parking lot I’d missed a meeting I’d set up with a friend of mine who was a magician who I’d pitched part of the trick which was intriguing enough for him to want to drive all the way up to my place to meet with me but within the floating time gaps I’d started to lose track of that first thing that goes when your mind starts to slip away after that first crest of the delusions and illusions of grandeur…time.
When I arrived back to the apartment I felt as if I was in a daze. My roommate had no idea what to make of me I’m sure. I was waxing incoherent poetry and philosophy about time machines, magic, illusions and David Murray Brockie, for some strange reason, a man whom I’d met in my previous life. He was some kind of musical space alien god…I couldn’t remember.
‘In the deepest ocean, the bottom of the sea, where the weird fishes come to meet you and me, so go slowly, and slide on out through the revolving doors beyond me and beyond you . . . and immerse your soul in love…’
It was all so simple. Thom Yorke winked directly at me when the “Daydreaming” music video dropped. I called my brother to discuss how to build a time machine, we watched the video at the same time, and thusly could track back through the digital realms of phone signals and the internet to trace back this exact moment to the point of a perfect singularity. If my brother and I could recreate this day, then we could go back to it and I could relive this madness over and over and over again and prove my point about time-travel. A point I’ll admit I was having trouble grasping onto. This epiphany was like waking up from a dream, on the tip of my tongue, but I knew, I just fucking knew the true secrets about god and the universe were right there all catapulted by a few lines in a song and a smile from an artist whose work I’ve admired directed by a great artist whose work I’ve admired. Patterns and rhythms like love as an emotion or sensation are sometimes so frustratingly hard to place but no less real. Like the antithesis of being afraid of the dark…I was entranced by a light in my mind shining upon everything but I didn’t and maybe still don’t and maybe never will have the language to describe such grand illusions, allusions. Yugen is the only word I can think of. Perfect yugen.
But how do you build a time machine when you’ve died? Maybe I can explain it to someone. But my speech began to feel so disjointed. It wasn’t disjointed to me but by the expressions and reactions of other people I was talking to I’m sure that it really was. Thom Yorke was Charon and “A Moon Shaped Pool” was his boat taking me across the great river. There is still so much work to do. Time to call everyone I know and let them know a piece of this puzzle that seems to be clogging my brain, killing me. I won’t let the girl know, it might scare her if she knew, maybe I’ll just send her positive vibes…now is not the time though. She was such an intense conduit for the sexual and surreal and that just might be way too intense for my mind at this moment.
I could use the time machine to solve world peace…to cure mental illness…what if Donald Trump becomes president and causes WW3…oh god it’s happening…is it happening? It it the future yet?
My mind is pockmarked with gaps of memory that float in a void and loose in my head but wither when I try to grasp for their details. It’s like trying to remember a dream a day later. I’ll do my very best to remember what I can so this story doesn’t read like a 60’s italian art house film feels.
I had messaged a lot of different people in that very short time period. I would be amazingly cryptic about what I thought I’d figured out. But my roommate at the time had heard the bulk of these intense and possibly insane ramblings. Now to put the ball back in my court I will say I’ve always been a rather manic person, hyper, and with a weird imagination but to my memory none of this was exacerbated by entheogens. As I had done time and time before I had one hit of weed and a light larger the morning prior, unless I was somehow dosed this sensation was all me and since it may have been days since this started…well any hit or drink would long have worn out of my system.
…
Thom dances like a flame does, wild, hypnotic, erratic with no set rhythm but rather feeling the vibrations of whatever song it is he’s dancing too. His dance seems to be uniquely his own, free-form, like jazz and like fire moving in the confines of the wind. His uniqueness is and probably always will be for me an inspiration of the pure understanding of what it is to be an artist.
…
I figured it out…I was trapped inside a video game. My brother had programmed it then to test me like all of our intellectual arguments as a child. How will I escape this trap…I should phone a friend…so I called my brother…a friend.
…
That was it, the understanding of everything. Symbols, totems, dreams, triggers, physiology and everything. All of the world’s mental health problems could be solved with a simple solution. Simple enough. It all starts with storytelling and magic tricks. Eureka I got it, it’s not just a time machine, it’s a genie box, the full breadth of art, storytelling, information, and medicine can all be realized. I can build this time machine…and now oh god I think I’ve already built it. It is the future and I’m trapped inside of it…have I build it yet? I can’t remember anything. Have I met Penn Jillette and explained to him that I understand about all the magic tricks, triggers, and totems and how to utilize them to help people rather than exploit them? Would Penn understand if I could find him? Freakonomics was correct! I could save the entire world, give everyone everything they’ve ever wanted, resurrect the dead, heal disease…we all can…if I just organize certain things in the right structure. Oh god, this house of cards in my mind is collapsing. Fuck, where did that idea go? ‘That Penn Jillette can be such a prick, and all it takes is a little prick to light your mind and imagination, just a little push through pain to drive you insane to see the veil the man behind the wizard and realize how odd it is that you, yourself, are god…and as god, you are capable of fixing everything if only you can layer communication and real life incentives in an honest way…then everyone can get everything they’ve ever wanted. But what if I’m wrong…what if people don’t want contentment and happiness? What if humanity isn’t ready for it? How do I build this device? I can plug my mind inside of a computer and track my own brain, map out my own insanity and teach others to do it and help cure it…all it takes is an in-depth study of art, sociology, magic tricks, triggers, psychology…I was right…it all goes back to Magic Tricks. That’s why nostalgia is such a prevalent thing in the zeitgeist currently it speaks to our naive fear of death…I have to contact Penn Jillette and James Randi and tell them this idea!’
Fuck, am I dying? Just let me slip to heaven god. I’m having a seizure right now.
…
I text a friend “I think I’m having a seizure, help me!” And I received and intensely apathetic response. Maybe if humanity can’t help a friend having a seizure they can’t help themselves.
And then the real pain started pulsing like a demon underneath my exhausting exhilaration of the sheer fact I thought I’d figured out literally every puzzle mankind has been puzzling with since we grew enough consciousness to keep ourselves perpetually neurotic.
...
An epiphany is like an orgasm for the mind and catharsis is like an orgasm for the soul. I was having these all the time vibrating through my veins and nerves and if the mind can be a metaphor for a lightning storm than my head wasn’t a few bolts it was a violent squall akin to an apocalyptic storm. At one point I thought I was dying and text a friend of mind that I thought I was having a seizure. Wait, was I repeating time again…am I stuck in the thought loops or have I actually done it…I’m literally traveling through time. I mean earlier I literally called myself hours ahead of me and asked how to cross over to the land of the dead. I suppose time travel is indeed a relative.
When I was a kid I met someone who’d invented a card game where at the beginning of the game the rules were never made clear to one of the players. The main rule was the person making the rules could not contradict any rules previously established while playing. The game is like a metaphor for life when we’re all dropped in with no understanding of how everything works but I feel like at this time I was given a glimpse into the strange rules of this reality that no one gets to see, the rules that god made. But god, if you ever get to see him, doesn’t speak in English but a much more cryptic and puzzling language.
…
Those fuckers at the back.
I’d felt like my intuitions inside my head had anthropomorphized and while walking around my small apartment kitchen in Van Nuys they were trying to talk to me as if I was on a stage surrounded thousands of darkened people flashing red lights at my head…little pin pricks. Has that prick Penn got back to me yet? Have I even contacted him? Can I contact him telepathically? No don’t be pathetic, time travel can be made real, solving all the world’s problems can be made real, but telepathy is out of reach…or is it? No wait that’s nonsense. Does anything I’m thinking make any sense? Am I really going insane? Is this how people die? I can’t remember anything.
(TRY TO REMEMBER THIS AND WHATEVER HAPPENED AT ‘THE BEACH’ DID YOU GO TO A SENSE TANK…DID ANYTHING HAPPEN THERE…? WAS THAT A TRIGGER TOO?)
...
Hospitals, birthday parties, Alice in Wonderland, cenobites, my childhood stuffed animal running around the valley streets, and I and my brother were in fact wizards with codes trapped inside a video game bouncing a bouncing ball off mirrors made of pure light and in the void of that complete insanity ratcheting up deeper and deeper in my mind I had a long conversation about what death really was with the most unexpected person…my father who’d died vomiting blood 2 years prior to this event. He was still alive and well in a nice button down shirt smiling. I think I’d seen the other side of death and it was both hellish and heavenly but not in any kind of religious way but in more of a Lovecraftian way. I’d seen beyond the veil and who did the veil send back other than a healthy smiling version of my old man…it’s gonna be okay…and then I woke up in a hospital…tied to a gurney. I feel like this had been a long journey.
Who were those fuckers at the back and what were they trying to tell me with their loud whispers?
…
To end this story I’ll say at the start of it that I had not ingested any kind of hallucinogen that I’m aware of as I don’t remember taking anything out of the ordinary and that I never got the results of my blood tests back from the hospital despite asking multiples of times.
Everyone has that special album though. Everyone has that album they put on and let the memories flood out of them in mass exodus. Everyone has that album they put on to let the tears and tears of the mind slide slowly out as you cry enough to fill a room, like Alice did. But I guess in this case my special album just has more teeth. I don’t know what it was about this album that acted as a catalyst, or trigger for this moment. I know that it takes more than a trigger to build this kind of a bomb though. I am not sure what the other components were or sure that I want to know but all I know is that my life is forever changed because of that moment I had with it and I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why. I know that I don’t need to. But what can I say a slide into madness is still a slide. What a strange trip.
Sometimes after you burn the witch in your mind true love waits for you and you find yourself at the end of a long, long journey from the land of dreams trapped inside of your head. I felt as if I’d aged a 10’000 years mentally in my head.
True Love Waits for you, in the deepest ocean, in the bottom of the sea where the weird fishes slide on out through revolving doors to immerse their souls in love.
Art can do powerful things to the mind when aligned right.
Epilogue:
“Inspiration comes out of the glass of a rare whiskey with smoke billowing across your tongue and memories float around like the ghosts of muses when you stare into nothingness and nothingness stares back late at night near the witching hours.”
I’ve no idea what sense of nonsense is floating and bubbling in my head now but only now that I must write and like Hephaestus pounding the words into my conscious I think might suit whatever end to this story I feel now no pleasure in the pounding in my head and psyche having giving way to the vices of smoke and booze only then allowing me clear enough passage in the realms of my own unreal translations from memory to dream to prose that I may parlay the fragments of thought onto this godforsaken page to attempt to get across the rarest of ideas.
Inspiration, magic, and the saddest of all things ‘optimism’ was truly my undoing. How can I reconcile with this ghost that consistently haunts me and taunts me into deep depressive realms my normally manic self isn’t quite used to. Who the fuck am I? Am I my twin brother? Of course not! Don’t be silly! I’m unique I guess. What is my purpose? Does anyone truly have purpose? Fuck. I scream typing this as I swig another shot of a rare Alabama based bourbon whimsically purchased on a whim from the store I currently clerk. 600 bottles made. Jesus. How unique. How truly unique. Fuck. This shit tastes like the rarest poison.
My mind sometimes clear as a bell is currently as dirty as my car. Thoughts of sex, ex-lovers, and drugs I wish I had in my possession right now won’t save me from this maddening depression. I know like most nightly squalls this will pass by morning but currently is in full force and like the spell of an ancient sorcerer I’ll write in hope that the ghosts in my head go away.
This epilogue is a weak ass incantation.
To set the stage for these disjointed ramblings I’m continuing to write in hopes that occasionally truth will emerge like the sweat from a fucking warthog I’ll describe currently what I’m doing and what’s in my field of vision. Currently I’m doing several things. I’ll list them because of course people (especially me) enjoy lists.1. I am smoking a pipe with a tobacco called “Pistachio”. 2. I am drinking an ice cold whiskey called (Censored) which is incredibly strong (and rare) yet causing an energetic head floating effect not dissimilar to that of absinthe mixed with champagne (one of Hemmingway’s favorite cocktails) and currently is creating bubbling pockets of memories I’m having trouble translating. 2. I am thumbing through old pages in my online journal. 3. I am listening to female folk singers that remind me of times past. Deb Talon’s “Comfort” is currently floating about the air. These currently are all the things I am doing while writing this trying to desperately make sense of my past in a synced way to then sum up all the chaos of the past 3 years since my what I’ll call my ‘time-machine incident’.
I can’t.
I can’t sum anything up.
The words float like musing teases and then swim off into the abyss of my mind like the dangerous mermaids of Never-Never Land.
The memories don’t cascade like they did during that episode they merely float out of my reach.
I’ll say this to sum up my thoughts. I’d figured almost 3 years later this story deserves a goddamn epilogue. After all that’s what’s expected isn’t it? A conclusion. An ending? Some series of thoughts to make sense of the madness that is life? But I figured if I write that I’ll write it in my own way with that same glimmer of chaos and disjointed prose anyone whose read my thoughts, my raw thoughts, might come to expect.
The world is in a spiral of bigotry, ignorance, divisiveness, and for some reason nostalgia thrown in for flavor. It makes so very little sense to my mind to witness a culture clinging on whatever mental comfort food available and then subsisting on the rest. I wish I could feed them all with nourishing thoughts and wisdom but I know the efforts like most artists would put such a strain on me I’d probably die again and this time stay dead. “Also fucking Jesus Daniel, what an egotistical thought, remember the last time you thought you figured something important out”…tauntingly screams the voice in my head as I edit this.
The only word to describe my life lately might be impotence. Impotence to write, create, and sometimes even to feel anything. Pink Floyd I guess was right. Being numb can be comforting. However I feel I guess I’ve wrapped myself in that blanket too long and this writing is somehow a violent vomit purge I feel I must let out. Why now? I have no fucking idea. I think probably because things are starting to make sense again and that thought scares me.
I’ve been in love. I’ve seen great shows. I’ve worked on great projects. I’ve fucked great women. I’ve kissed amazingly. I’ve seen priceless works of art. I’ve drank rare fluids and ate even rarer meals. I’ve seen the sunrise in a desert and the sunset on a beach and I feel in some cases I’ve experienced more in a day than most ever seem to get in their entire lives. That numbness is keeping me from exploding. And any fun or wild moments I’ve had lately are in my own way perfectly timed for maximum safety. In the most basic terms. I’m not the same man I used to be and it’s taken me far too long to get used to whomever this new person I’ve become is. My past and my psyche did not and have not simply moved on. I can still hear him inside me like an ex-lover calling late at night hoping for another quick fling I’m all too aware is far too dangerous in my experience. Waking up three years late from a violent psychotic break and leaving your home of nearly a decade behind isn’t a scar on your mental state it’s a strait up amputation and that phantom limb still keeps tickling me.
Social media depresses me. I have trouble concentrating watching movies. The routine life I so hated in my youth has come back to save my life and a part of me resents it. Sometimes I want to scream at the cosmos…”For god sake just let me drown” and then pleasant simple moments come back to remind me that I’m probably better afloat. A boy whose entire youth was based on his exuberance and mania has been beaten back by the world so hard that switch in his mind has changed from mania to depression and yet somehow I’m fully aware my sticking around in this world is keeping other people afloat in the chaos of their minds.
The pedantic ramblings about my dead friends Tom and Patrick or what it was like to work on a film like “Get Out” or what it’s like to manage a liquor store, gas station, and liquor store again or to describe that semi-empowering feeling of turning down good film work or what it was like to be in a mental asylum rooming with an insomniac and having conversations with a schizophrenic and being hit on by two sexy nymphomaniacs while locked up would probably honestly bore you to tears and the flair of that kind of story is not something I’m interested in telling right now. It would be so dull and predictable of me to do so and lament the times. If I concentrate hard enough I can still see the fabric that sews the entire universe together. But I try not to concentrate that much anymore. The visions come close to breaking my mind again.
I’m not suicidal now. Been there done that. But occasionally the thought of simply not being around comforts me. However I find most of that comfort in the simple act of sleep which I will partake in…
Now.
“When everyone has gone to sleep and you are wide awake
There's no one left to tell your troubles to
Just an hour ago, you listened to their voices
Lilting like a river over underground
And the light from downstairs came up soft like daybreak
Dimly as the heartache of a lonely child
If you can't remember a better time
You can have mine, little one
In days to come when your heart feels undone
May you always find an open hand
And take comfort wherever you can
And oh, it's a strange place
And oh, everyone with a different face
But just like you thought when you stopped here to linger
We're only as separate as your little fingers
So cry, why not? we all do
Then turn to one you love
And smile a smile that lights up all the room
Follow your dreams in through every out-door
It seems that's what we're here for
And when you can't remember a better time
You can have mine, little one
In days to come when your heart feels undone
May you always find an open hand
And take comfort, there is comfort
Take comfort wherever you can, you can, you can.”
- Deb Talan “Comfort” from the album“A Bird Flies Out”.
. . .
Like a Chinese finger trap thinking too much about this ordeal, much like trying to pull your fingers apart, is the wrong answer. Since this deeply suicidal note I’d sent to my brother and two of my closest friends I’ve calmed my bones and brains from these lingering thoughts that would return in the year after like a blight on my mind. Instead I’ve tried to focus on the good things, my simple government job, and since going to a meditation center to try to help quell these fears like a gift from god…I met a wonderful girl, a love who has helped keep me calm focused and balance like a living embodiment of why I went to the meditation center in the first place so I suppose after spending my life engorging myself on the tedious minutia of coincidence I’ll leave you with the only quote that springs to mind.
Another epigraph.
“If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?” - Fox Mulder.
