The Intima Made Me Cry
Last night I saw the Intima for the first time.
There's a point, when noise gets so loud that it becomes a felt physical presence, that it starts breaking apart, fragmenting and allowing ghosts to enter through the fissures. Phantom melodies and incidental harmonies waver in and out of one's perception like choirs descending from Heaven that one is just barely, and intermittently, clairvoyant enough to hear.
Are these ghost voices really there? Does it sound the same to everyone? Or are they created in our own heads, in reaction to the stress of the extreme volume we are subjecting ourselves to? The violation of sound so loud that you can't even hear it anymore, noise that cancels itself out. Like when you put your hand in water so hot your body gets confused as to whether it's feeling heat or ice-cold. Like when you feel so strongly about something you love that you couldn't say, you can't really say anything about it, the best you can do is blaspheme and deny, the best you can do is to write something about it and cross it out, blacken and obscure it with angry pen strokes saying no, that's not it at all, no that's not right. Like when you love something so much you want to destroy it to stop the small sharp pain that your intensity of feeling is focussing itself into.
If you were a soldier at war, crouching in a fox-hole with shrapnel raining down around you, and tanks churning and crushing and machine guns drilling and screams and shivering of teeth and desperate shouts and harried commands, and a mine explodes near you and something is wrong with your ears, and everything becomes washed-over with a fog of white noise, and it is clear to you that you are dying because you hear the choirs breaking through at moments, and the voices are dulcet and sweet, and the harmonies are many-layered and perfect and deep as an old old story -
maybe that would be a little like last night when I saw the Intima.