1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 155

The whole of human life might be summed up in one phrase - the search for a suitable narrative. We all need stories, not merely to relate but to act them out, to inscribe them into the routine moments of our existence, to fix them as reference points by which the drift of sensation and perception is held in place and made sense of. The stories need not be outlandish or heroic - they can be homely domestic tales, like the narrative of the hours between waking and sleeping, of the routine of the day, habits and accidents that form the pattern of our embodied and embodying relation to the matter around us. Yet there is a danger here, a peril native to the activity of narrating itself; a false consolation in the apparent coherence of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can seduce us into editing our experience to conform to pre-written plots, pressing the messy and intractable forms of life into approved narrative shapes. We are haunted by what escapes such editing, those shadowy regions where the self loses coherence, dissolves into obscure zones where narration is impossible, trickles away into a drift of pure sensation. When Shakur got hold of me I was already dissolving, a mouth opening up at the heart of that solid sense of self that sustained my existence. I had been haunted for some time by certain sounds, voices, which seemed to bubble up from zones beneath the polite narratives of identity and belonging that formed the conventional self. These voices were not merely auditory phenomena - they seemed to strike at deeper levels, to impact the visceral matter of the body's cohesion, to threaten the binding principle that held me in the shape of selfhood. Their words had weight, they came trailing masses of sensation, zones of intensity that cracked the shell of personal integrity. And as these ineffable voices whispered and bellowed in my inner ear, the self I thought I knew began to unwind like a turban of gauzy veils. I found myself becoming a medium for these eerie presences, a window onto oblivion opening within. No longer was I solid or coherent, but instead a whirlpool of disintegrating fragments, shreds of identity whorling through my nerves and organs, momentarily cohering and just as quickly dissolving. This was the state Shakur confronted as he burst into my life, a conundrum he addressed with forceful pedagogy. One day, as I hunkered alone in my room, a furious rattling at my door announced his arrival. He showed no patience for niceties. As I opened to his barrage of jabbering sound and muscular frame, he simply put his meaty hand onto my chest and shoved hard. As I reeled backward, relinquishing body-space to his imposing presence, my bones and flesh mocked up the hollow thud of ego-dissolution. "I am the warrior of the bass frequencies," he announced, and his mouth set into a grin made for carving monoliths. "The beats I bring will activate your cells, reconnect the currents between body and spirit, make way for the narratives that really matter." Even as he spoke, I recognised vibrations coursing through me, disrupting the spurious stories I told myself. With those subsonic waves came visions - the shimmer of sunlight on a perfect desert flatness, the faint curve of the earth's horizon blurring to the infinite, and somewhere within that limpid expanse, deeper than deep, the heart's own rhythm pounding faithful and immense.