I Just Can’t Keep Secrets

Transcending Time From One’s Heart Gravity

It must have been last December when I started to muse about The Club’s upcoming theme. It’s a reflective venture I used to do when Miss Isabel, Jeff, and I gather somewhere under the sun to evaluate the previous year and to define what I’m envisioning for the one to come… But this time, against my instinct, I decided to bring the whole band to Tangier in an ultimate last attempt to find any possible reconciliation, closure, and rebirth, which ended up a miserable fail, yet it was probably the only possible outcome, as I had clearly been the only one fiercely trying to keep whatever I thought was precious artificially alive for almost 2 decades at that point. It was long dead, way before we even set foot in Morocco, but I wanted to believe in the impossible, even if I knew it was taking much more than my collective delirium to save something that wasn’t worth saving in anybody else’s eyes.

On top of that, I was really ill, more than I wanted to admit and clearly way more than I wanted anybody else to know. I had flash stroke episodes, almost fainted daily, and got so weak it would have been dangerous for me to take a plane back home… It’s never too recommended to have a cardiac arrest in a plane, let alone when recovering from a cardiac double graft surgery. But I’m not wired to flee the scene of a catastrophe, especially when it’s my own life on display, as I was not only on the verge of disbanding The Long Shadows but also had to put up quite a fight to maintain my label and its assets afloat… COVID hit us hard, but almost dying left several of my former friends and associates wondering what there was for them once I’de be gone… So much for gratefulness… But hey, no one owes me anything. We all have one ticket to use in that jungle, and rarely, like I had, do we have a second one. If my health was rapidly declining, it wasn’t a reason to surrender to the vultures, not yet anyway. I knew I had it in me to push back, and I did, almost losing my life a second time in the process… but I’m truly glad I did.

In that whole journey of bad news, of fake friendships, of perpetual abuses, and of other people’s delusional entitlement that I had to deal with, I somehow never lost sight of the reasons why I care about it all regardless of the surreal circumstances surrounding me. I thought about you, the community we are part of, the affection, the care, the benevolence, everything that came way before words and music… It gave me comfort and courage to recenter my focus on the only place that ever had any value in this whole adventure of art and humanity. The rest is nothing, at least for me it ain’t. And thinking about it empowered the reality that what I have inside, that little something that defines me, no one can steal it away from me, no one can even alter its singular nature, not even my obviously dramatic health status, my profound disdain of the situation I was in, or my lack of positivity regarding the near future. No. What’s inside could be pretty shaken up, gravely damaged, or left hollowing at times, but it never failed me — never.

Therefore, thinking about the Club’s upcoming year and the theme that would define it, I wanted to illustrate the turmoil in which I found myself while emphasizing the necessary resilience required to remain the dynamo of our own existence and consequently avoid becoming the casualty of any punctual misfortune. It’s so easy to find yourself turning into the product of our momentary disruptions… So, beyond my complicated occurrences and their challenging aftereffects, I was musing about something that could encapsulate our personal struggles, as we all have to compose with a wide spectrum of circumstantial entropies while representing elements we collectively endure as well, as we’re never truly alone, no matter the specificities of our respective distress.

The idea came to me out of a peaceful sensation of weightlessness I felt when I was on the rooftop terrace of my riad in Tangier, in the first light of morning, standing, with my eyes closed and my arms stretched, letting my spirit float through the feathery warmth of the wind caressing my face, feeling serene, free even, and letting myself be lulled by the sounds of waves gently crashing against each other and the birds’ chants awakening a day made of renewed promises and blooming possibilities… It was like an “out of body” experience where whatever preoccupation holding me back was unable to reach me no more… It wasn’t denial, it was enfranchisement.

Following that transcending instant, I kept on thinking about that feeling of beatitude and how defying a sentiment it was for me to embody… It was an emotional act of resistance, a spiritual form of positive subversion, an inner liberation from every piece of toxicity I was confronted with, fading whispers of old echoes, all stuck in a time length solely existing in my own ingrained design and persistently haunting me through my everlasting inability — or profound unwillingness — to let it all go, a paralyzing condition that could only be addressed by resisting the constraint of time itself, by initiating a revolt of my tangibilities, of my absolutes and immobilizing anchors…

To do so, it had to revolve around the “heart”, its soulful nature, to connect to its unique gravitational pull, one that operates outside the constraints of the world we have built for ourselves, its racing pace and implacable grounding expectations. Once connected or reconnected with that singular beating rhythm, you can find yourself experiencing an unbending measure of love, of compassion and hope, something much wider than any of the limitative intellectualizations of those make-believes, as we’d rather fabricate emancipative concepts and accept the faltering essence of our illusionary interpretation than abandon ourselves into the limitless dimension of what we’ve been yearning for as long as we become consciously aware of our humanity… I know, it’s philosophical jargon and spiritual argot… but it doesn’t make it less true or real, right!?!

Transcending Time From One’s Heart Gravity is about freeing our self-imposed limitations and our impermanent passage in a monochromic projection of an existence we are not only contenting ourselves with but one that we are nurturing and are allowing to be governed from… Only to focus on the unchaining meaningfulness of a life forwardly lived through a purposeful awakening.

And it’s an evolving state of heart and mind we are all invited to discover together… That’s my vision for this year’s The Club, one I wish will be marked by intentional significance and ongoing transformations.

Life creates life.

Your brother and friend,

Alex

PS: You can discover The Club here.