“There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.”
- Jean Dubuffet
My dear brothers, sisters, friends, and loved ones,
Another week has passed since I arrived in Tangier, it’s been three fulfilling weeks already. I didn’t even see the days slip into one another, to be honest. I completely lost track of time. Unlike my previous four-month stay here last fall, a season that felt like a never-ending funeral procession, I didn’t allow circumstances and their sorrowful numbness to steal whatever time I had in my hands to live, to experience, to shape and reshape life — mine. Nor have I let the streaming inspiration of what has always been sacred ground for me be defined by the foolish dream of a long-broken relationship, one I once believed could heal, but I had to admit and accept that such type of intimacy, which I yearned for in order to let what I have in my heart bloom, never truly existed in the first place.
Letting go recently brought a freedom I had denied myself for far too long, simply because I knew what that liberty would mean for some of my closest “friends”. At least I was lucid on that point. I’ve never felt as creatively engaged as I do now… Working in my little home studio is the perfect embodiment of the vision I always had. I’m no longer sitting around waiting for life to unfold its blessings in front of me: I’m actively becoming that life. I’m becoming the sounds I hear in my spirit, becoming the words slowly assembling themselves in my heart. I’m being rather than trying to manage my environment and the people within it. My values are resolutely getting their colors back, reason why I believe that those sounds and words will draw the right people together… They always do. I no longer have to wait for anyone. And it’s liberating.
There’s a popular American adage that says, “Build it and they will come.” It’s true. I consecrated my existence to building what I now see with clarity as “meeting points”, places where people could gather and walk alongside one another. But over time, those places turned into “waiting points”, spaces I used to equip others, hoping to soon depart together. Eventually, those spaces became “status quo points”, “compromising points”… and finally, “dying points”. Mine, essentially.
So yes, it feels good to build again. To see new people arrive. And this time, we share a profound common purpose, something strong enough to get us all enthusiastically moving toward the new adventures awaiting to be embraced. Adventures that have the power to transform us, in whatever way we’re willing to allow it. And if that intentional migration, which involves a profound personal enfranchisement, leads me to dive deeper into the near-death experience I endured 890 days ago today, then all the relational sufferings were worth it… because it’s where I need to go, what I need to explore, what I need to make peace with… And there’s no other way than going all the way. It’s a traumatic yet transcendent experience I refused to look into ever since it happened, until recently…
Until I found myself surrounded by people kind enough, brave enough, and benevolent enough to accompany me through that thick blur I wanted to leave behind for fear of losing my mind in its intangible oblivion. Do I believe I’m ready to face it all? Is now really the time? There is no now for that kind of elusive fog. There is no such thing as readiness when confronting the most dreadful, horrifying, and disruptive moment of your journey. I’ve been emotionally paralyzed ever since, afraid to engage with life, afraid to lose everything once again, afraid that I might cause irreparable pain to those I love should I ever have to depart for real.
There’s a fracture within me, several ones, probably. Psychological. Spiritual. Emotional. All part of the deeper fabric of who I’ve become. Of who I know I am now. And it’s okay. I’m okay. It’s always been “okay”, even when it wasn’t at all. I have always been “ok”, no matter what was truly going on within me. That’s how I’ve been wired, to just keep on going. And I did, and I still am. Maybe slower than before… But yes, I am. This time, though, what’s fundamentally different, even if I know I don’t need to confront that “incident” in order to move forward, is the fact that I want to look into it… Not because I have to, but because I choose to.
There’s a world of denial and unspoken truths I want to explore. A kind of inner pilgrimage where complete immersion is resolutely the very first step through a door I’ve long pretended didn’t exist… But it does. And it shines. Vibrantly.
Expressive art has always been my roadmap. But before I could even approach that so-called door, there was a long road of frustration, bitterness, resentment, rage and violence erupting from my soul when I was told I had to write a will, put my affairs in order, make peace with people, and say goodbye to those I loved in case I would die. The odds weren’t in my favor… And all this occurred just when I was finally where I wanted to be in life, personally and professionally… Coming back from the dead deeply messed me up.
The best I can describe that pre-dying thing reality is like:
The ground shook beneath me.
Then everything collapsed.
I was left for dead.
Until… I opened my eyes.
But the world I woke back in was unrecognizable.
I no longer fit in it.
The arms that once held me couldn’t comfort me anymore.
The question wasn’t “How long was I gone?” Nor “Why am I back here?”
It’s more in the likes of “Who really reemerged?
Who came back from the dead?”
And honestly, those questions still lingers.
It has been something I had no desire to answer ever since.
That contextual “mise en place” is important for me to set you up with, as the second song sketch (titled La La La for now) encompasses the sentiment I was wrapped in before the surgery, before what I now refer to as my “degenerative passage”. It’s a form of acceptance, one made of cynicism and resilience, of oscillating delirium and intoxicating madness. It was all personified by a multitude of voices that took possession of my thoughts, haunting them with fading memories made of images, faces, moments, sensations. Of everything undone, unfinished. All exposed. In fragments of stories I either refused to face or never had the courage to pursue, to complete.
They came like discolored film reels playing simultaneously in my head, echoing the countless doubts inoculated by my wounded heart. I was dying way before I lay down on the surgery table, as my emotional being was disappearing a little more with each word I managed to capture from the chaos… Those voices broke the walls of my absolutes, shaking the foundations of what used to separate reality from illusion, darkness from the light, faith from hopelessness. That was the breaking point for me.
Believing I was becoming crazy, I surrendered to the distress that becoming something else was required of me. Like being a specter's undertow, trapped in a loop reflecting a vast emotional void, isolated in waving forms of total emptiness, where you are nothing more than some silent echo of someone’s remaining shadow… La La La refers to that inner prison of the psychological nightmare I used to be in for a while… where I still feel like I am stuck sometimes.
The ongoing album is slowly shaping its uniquely real and honest identity, pretty much on its own, right now. The rest is for me to define how deep inward I am willing to go and how much I am disposed to torture myself, to suffer and re-suffer, in order to perceive what I didn’t want to see, to break the cycling denial and to go through it all over, and over, and over again… until I know I went all the way. I guess that’s something we’ll find out together, my dear ones.
Life creates life
Your brother and friend,
Alex
