The Big Picture and the Closeup

Perhaps the point of the title Aerial Boundaries was the actual possibility of something that had seemed impossible. Like Michael Hedges’ two-handed plucking/tapping. Like a hive of activity in a field that first seems to be sleeping in the sun. Or like finding music for myself. And some measure of serenity.

The cathartic quality of Purple Rain spoke directly to me. I could dare to recognize now that I had been engineering my own catharsis. And so for that night Purple Rain was my anthem.

I needed to unpack things. I needed to clean things up. And Gladys pitched in. It was strange that someone who could generate such chaos in any space she occupied could somehow help bring order to mine. But she did.

Anyway, the cumulative effect of the buzz wearing off, much loneliness, much busyness, and a therapy group taking exception to my way of getting better was that I spent much of that summer in bemused solitude. Alone at night indeed. And yet it was an incredibly rich time.

But acceptance, though assertedly the last stage of dealing with impending death, is only the first phase of deciding to divorce. Then you need to summon courage, logistical skill, and cash. And the greatest of these is courage.

As the sun was sliding down the horizon, carrying her away, the song in my cassette player was Teach Me Tonight, in Al Jarreau’s then-recently-released version. I kept replaying it, and it made me feel a little better.

The vines and the telephone wires and the guitar strings are all one in a dazzling poetic metaphor, all ligatures that simultaneously vibrate in a siderial harmony and draw the lovers together. And that was exactly what it felt like: that the two of us were being drawn to each other by invisible and harmonious forces.

The cave journey Vollenweider and friends charted out felt less sinister and dangerous than the cave journey the programmers responsible for Adventure contrived, but they each appealed to the same place in my head. Jointly these two creations, the game and the album, served as the perfect expression of the computer journey I embarked on at that point. You venture into mysterious places, develop new skills, and bring back all sorts of treasures from those mysterious caves we now call cyberspace.

The bargain I’d made with myself at the beginning of all my running around was that anytime I wanted to I could always turn around and rejoin my life’s earlier course. But when I decided I wanted to, I found anger was blocking that path back. These songs may not have been precisely applicable to our situation, but they were precisely applicable to my mood. I knew how things were supposed to go, and if they weren’t doing that, there had to be an explanation, and I was going nuts trying to find it.

Williams provides a musical metaphor for that wonderful dream we’ve all had sometime, in which we learn to fly. And that dream is in turn a serviceable metaphor for the erotic ecstasy of Superman and Lois. That was how I wanted to think of myself then: freed from the bonds of conventional morality, accompanying professional success with sexual release, floating high above everything.