Edition #28
In the Wake of a New Morning
I started writing this on a plane, headed to Montreal after I had the utmost blessing to spend a few days in Japan, a highly significant place that I have considered as my spiritual home from the very moment I set foot on its unique land back in 2007, and finished some 30 days later… Time goes by so fast, so fast that I honestly can’t recall much of what happened to me in the midst of that succession of seasons that, for the most part, oscillated between fall and a never-ending winter, as if I was caught in an everlasting stream of jet lag, never able to discern nor quite feel the streaming sensations of the present tense… I exist like an hourglass feature, decaying one falling grain after another, in a golden cage I built myself, a circus made of shadows without reciprocating love and vampires drying what I thought would be an eternal source of will to go on, no matter what, like I’ve been wired to do, like I’ve been raised to do. A gift for some is a curse for others, but it never felt like either for me… I just kept on going, leaving the past behind, losing myself, depraving my heart and soul from every single layer of the bright colors that used to shine all around me since I was that kid who called a hospital room his home. Sometimes, somehow, the greatest stories of all aren’t the ones we dream to tell our loved ones at the end of our journey. I guess that’s why I don’t see any tragedy in the days that paved my existence up to now, nor do I regret any steps I have made. Oh, I wish I would have found better companions to walk those untraveled roads with, found a way to guide my loved ones on a merrier path, one with fewer struggles, to commune with me… But life offers no dress rehearsal, no handbook to go on through. There is early faith and hope but they, too, soon leave place for pain and sorrow to be discovered. The rest might be luck, fate… For me, it’s been grace. Finding true compassionate and caring friends, such as those surrounding me as I write to you, with a love and patience towards me that supplant the profound emotional damages preventing me to give back, if only a fraction, of what they so generously offer me every single day, no matter how difficult it is to deal with the troubled and haunted individual that I know I am. That’s why I can say, without any hesitation or bearing any doubt, that I am a rich person, as there is no greater treasure in the world than being truly loved. I wish I had known to stop to let them know instead of constantly pressing on through struggles and despair… And this is why I’m so sad that it’s only when I had to think of writing my own will that I realized what I had never actually paid attention to — impermanence — even though it’s been the object of my musing contemplations for pretty much every creative project I have had the privilege to give life to. Irony is the most faithful ally of every wanderer and philosophical fool, I suppose…
there’s no absolute, no truth, no human absolution even, only empathy and forgiveness. The rest is elusive and illusionary. There’s no evolution in temporality.
When my doctors told me the implacable truth of my condition following my last tour, including the inevitable necessity of a heart surgery, I don’t think I seized the gravity of the words they were carefully trying to communicate. I was laughing as I have always laughed off the difficulties I had to face along the way. I survived everything, from early childhood meningitis, to being hit on the head with a hammer, a car hitting me while I was rocking my new big wheel ride, being sexually abused, being offered candies to help a stranger find their supposedly lost dog, and on, and on, and on… Every little piece of my past bleakness slides, scattered amongst the otherwise colorful carousel of pictures I decided to make my story out of. I’m not special. I’m not different from others. Life is what you make out of it. And while I made poor — but heartfelt and honest — relational decisions through the years, I am grateful for most of my days, for most of the people I welcomed home and to whom I offered a place of honor at the table of my existence. Nothing is totally right or wrong, not even evil. When you are disposed to forgive a former friend’s hurtful deeds and are eager to confess its glowing nature in your own inner self, there’s no absolute, no truth, no human absolution even, only empathy and forgiveness. The rest is elusive and illusionary. There’s no evolution in temporality. At least that’s what my father taught me when I first started to elect residency in hospitals as a child: “There is no age, no limitation, no frontier, no decay to your spirit, boy. Time is a global construct to infuse fears within each and every one of us, and when we are scared, we only focus on tangibility, on our mortality… But when you don’t enslave your mind to that precept, you are free to become whatever you want, to define the world as you want it to be for you. You can defy time and every universal parallel we believe we are bound to. We are here and everywhere at the same time. Can you see it?” I don’t think I fully grasped the lesson or concept my father was trying to teach the 6-year-old me, nor have I fully understood what he told me a few hours before he passed away, even though it resonates more and more within me now: “You have always had the strength to live without having any fear of dying, but you sadly denied yourself the most precious thing there is: the ability to grow beyond your very self when you are willing to live — to truly live.”
Is it the reason why I embarked on a travel frenzy the second I had to face the reality of my health condition? Probably it is, yes. But if there’s one thing I cannot fool, it’s my closest friends, and those close friends kept texting me “Alex, I never saw you smile like that before!”, and “Brother, you are radiating on all those pictures, it suits you really really well!” as well as “Where is the usual darkness you had behind your eyes before?! Keep that spirit, you are beautiful!” I don’t know the measure of empowering encouragement and amazement, I just can’t say, but one thing I can say for sure is that I knew right away that I needed to see you before whatever might come next for me. In fact, I told Jeff on the phone right after receiving my diagnosis that I had good and bad news. “The bad news is that from now on, every day counts. The good news is that I want to spend every one of those days with the people I love and care for.” We hit the road almost immediately. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it all over Europe, South America, and Morocco… At least, through pictures and videos, everyone was able to see how happy I am and how resilient I am to face that new challenge. I have too much of an inspiringly busy schedule of projects to share with you all ahead of me to bow down and call it a day, right?!
And that’s what I’ve always been the proudest of; being one of us. Not the center of it all, not the focal point of who we are as a whole. No, one of us.
Therefore, I don’t want you to worry. Life is life and always will be. Everyone has their own obstacles to manage. That being said, it’s our collective connection we have with all our differences that allows the magnificent sum of what we are together to keep growing beyond what it should logically be. And that’s what I’ve always been the proudest of; being one of us. Not the center of it all, not the focal point of who we are as a whole. No, one of us. Sitting, like everyone one of you, at an ever-growing round table, at which the place of honor is held by our determination to offer the best version of ourselves to the others sitting with us. And this is exactly what I experienced in Milan, Paris, and Tokyo; unique individuals from different backgrounds, be it on the cultural, political, generational, religious, economic, or what not level, together, laughing, crying, hugging, remembering and projecting ourselves in the future without temporal worries and free from any measure of our human fears. It felt incredibly rejuvenating, to say the least…
Time doesn’t really care what answers you think you may have found; time knows we rarely dare and ask the real questions in the first place.
Everybody wants to be healed from something they can’t truly define, and if I can foresee the logic underneath some philosophers’ perspectives regarding the fact that we are our own destructive demise, I tend to believe that it’s our inability to touch the invisible that results into most pain we somehow experience… I’m not referring to religion — a fabrication that goes from the parvis of what we contemplate as being holy, a worship of highest divinities, athletes we admire, artists we revere, social and political arenas — but to our multi-faceted unfathomable essence, a self-constructed representation of our own selves inclined towards our inherent feral attraction for self-inflicted miseries, a succession of cleansing penitence amending sins, a referee’s bad call resulting in an unfair loss, an art form that saved our mind from the stupor of feeling nothing at all, a sacrosanct cause to which we have dedicated our passion and for which we have become the unofficial evangelist radicals… Poison for some, remedy for others, we all need to be touched, to be welcomed, to be understood, reason why most of us have found comfort or consolation in a sort of inner struggle settlement with our existential longing, even though it never offered much, if any, quintessential and lasting epiphany beyond any of our feel-good make-believe… For better or worse. Time doesn’t really care what answers you think you may have found; time knows we rarely dare and ask the real questions in the first place. The blur makes the trick look like the real deal, and time holds all the cards that will never flip for us to win. Joy, like its excitements, is a marker between the worries and anguish that we learned to wrap in bright ceremonial cloths to convince our troubled morning that once we cover our cold and shaky feet with its dazzling blaze, our whispering path becomes a clamored voyage for a day…
I know this might sound depressing or fatalistic, if not presumptuously adamant, as a vision of life, death, and furthermore — and maybe you are right to think so for several different reasons — but I never considered such reflections as being negative or defeatist, as much as I have never blamed a mirror for projecting the tiredness of my fading eyes back at me. On the contrary, I find a profound consolation in what I could so easily rebuke the view of. There’s no reversing mechanisms with time, no matter how much we torture our body and soul with Botox and miracle cures. But of all the paralyzingly frights I have to compose with daily, life’s inevitable countdown ain’t one. Irony, and the implacable apathy it results from, remains my greatest and everlasting fear, however. The real decaying process we are terrorized of is not that of the body, but of the heart. And if I don’t understand the concept of distressed aging in a context of our ability to seek, and maybe achieve, emancipating consciousness, the prospect of our inevitable death always prevail against the notion of our immortality and its paradigm like folk heroes we defined as such… deflecting the issues about what I have done with my own life and what am I leaving behind, if I do so…
I too often mix the tangibility of achievements with the notion of purpose.
When my father died, he told me I was the most amazing accomplishment he had done in his life, even though he had nothing to do with the man I became. I didn’t know what to make out of it, to be quite honest. It was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but I was wondering what I had done or accomplished for that broken man losing his battle against cancer to tell me that… I don’t stand flatteries, much less so on someone’s else death bed. So what was it truly about? It haunted me, and that scene kept on playing on repeat, taking different shapes and forms depending on just how willing I was to suffer on any giving occasions — the result of my struggles with seeing myself as nothing but a failure and underachiever. In reality, even the most perfidious or lesser of a man has the ability or the common sense to ensure their prosperity, while I haven’t even achieved that… Having to sit in front of a notary to detail my will before having my heart surgery acted as a major pitfall to my lifelong reality… Not that I should have had kids for the sake of leaving insignificant objects to my heir but more in a cruel reminiscence of the downfalls my journey was made of… Have I run all my life on a treadmill convincing myself that I was going somewhere? It felt like that, sometimes. Maybe because I’m the last remaining one in my bloodline… Ain’t that a strange and weird achievement of absolutely nothing? Here lies Alexandre Serge Henry Jimmy Jean-Guy Jack Foster. No wonder, with all those middle names, I had trouble finding my own identity growing up, or why every time I have one drink too many I lament about it all… I too often mix the tangibility of achievements with the notion of purpose. “Go and make yourself some kids instead of torturing your soul like a monk tired of his own complaining mantra,” a friend kindly laughed at me once. I always laugh. Maybe it’s the mantra that gets old, after all! Who knows… Nonetheless, that’s what I am presently wondering about since I accepted the possibility of being on the last stretch of my story — not that I don’t want to keep on going.
In fact, the way I see it, my recent travels with Jeff that have allowed me to meet some of you and rekindle with old friends don’t make amends for the decisions that I made to live the way I decided to live, nor was this an attempt to write or rewrite the last few pages of my book. It’s gratefulness towards those who gave my existence a meaning I don’t quite understand anymore. And the sole idea of having a stranger’s pieces of heart being transplanted in order for me to stretch my existence a little longer is not only a matter of urgent necessity for me now, but in it also lies a wonderfully humbling symbolic, the passing of someone becoming the life extension of another. A machine will keep me alive during the 6-hour procedure. Does it mean I’ll be dead for a short while? Somehow… But more seriously, if it wasn’t serious enough already, I like the perspective of having another opportunity to be thankful for the little things that still move me to this day… The colorful sky of Virginia, the appeasing chaos of Tangier, the mountain walks I have with my 2 pups MacKaye and Leonard, the hilarious moments I share with my friends, the postcards I write to you, the noises I make with my band, the hugs, the smiles, a good book… even a bad record released by one of my favorite bands! Will I be more appreciative now? For a while, I’ll be. Human nature being what it is, I will no doubt forget, like most of my own song’s lyrics, that I ever opened up about it through this present journal entry, or even deny I shared about it all with anyone else… But I am at peace, serene.
Will I be more appreciative now? For a while, I’ll be. Human nature being what it is, I will no doubt forget, like most of my own song’s lyrics, that I ever opened up about it through this present journal entry.
Therefore, the next couple of days will have quite an uncanny rhythm for me, as I need to get some rest after welcoming my friends and family in Virginia for the new year. I seriously wish I could have had you all at home for the occasion… This family time will be followed by a new series of pre-surgery tests and checkups. I will try to inform you as much as I can, but I won’t be able to “do” much of anything that I usually do, and I deeply thank you for your understanding.
I just wanted to write you those few words to inform you, but mainly to thank you for your words, for your support, your prayers, your good vibrations, your generous gifts, your benevolent presence in Milan, Paris, and Tokyo, your kindness and caring hearts for me. You all give me so much courage and determination and are all so precious to me. Really, there are no words to express how blessed I am for every one of you. I hope I am able to make you feel how utterly significant you are for me in the same way you do with me every day.
Be safe my precious friends, brothers, sisters, and loved ones. May you and your dearest ones be blessed, safe, healthy, fulfilled and remain hopeful during this new season.
Your brother and friend always,
Alex
PS: Oh, I almost forgot to give you some well overdue updates on the creative front side of the otherwise pretty large spectrum that is my health condition. I managed to work on my new album project in the few past weeks and intend to resume writing/production/recording sessions before my surgery that should take place sometime in January. Meanwhile, I will invest myself into the post-tour book in the next coming weeks… I told you, I’m not done just yet, just a bit slower and hopefully wiser…!