Autumn Closing In

I've spent much of my adult life pining for a composite moment of ecstasy experienced in my youth through recorded music. Looking now to name this moment in a word, I first thought of ascension, after John Coltrane's tumultuous 1966 album, but I've settled instead on the more modest lift, after George McCrae's "I Get Lifted," a 1974 funk single produced by H. W. Casey and Richard Finch, the pair behind KC and the Sunshine Band. I love all the rests in the record's dark G minor groove, and how what would normally be a cymbal part—three hi-hat hits followed by a crash—is ingeniously, breathily vocalized: chick-a-chick aahh.

I can't say precisely when my nostalgia for this feeling began, but in retrospect it seems to have been immediate, as when you start to mourn an ice cream cone before even reaching the bottom scoop. It was at least premature. By my mid-twenties I was more devoted to music than I had been in my teens, but my responses to it, I was sure, were slightly yet crucially diminished. If my not terribly practical ambition was to create a life centered on music, my fantasy was to hear everything, always, as if for the first time, with a seventeen-year-old's irreproducible, unrenewable ardor, but without having to suffer again the curfews and general indignities that come with being seventeen.

One needn't squint to make out the romantic inheritance behind my plight. Wordsworth was twenty-eight when he wrote "Tintern Abbey," his famous poem about nature, transcendence, loss, restoration, and memory, this last described as a "dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and harmonies." The poem's speaker has returned, after a five-year absence, to pastoral and sylvan settings overlooking the titular Welsh ruins on the west bank of the River Wye. His bounding earlier visit has become a mnemonic salve against the "weary weight of this unintelligible world," an exemplar of those times when, elevated from corporeal existence, "we see into the life of things." At the poem's midpoint, an em-dash introduces a twinged sigh:

            …—That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more,And all its dizzy raptures. …

Now, like a seven-inch single, I'm forty-five, a more customary and embarrassing perch from which to indulge in nostalgia. It's a pink-clouded morning in Minnesota, and I'm listening to Boy in Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, who was still in his teens when he released the album in 2003 and whose stage name sounds like it could have been derived from Wordsworth's above line. "I'm just sittin' here, I ain't saying much, I just gaze," he raps, "I'm looking into space while my CD plays." The keyboard bleeps in a minor key, drawing much of its tension from the flattened second, an ominous semitone to most Western ears. The lyric is about gun violence, depression, and lost innocence, but I focus today on how its "I," which is both Dizzee Rascal and his listener, foregrounds music in a way that seems natural to many teenagers, inert to many adults. If only for ten or fifteen minutes each day, I've been trying to return to that characteristically teenage approach: to listen to music not just when I'm cooking dinner, doing my yoga-mat exercises, or driving my son to a Magic: The Gathering tournament, but rather to listen to the exclusion of all other activity except contemplation and dancing, as if music were still primary, demanding, and mysterious.

Sciatica is pain running down the course of the sciatic nerve, from the lower back to the foot. My case is most activated by sitting in uncomfortable chairs, which is almost to say, chairs, and by pedaling a car's ignition or a piano's sustain, which I tend to overwork on ballads. Imagine a writer who puts ellipsis points after nearly every phrase, hoping each time for ineffable plangency, and you'll more or less understand my approach to the sustain...