11/30/07

Thoughts \ Developed Thoughts \ Rants \ Raves \ Writing

11/30/2007 00:50 -0600 GMT

Fade Away, Wide Awake

If you know me, you know I am a big fan of U2's music. About a quarter of the songs on my iPod are U2's, and if it hadn't broken, it would be a U2 iPod I was listening to. To compensate for that fracture, I got a video iPod with the primary motivation being that I could watch U2 videos on a 2.5" screen.

As ridiculous as that sounds, it was better than I imagined.

I first saw the lads in Los Angeles, from the third row, just as they caught their stride, during the Joshua Tree tour. It made such a spiritual impression on me that I purchased tickets for two more of their shows in the City of Angels. Once more in the Sports Arena, which seats 10,000, and once in the Coliseum, which seats nearly ten times that number. 

Then again, later, during the Zoo TV extravaganza, in the first Bush era, in all the lights and visual-audio overload. I made a quick bootleg of that one.

If you were to place a dollar bet on what I'm listening to on any given occasion, your best bet would be on U2.

Then again on the dark continent, I was at the same hotel where they stayed, in Johannesburg, overlooking the zoo, in the land of their Silver and Gold, and I wondered if they would sing the anti-apartheid song in the era of transformation in the new South Africa.

But they had too much class when Kendall Huff and I saw them play that night...they had a new fight brewing, against AIDS. This was a fight I was just beginning to live and breathe in my own world just two countries north of the place where they finished their PopMart tour.

In between I nearly forgot the Memphis show, front row, earlier in the PopMart tour, lemon and all.

Later, and most recently, I introduced my lovely Zambian wife to my muzungu musical tastes in Atlanta. It was a Mofo show of epic proportions. We were inside the heart, surrounded by the lads and their sound, before the significance of 9/11 added to their poignant message. The Edge was Maggie's favorite, and as usual, I witnessed my better half cutting to the core of any issue - she saw that the Edge was the backbone of what made U2's music special.

I missed their last tour; tickets were too damn expensive for this student to justify. But I still have all the unreleased stuff, all the B-sides, all the live stuff, some bootleg stuff. I have it all.

And in the course of this relationship with the music that U2 has created, I have sometimes gotten complacent in it. It is a heartbeat that I listen to, my meditation, my prayers, vocalized in ways that are articulated better than I would do. As such, the sounds have gotten ordinary, like an overplayed song on the radio.

My sister once remarked about Vertigo when it was near it's release date. She lives in Boston, the Irish-American heartland wherein U2 fanatics are most concentrated. She said Vertigo was overplayed, and it was, but that doesn't mean it isn't a superb song. I listen to it on every occasion when I have had to make a run on the highway into an exam. It gets my blood pumping. As Bono says, "Every now and then, a song comes along that makes you want to burn your house down."

U2 has a passel of songs, and many of them are historically noteworthy. For me, the best of their songs have a rhythmic quality that comes from Edge's guitar and that reminds me of waves in the ocean. The songs that have this characteristic, like One, Bad, Until the End of the World, and others, wash over me, but since I have listened to them a hundred times each, that unique tone has become subdued.

Occasionally however, for some reason, I hear one of U2's songs again as if I were hearing it again for the first time. I heard Bad again tonight, and it hit me as I have tried to described. I heard Bad as a new song, and as it did in the 80s it hit me again, new, fresh, pertinent, relevant, and deeply significant.

In Bad, there's the gentle opening, of light guitar, rhythmic, and just as the rhythm takes hold, the Edge adds bells from the strands at his hand. Larry hits the cymbals in time. And the steady beats are carried by Adam.

"If you twist and turn away"

"If you tear yourself in two again"

"If I could, you know I would, if I could, I would, let it go"

The rhythms pronounce themselves again.

"Surrender"

"Dislocate"

"If I could throw this lifeless lifeline to the wind"

If I could surrender everything that makes me feel secure in order to secure your future, in turn...

"Leave this heart of clay, see you walk, walk away, into the night, and through the rain, into the half light, and through the flame"

"If I could through myself, set your spirit free, I'd lead your heart away, see you break, break away, into the light and to the day"

That last phrase epitomizes what I see a doctor should be. Take your patient's adverse circumstances, find the light, and lead them to it. And in AIDS, where the circumstances are as dire as it gets, and in AIDS, where the flames burn the most, where the obstacles to overcome are most high, in political terms, in passionate terms, in terms of human consumption, these lyrics ring most true.

"True colors fly"

"Colors clash collide in bloodshot eyes"

"If I could, I would let it go"

"This desperation, dislocation, separation, condemnation, revelation, in temptation, isolation, desolation"

"Let it go, and so to find a way"

Then the bells and the drums and the rhythms and the registers climb out again, washing over me like waves of the sea, suddenly again calming, culminating, and crashing in a climax of musical genius...

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     * 

I feel like an aspect of my life is fading away, and I am wakening to the new beginning of being a physician and taking care of people with a new, profound responsibility for those in my care. So fade away. I'm wide awake.

As I leave the responsibilities of medical school behind - the standardized tests, the scheduled rotations with evaluations - I take on the real responsibility that I planned for when taking on this adventure in the first place. And as a studential part of me dies, the loudest part that has been kept silent for too many years is now permitted to roar. 

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     * 

"So let it be"

"Sleep tonight, and may your dreams be realized"