The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier

Author:Kevin Brockmeier
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307377104
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Turn to page.

You select a mix CD a friend sent you and put it into the stereo, listening as the first song strikes up with an artificial needle hiss. Sometimes, during the slow-lit, lingering afternoons of high school, you would sit down and close your eyes for an entire album, just letting the music wash through you. Every so often back then you might catch yourself swaying your neck or whisking the air with your hands during one of the more expressive passages, but mostly you would lose track of your body altogether, until the last note of the last track faded away and you returned to the four walls of your bedroom as if awakening from a dream.

These days you need something to occupy your other senses while you listen. As the CD plays, you let your eyes travel over your bookcase, following a stepladder of colors from the top shelf to the bottom. This is the test: to see if you can make the entire climb using solely the books with red bindings, say, or solely the books with blue. It is a pointless exercise, but you are secretly pleased when the only color that gives you any trouble is brown.

Midway through the disc is a scratchy recording of Hoagy Carmichael singing “Stardust.” Every time you hear the piece, it makes you think of your grandparents dancing to songs like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” holding each other close to songs like “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” falling in love to songs like “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” How such simple tunes could have stirred such emotion in them will forever bewilder you, though no doubt your own grandchildren will someday think of you dipping your shoulders to “This Charming Man” or feeling your heart screw tight to “Hallelujah” with the same feeling of affectionate mystification.

Outside a siren goes racing toward somebody's tragedy. There is a ten-second gap in the music as the noise drowns the instruments out. Then the drums knock through the blare, making room for the guitars, and gradually the song reclaims the room.

The CD ends with Van Morrison singing “Sweet Thing,” a track you never tire of listening to. You love the way it loops and rises and loops around on itself, again and again and again, like a hundred circles stacked one on top of another, and the way Van Morrison's voice seems to carry so much sorrow and so much exultation at one and the same time. It is as if he were calling out to himself from the cusp of some precipitous decline, just young enough and just wise enough to celebrate in the face of all his suffering.

“And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain,” he sings, “and I will never, ever, ever grow so old again.”

There is a part of you that would like to adopt those words as your manifesto.

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