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The Kitchen Sink - Installment #7
by Benjy eisen - benjy@archive.phish.net

"ZEN MOMA"

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"I look out and see these freaky people who are just dancing all over the place and I completely understand why they need to do that. It helps them shed the bullshit, and it helps us." - Trey Anastasio (Guitar World; August '97)

The first time I ever made love to a girl, I learned how to dance. I'm not going to get into the how or the where or with whom and quite frankly I don't even believe I'm bringing it up. It's funny though - I remember for some reason a friend of mine telling me that when you lose your virginity you become a man. Another friend took it even higher and said "You'll feel like a god." I didn't feel like either of those, actually. Rather, I just felt GOOD. Like after a Phish show.

It wasn't the best time I made love though. The thing was: I was thinking about what I was doing, was I doing this alright, was that going to hold like that, was I not doing something I was supposed to, does she do this or do I? It was like being lost in a very, very wonderful place. Once you get to know the place a little better, though, I think you can appreciate it more because you can just **be there**. And appreciate every second for what it is, without worrying about what comes next. No pun intended...really.

When you can connect with someone or something so deeply, when you grok it to the point of actually intermingling with it, a sort of transcendence occurs. That is to say, you transcend your body. You become free, in a very real sense, letting your spirit swirl and twirl and twist around in an ever elegant and enchanted tango. And it's not just with one other person - when you dance, you dance with the whole universe.

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In the spring of 1996, Trey Anastasio assembled a dream line-up of a dozen or so musicians, each noted for their improvisational ability, for a two-night stand at The Academy of Music in New York City. It was the last two nights of music to ever be performed there.

That music lives forever.

Trey named the project "Surrender To The Air" and I think there's something to that. It wasn't just a name - it was a philosophy. When you surrender your personal hopes and fears, and you dedicate yourself to whatever **the moment** brings, the jams that occur are pure and golden. It is the reason why that music will live forever even if no one had ever got it on tape. It remains in the air!

At the time, each set seemed to me to last an eternity. That is definitely not to say that it "dragged on." You see it is a common thing for me nowadays to start to gather my stuff together and prepare to leave in the middle of a set. Oh don't worry - I wouldn't even think of it. It's just that, until the next song starts up, I'm convinced that there is nothing more the band can do. During that YEM or that Bowie or Bathtub Gin, something happens, something big I mean, where I snap and suddenly I'm no longer in an arena full of overzealous security guards and alien mafia and high school kids who can't hold their liquor. Rather I'm transported to a place where nothing exists. Where there is no time. It is a temporary feeling that feels like eternity. Funny how that works. But for that moment, I am actually **inside** that moment, twisting and turning and plummeting down its cosmic tubular design. For a moment I am that design....**I am that moment.** And then "the moment ends, though I feel winds."

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Fuck transcendence. I want transcen-DANCE. I want to be able to take the universe by the horns and say, "Oh, you want to play like THAT, do you?" I don't want to think it through or second-guess but rather make a mad dash for the nelson, wrestling it to the floor and it makes no difference whether I'm the one pinning or the one being pinned. Everyone is both...at all times.

There's a well-known idea that Buddhism has waltzed with since its very beginnings and that the rest of us, in the Western world, are just starting to engage. It is the idea of "mindfulness."

Our everyday state of affairs are saturated with a limited field of vision - we see bits and pieces, one followed by another, without equating them as smaller pieces of the whole. And without realizing that behind those couple of pieces are an infinite amount of more pieces, each one in constant motion, each one dancing in harmony to the great song.

By this I mean merely that as you drove to work this morning, or as you walked to class or whatever it was that you were doing, you weren't aware of the endless amount of activity going on for light-years in every direction, even if you had contemplated the syncronicity before. And from our limited field of vision it is nearly impossible to see everything that happens in a given second as being equally important or interdependent. We get caught up in a chain of events, a string of moments connected to each other, rather than being caught up in the moment alone, connected with **everything**. So instead we think about that girl we met at a party last week or what's for dinner tonight or if we were supposed to take a right at the next light or the one after that.

When you start to understand that the universe has existed for over five billion years and that, related to an average lifetime, the entire history of human existence wouldn't even take up one second of one day....when you start to understand that even centuries and millenniums pass by as effortlessly and as unnoticed as the minutes do while sleeping, time blows up to the point of being timeless. And that's when the individual moments become more important.

When you throw down at a show and your eyes are closed and the music pulsates with you and you surrender yourself to the air, letting every note pour in with all the essence of the universe contained in its vibrations, time stands still but feet begin to move. And you get down for the ages. And you get down for humanity and beyond that too - for the one thing Col. Forbin and the Lizards overlooked is that you don't need to read Icculus to get it....not if his words are contained in the bottom-end funk of a Ghost or the cinematic leads of a Hood jam. You find your body in motion, alligning itself with the constellations and your day-to-day of daily routine seems like a dream as you dance awake. You live timelessly in the moment and the moment, in turn, becomes timeless.

This works out good for me because I'm terrible with time. I'm always running a little bit late or a couple minutes early and sometimes I forget entirely. And I'm not a great conversationalist when trying to follow directions, because I'm always looking for that particular street or red brick house at the corner. I get caught up in these things. I think about a girl I just met at some party last week or what's for dinner tonight or if I just missed the turn I was supposed to make. Not that any of that really matters, but it's fun to pretend that it does.

I'd make a terrible Buddhist and an even worse monk. But I make an excellent tour head I think.

People say that music, like any drug, is an escape. Bullshit it's an escape!! Quite the opposite, it gets back to what is real because it understands that it doesn't matter if you have to do laundry today or if tomorrow is trash day. Taking too much time to think about those things is the real escape. They're the danger!! They're the distractions holding us back!!

Because when you ram that soundboard patch up your ass, you better believe in electricity! That electrical current is going to go through every vein in your body, making you dance in hallways and on lawns and in arenas and clubs and amphitheaters across the nation, just as sure as that same electrical current is lighting up every building in New York City.

When Phish plays Limb By Limb, the same electricity that carries every note from Trey's guitar to his amp and ultimately to your ears is the same electricity that powers the modem that you used to log onto this web page to read this column. And that is something that is right here, now.

And so when when we get lost in the moment of live music, when we find our bodies in motion held fast to the funk of a MOMA, for that one moment we transcend all of the little triumphs and tragedies of our individual lives and we drink deeply from the waters of the universe, holding the cup to our lips as did everyone both before and after us and I'd be lying if I said the result wasn't heady and freaky just a tad bit intoxicating. And, above all I think, it **moves** us, keeping us in time.

And that's when we learn how to dance.

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**Columnist Benjy Eisen is currently applying for membership in the Menudo fan club after being kicked out of Punky Brewster's in '86 for inappropriate behavior. Apparently he had too much Punky Power.**

benjy@archive.phish.net
copyright 1999
The Toga Rogue Publishing