El Anhelo

Tonight in the car on the way back from Leeds, I was struck by the force of vocalist Israel Fernández performing his composition El Anhelo. The overwhelming weight of times past, a gargantuan, writhing mass of experiences remembered and forgotten, flooded over me, staggeringly unexpected, catching me entirely unawares. It has been some time since I gave my attention to flamenco, a sound which had fascinated me as a child and which seemingly saturates my memories of summer, intensely tied up with confused, hopeful love and blissful naivety, untroubled by adult realities and cloudy horizons. How this music is written into my very being, violently shaking long-dormant emotions to raging wakefulness. The surging force of nostalgia is terrifying, and terrifyingly intoxicating. You can get lost there, a stranger to your younger self, an aged doppelgänger behind a one-way mirror, proof if ever it was needed that you never really were, no more than you are, or you will be. Like Narcissus mercilessly ensnared, lives are squandered here in visceral hindsight or desperate anticipation, fearsome yearning, el anhelo. The intervening years have turned me away from blistering defiance, incandescent resolve, towards a place of boundless quietude, perpetual renewal, patient drifting. There was a time I loathed the word content — so pathetic, so docile, so unambitious. Better to reach, to grasp, to rush, to finally outwit time in all its haughty primacy, to be the first conqueror in an eternal struggle measured in suffering and loss. But there is no peace here, for the struggle itself is but a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, chains made of smoke. There is only now, a shifting, roiling, infinite potentiality, everything and no-thing, a oneness that belies the separation of self, a separation from others, a separation from endless versions of you. Where do we leave all our former selves? When does one stop being one self, and step into the shoes of a new, updated self? Do the other selves continue on, ignorant of the irresistible call of oblivion, or are the selves shelved in some cosmic refrigerator, doomed to sit shoulder to shoulder with weirdly familiar yet horrifyingly unknowable yesterdays and tomorrows? No, nothing has been left behind, and nothing is yet to gain. Everything is already here, and always has been. There is no shadow at the centre of the star. Look forward, look backward, look upward, look downward, you will find yourself smiling back, the universe pouring through your very eyes.