Blown in the Wind
Mandalay, Myanmar, March 2nd, 2015
Salaroche

As I listened to Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 release of “I am a Rock” a couple of days ago I was transported back in time to the moment I first heard that song. At the time I was living in El Salvador, where they only have two yearly seasons, the rainy one and the dry one, but measured by general Western standards the moment in question must have happened around early Fall of that year.

As a seventeen year-old aspiring singer-guitarist, I had recently hooked up with a well-known local drummer called “Chamba” who also happened to be my neighbor. In his company I took my first steps in the use of some of the popular mind-altering substances of the day, which were by then part of his daily staple as well as that of a good number of other musicians too.

Most importantly, however, through him I was able to meet some other interesting people who also lived in my neighborhood, one of whom played an essential part in the episode that drove me to write these words: The name of that special character was “Enano” (Shorty) Lacayo. Enano was a lively, energetic guy with an easy smile and a joyful ready-to-burst laugh that he usually let out at the smallest of opportunities.

When I first met him he was very ardently telling Chamba about the new records he had recently gotten, many of them recordings that had only just reached the top of the US Billboard charts. By the end of his expressive exposé, Enano offered to make a reel-to-reel copy of those songs for Chamba, at which point I interjected asking whether he could make a copy for me as well. Enano and I were not friends at that moment, so he was a bit startled at my request but, with a smile in his face and looking me straight in the eye, he said “sure, why not?”

A few days later I got a call from Chamba telling me I could go pick up my copy of the songs at Enano’s place, which I did as soon as I could. To my delight, the copy was of a perfectly professional quality. Enano had very good tape players/recorders at home and had done an outstanding job in putting the song collection together. On top of that, my dad’s stereo equipment was of a very good quality too, which made listening to those songs a veritable pleasure to my ears.

Among others, the tape contained two famous songs I still recall listening to: “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds and “I am a Rock”, by Simon and Garfunkel. Both those songs got indelibly imprinted in my mind and, to this day, there are still occasions in which right out of the blue either of them just springs into my consciousness with all the peripheral memories that usually come along with songs whenever we recall them. The moment that this time around lured me to my computer keyboard is a twice-as-much intense version of those occasions.

I even remember one particular instance when I was at home listening to “I am a Rock”, trying to equalize the song to a point that suited my mood of the moment, when my dad walked into the living room and stood there watching me while he listened to the song, paying attention to the different bright and middle tones I was adding or subtracting from the mix. My dad was a conservatory-trained musician and a very good guitarist too, so his ear was at least as sensitive and developed as mine, if not more so. His reactions to my equalization, therefore, were quite telling to me as far as what he thought sounded well or not was concerned.

From that point in time on, memories related to that song jump back and forth across the years as if “I am a Rock” was the axle around which several relevant events in my life revolved. Of course, I could say the same about a few other songs and circumstances, but the flashbacks I’m talking about in these paragraphs are the ones that that particular song awakened in me.

The fact is that the songs Enano copied for me during those days in 1966 were like harbingers of a few marvelous things to come. Less than a couple of years later I joined a rock & roll band and had a considerable hit with them with me in lead vocals. Later I co-formed a couple of experimental groups which led me to eventually join some communes up in the mountains, which led me to experiment with hallucinogenics, at which point my life took a turn that many years later brought me to embrace the discipline of Jnana Yoga.

Along the way I met many people and experienced many situations of different kinds and qualities so that, in looking at them from the perspective of this moment, it all looks like a rainbow-colored papier-mâché collage sculpted in bas-relief over the course of the years, while above it all hover the songs that signify each of the salient moments seared in my memory, along with the accompanying characters and peripheral circumstances that add further significance to those moments.

At times it all feels like having lived different incarnations in the span of a single one, as if the subjective witness in me has remained unchanged while the objective observed has moved around, transformed, and evolved in a fashion similar to that of changing costumes during a theater play. At the same time, the rest of the cast continues to enter and exit the stage seemingly at ramdom, many of them never to return, while new characters come and go more often and faster than the scenes and the scenario can ever manage to change.

Sad moments, happy moments, exhilarating ones, passionate ones, each of them leaving its own imprint on the canvass of existence, only so that they may someday spring back into my consciousness whenever any present event or circumstance triggers them right out of the subconscious, thereby in fact reducing them to mere fleeting recollections of a road once travelled never to be travelled again.

Enano passed away many years ago. According to what I hear he went down into the Pacific Ocean while skipping playfully close over the waves in a small airplane. But he is not the only one among those late sixties and early seventies friends to have departed. There are other Salvadoran musician and artist friends who have also left this world. The pianist-songwriter “Bolo” Martinez, for one, also passed away accidentally while swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

Then there is the singer-songwriter “Tamba” Aragon, who became a guerrilla commander during El Salvador’s civil war and was shot dead in battle by a member of the National Guardsmen, Mauricio “Burro” Cerén, who I’m told was an active member of some Salvadoran death squads and was gunned down in the streets of his hometown by the guerillas, the painter Guillermo Huezo, the pianist-composer Alex Bella, the eccentric commune-sponsor Miriam Interiano, the guitarist “Guayo” Melendez… all of them with their corresponding chapters encrypted on each other's book of life.

In contrast, “I am a Rock” is not a song meant to inspire anyone to embark on the search for communal experiences of any sort. It is a song telling of a self-imposed isolation from society, which basically amounts to a negation of the beauty of love and friendship. It talks of shields and fortresses held and built against the possibility of pain that all human relations of their own weight usually entail. The song’s premise was intentionally planted at the core of all things that the sixties rebellion was supposed to be struggling against: Any kind of insensitivity towards our fellow human beings.

Yet, the short recollections I have mentioned above are all interrelated and openly associated to the dreamworld that in the long run turned out to be the late 60s countercultural movement that took place across the Western hemisphere. As a result, all of those remembrances are scattered in my memory like fragmented remnants of a hemispheric micro Supernova of illusions that finally crumbled at the dawn of the Disco era of the 70s.

The fact is that, except for a few songs that some of us recorded together, there is nothing tangible left from those years that any of us could pinpoint and say “this is what it was all about”. All that joy, all that sadness, all those arguments, agreements and disagreements, all that lovemaking, all those parties and personal conversations, all of it has already vanished in the fog of time as if it had never taken place.

There is a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism referred to as the Sand Mandala whereby a group of Monks-artists get together in a spacious hall and design a large, beautiful, and very intricate mandala using differently-colored sand as their main material. The point being that once the Mandala is finished it is destroyed with what could easily be perceived as slightly disdainful strokes of the hand, thereby symbolizing the ephemeral nature of human existence in general and the ultimate irrelevance of all that we may do in this world in particular.

It is from a similar perspective that I started writing these words, as all that I have mentioned before is gone, as if I had fallen asleep that day in 1966 when I first listened to “I am a Rock” and had woken up a few days ago when I listened to that very same song again, and everything that ever happened in between was nothing but a dream, a mirage, an illusion, all of it turned to nothing but thin dust, Blown in the Wind.


Salaroche