Turiya Sings
I reached out to the man I was still in the process of unloving in a squalid, unshowered and depressed state in my Airbnb in Mexico City. Dangerous territory, but to be fair, I had only two friends I could talk about mental health with, two friends at all really. He and I had decided to be friends after not being romantically compatible. If we got it right at being Just Friends this time after at least three failed attempts, I’d technically have three friends. Our connection had been deep enough that we had shared our experiences with overcoming chronic and life-altering and even life-threatening conditions with each other. The countless doctors and hospital visits. The useless treatments. The uncaring American healthcare system. He with Crohn’s, and myself with depression.
I texted him, “Hey I have a question, as a friend. And I don’t know if you can relate. But what do you do to help with depression when it feels out of your control?”
He asked if I was struggling right now. I plainly answered, “Yes.”
We went back and forth for a bit. He gave me his advice. All I said was “yeah” in response to some kind of positivity and words about perseverance one can only achieve with proper executive function. My kidneys have been hurting the last 2 days from holding my piss for hours at a time in a state of depressive paralysis. I’m not really able to transmute my energy right now, love. I’m suicidal. I’ve been googling creative unmessy ways to do it again, although the best way is simply to jump off a high rise building if you really want it done. I did not tell him the italicized portion, of course.
After no response to his long-winded yet thoughtful advice about locking into creativity and writing when one is depressed, he added, “Alice Coltrane always helps.” One of many things we bonded over during our brief honey-moon phase was our shared love of Alice.
I gave it a shot, quite familiar with her music. Some of her devotional music truly does require movement of the body, joy expressed through dance. Not all, but some. Her discography is her life’s journey, her spirit’s transformation through her compositions, and she gifted it to us. I decided at first to forgo my favorite album of hers, a 1982 powerhouse compilation of stripped down haunting organs and synths with her contralto humbly and powerfully praising, for the benefit of all beings. The only percussion is her perfect rhythm on the keys, aside from maybe one song where you can hear soft and sparse drumming. It still carries a melancholic nature throughout the album. Many of the songs sound like they are being sung in between states of peace, awe, and something mixed with repentance and soberness, like praying on one’s knees, if it would please the gods, for the benefit of all. She both conjures god and bows to him with her voice. A conduit. Turiya Sings.
I tried to wake up my being with more rapturous songs from her various albums, but was not remotely near this frequency mentally, immobilized in bed. I tried with her more complex spiritual free jazz compositions with Pharaoh Sanders, hoping the synapses in my brain would fire off with the genius contained in each bar, but my brain could not keep up with the pace. Eventually I landed on a song I hadn’t heard before, “Om Shanti”, released on an album in 2017, 10 years after her ascension. And I began to weep again. Because I could not see myself in god’s children, I was not in god, god was not in me, and I didn’t deserve to be alive for this reason. I feel nothing. I am removed from the collective consciousness, collective love, adding no love, joy or peace to humankind whatsoever. What purpose do I serve here? I am already dead in my soul. God, take the body, the beating heart that goes on for no one but maybe my mother. I am a hollowed out church. My bones are rows of empty pews. There is no song worthy of rejoice inside me.
“Help me,” I whispered over and over again, to the ceiling and to any ancestor or god who would hear me. More hot tears burned the sides of my cheeks. I was so thirsty for water, but couldn’t move.
I played the song again on my phone. This was the only movement available to me. I lay again, flattened. Then my left pinky finger trembled like some life was inside of it. I silently cried in frustration at how pathetic my mind was. This disability is a joke to someone who is living and dying with, I don’t know, ALS. I am not paralyzed. But my hand twitched again, trying to become alive.
I sat up in bed with immense effort, as if I lived in the body of someone who was 90 years old.
And instead of getting up to pee and get a glass of water and open the blinds, I wrote.
I immediately thought about how my friend Charlie, who had died earlier that year, had asked me during the pandemic to write a piece on the 2021 public remastered re-release of Turiya Sings for his independent and endearing music publication, as the album had only been available to be pirated at that time unless one found a rare physical copy.
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Charlie lived in the same rickety old apartment building as me in Pilsen, Chicago in our early twenties. We realized we were neighbors when we were waiting for the bus one night. He had no coat on in the windy 20 degree Fahrenheit weather, and was wearing a plain white t-shirt and his eyes were frantic. I asked him if he was okay and if he needed a coat. He said, like it made perfect sense, “My coat’s inside and it’s always warm on the bus. I don’t want to miss the bus.” He motioned to our building. Made sense to me.
My unit was beautiful yet frigid due to its poorly insulated floor-to-ceiling windows. I would unlock the door to my apartment and see my breath condensate inside as I cranked the old, grated gas heater that made questionable noises. I sat as close as I could to it without burning my clothing to warm my frozen hands after the walk home from the train. After I moved out of the apartment, Charlie texted me a picture of the half-torched apartment building and told me that my unit had burned down in a gas fire.
We found ourselves again in Los Angeles, barely touching our thirties. Thankfully his white t-shirts were weather-appropriate there. He was truly an endless and emphatic encyclopedia of not only music, but cinema, and not only art, but psychology, emotion, and raw fucking humanity. Philosophy and theology came naturally to him as well. He could talk to you about any of these topics with both confidence and hunger, both teacher and student. He reveled in the splendors of human creativity, and in his mind there existed no hierarchy among artists. All of it was “fucking sick!!!!” to Charlie. A lightning bolt. The Criterion Collection was obsolete next to his recommendations. Crate digging at a record store was not nearly as fun as simply asking what he thought about a particular genre of anything from any decade. There are not enough words in English to describe him. I would need idioms from multiple languages, and I wouldn’t be shocked to know if he’d already known them. The easiest one to describe him would be “friend”.
I hadn’t ever had the heart to ask his friends how he passed. I had my ideas and did not want to be right.
I remember just 2 days before we even knew Alice’s album would be re-released, had no idea at all, I was wholeheartedly telling him inside my shit hole East Hollywood apartment about how it had saved my life, and how he’s gotta hear it as a fan of hers as well. And, how I didn’t know that it was even a Hindu devotional album when I first heard it when I was 25, I just thought it was one of the sickest ambient albums ever made. I had no idea who she truly was. I stumbled upon it on an ex’s hard drive and fell in love with it. Many jazz fanatics, particularly men, cannot see her past her husband. I’m unsure of why anyone would compare their respective work. I digress. But upon her introduction, I was also completely ignorant to the impact that her music would have on my existence! Charlie texted me a link to the official re-release of the album available on streaming platforms for the first time. “We were JUST talking about this! Holy shit. Fuck, it’s so good.” As if it were divine timing.
Chuck was openly bipolar and his passion for music was his most infectious form of knowledge and excitement. “The piece can be about anything”, he reminded me. “I don’t know of anyone who’s more up for the task. You gotta do it, Dre. It can even be about mental health, especially about mental health even. Dre, I promise you, I cannot think of a more suitable voice to put Alice’s legacy into the context of mental health.” I reread our old texts sometimes. I told him I was intimidated by the piece and he only encouraged me further. He would always read my little broken pieces of work, and this was enough for him to believe in whatever I would write next. He knew that I had been struggling through a divorce and a privately snowballing Xanax addiction, and we were friends who supported our respective highs and lows with love and honesty and humor to get through it. We had an allegiance to the mentally ill weirdos and artists of the world, and that meant to each other. Where others saw darkness, we saw all the light around it to cast such a shadow. We chose to celebrate life in that light as much as possible. It was precious and fleeting for people like us.
My addiction and my depression were eating me alive in Los Angeles, I was rampantly losing weight, and frankly I was not up for the task of finishing a cohesive piece of writing. And I didn’t. Who was I to speak on Alice Coltrane? Swamini Turiyasangitananda? I should be doing more research, I thought. I just loved her music and spirit, like anyone else. There are entire devotional groups in her honor. There were rampant devotees in Los Angeles, especially where her Malibu ashram was located. She did not seek out spiritual gurus, god themself was her teacher. Devotion was her gift as a teacher, Turiya her name. I didn’t see then that to honor her was also to honor myself. That to love her was to love myself. That I didn’t need to write a complete biography on Alice Coltrane to express how her music had transformed my soul forever. She lead me slowly to a vast internal and collective peace I never knew existed before, through the doors of her songs and devotion.
Back in Mexico, I let Turiya Sings play on, start to finish. Let Alice and whomever she channeled hold me and then release me anew, as they had countless times before. I opened the blinds. I took a piss and thanked my kidneys for their hard work. I thanked god, and I thanked Charlie.
Chuck, I finished the piece. And did you hear me when I talked to the ceiling? Was that you, breathing life into my hand?
Chuck, the piece is finished. Thank you.
******
I reached out to Charlie’s best friend after writing this and asked if he’d like to read it. I didn’t know if I was overstepping during his grief, but I figured he might be happy to hear any anecdotes about Charlie. His response was overwhelmingly positive. I can see why he was his best friend. They both encouraged friends and acquaintances alike to flourish in expression, authenticity to oneself, and perseverance in their endeavors. To be real and connected above anything else. He, like Charlie would have, congratulated me on my writing and thanked me for sharing it with him.
He joked about how having depression was almost a prerequisite for Charlie to trust you, to know that you, too, felt too deeply. To know that you felt the full spectrum of the human experience.
Then he told me it was Charlie’s birthday yesterday, the day I wrote the piece, and what a great gift it was to him. Charlie, I forgot your birthday, but I got you this: I love you.
