THE MAN How Psyence Fiction helped me learn to live again with chronic pain SARAH ROSE Features Editor
Being the first in line for a concert is probably the furthest thing from Psyence Fiction was the ambitious project of DJ Shadow and James being inconspicuous when you’re seventeen and trying to sneak into Lavelle, a man barely a teenager himself when it was released in a bar. This wasn’t something I’d considered while waiting two hours 1998. On the surface, the record weaves a sort of space opera using to see DJ Shadow outside of Flames Central in Calgary. Then again, an AKAI-MPC60, a pair of turntables, and a guitar in the hands of I’ve never been good at hiding. Metallica’s bassist. Sounds from Blade Runner to The Twilight Zone and the Star Wars Christmas Special accompany the narrators: Kool I borrowed money for the ticket from my mom, fabricating some story G Rap, Thom Yorke, Alice Temple, Mike D, Badly Drawn Boy, and about going out as teenagers do. I think she knew. After watching your Richard Ashcroft. teenager spend a year locked in their room—writhing in the same body rending pain daily, dance shoes and textbooks left buried under Joan Didion famously wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves a thin layer of dust—those moments of fleeing normalcy must feel stories in order to live. […] We look for the sermon in the suicide.” like the first glass of water after crying. Underneath the quirky frame, Psyence Fiction was an invitation for me to explore a more existential journey, to the idea of fighting back. The bouncer asked for my ID, pulling me out of my excited reverie. This was the moment I spent hours preparing for. I handed him the The fog of undiagnosed chronic illness is like standing on a train track, card borrowed from my friend’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, every hearing the distant grind of a thousand-ton death machine barreling bit of information memorized. Having the wrong eye colour listed down the rail, seeking out a terminal sense it will always refuse you. would be a good tell for an attentive bouncer, but as long as he didn’t You’re left chained to the tracks, paralyzed. You’ll never be able to ask me to take off the aviators covering half my face, he wouldn’t be move forward without looking over your shoulder, far away horns able to tell. He wordlessly glanced up and down for a few seconds, blaring in the distance as a reminder. Life becomes as uninhabitable taking in the girl in a dog tag necklace standing cross-armed in front as a rock jutting out from an angry sea, left to the whim of erosion by of him, then took my ticket. raging waves. Inside my island of isolation, Psyence Fiction found me. Maybe he knew, too. All I knew after walking through the doors was that I was there to fight for my life and that there’s no thought at 120 decibels.
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It filtered in quietly, beneath the glow of my iPod screen and moonlight streaming in through the window of my bedroom. A flicker of radio static and the hiss of space—then it hit. Drums so loud I jolted up, like gasping for air after drowning. I motioned to the volume controls,
