The first time I ever heard this Bright Eyes song was on YouTube, sometime around 2011 after being recommended I listen to "At the Bottom of Everything" by a girl I was madly in love with at the time. Summer camp before freshman year had brought us together, and my adolescent self as well as numerous acts of good faith drove me to take her word as gospel so I sought the song out. Afterall, she had also recommended I listen to "Between the Bars" by Elliott Smith which I somehow got ahold of and learned the tablature for marking the first time I sang in front of anyone.
If I recall, the monologue at the beginning of the Bright Eyes song was confusing to me at the time, and I put off listening to it under the pretense that it must have been a bad upload, or not the real song. Later of course I found it and it went on to be one of my all time favorites, still to this day. I've thought about what the song means quite a bit, especially the titular line given toward the end of the song during a spoken word interlude, after the plane has begun to fall out of the sky. As the plane plummets toward the ocean, Oberst sings:
" And then we'll get down there
Way down to the very bottom of everything
And then we'll see it, we'll see it, we'll see it "
The very first time I ever took acid was in my dorm room at the University of Colorado. I remember having a conversation with some acquaintances that night about the trip on mushrooms they were planning to take as well, I think it was late spring on a weekend. My roommate Javier and I had discussed it before, and we knew someone, Jesse Deutchman I think, who sold at the time. He described how he had devised a system to send air sealed containers of pot back to his friends in New York, and unlike the kid in our hall who was eventually arrested for his over involvement with drug dealing Jesse was our most reasonably safe bet when it came to obtaining the drug.
It was late when I came back, and I really don't recall how it came to happen that we would take that drug so spontaneously. I certainly didn't suggest it, but I may have egged it on. Jesse was there and after some ruminating we decided, fuck it, and he went back to his dorm to get the goods. I remember being somewhat taken by the fact that the tiny square was blank. At the time I don't think I knew it was customary to have a blotter covered in some colorful bears, nor did I expect it to look more intimidating that it was, but I was still surprised by how unassuming tabs look, considering their power, and I still feel that way now. We took the drugs around 11:00 at night and had honestly a very nice time. Admittedly, being in an enclosed environment and at night is far, far from ideal and I think those concerns, while assuaged by spontaneity, were legitimate as evidenced by the sleepless night. Still, there were some profound moments.
I remember after Jessee had left Javier and I sat on the couch and channel surfed for a while, sort of in a daze. We were sitting in the darkened room completely raptured by the moving pictures on the screen as well as completely at their mercy. In the same way that music sort of fills a space with an energy, a vibe, or a current of potent particles subject to change whenever the next track comes on, the television with its stimulating lights and sounds was almost too much to conceive at the time. In that mesmerized state I recall Javier suddenly flipping the channel to reveal a sudden, shocking close-up of a thousand year old decrepit corpse, completely static on screen, and yet pouring out of the screen with an indelible chaos. We screamed, naturally, I think the adrenalin and the delay in my drug addled brain left me a few seconds to instinctively look away, my head jerking to the side while Javier convulsed and legitimately exuded terror. Once a semblance of reason returned to my body I remember asking him "what is it? What is it?" knowing that looking for myself was anything but a good idea. Within a moment, the History channel program on Egyptian mummies cut away from the close-up of some king tut to reveal a very stable and boring looking women explaining about the corpse scientifically, and Javier reassured me I could look, that it was just a Mummy after all. The absurdity of our terror was quickly overcome by laughter and release of tension, and we continued channel surfing a bit feeling somewhat more seasick and hesitant.
Another important memory that night was the first inkling of the feeling everyone who has ever talked about acid has been trying to get at to explain or experience vicariously since psychedelics were discovered. For me, at least in that moment, it felt more or less along the lines of a sense of oneness. Nothing too extreme, no such extreme unshackling as ego-death, but it was a very particular feeling and most important the sort of feeling you get really deep in your bones. I'm reluctant to recall this memory through overly rose-colored glasses as I feel is so often the case trying to explain these experiences, and while I don't want to under sell it in any way, I suppose I feel its important to point out this feeling is not one of those irretrievable onces that you don't ever really have access to unless you're high. I think the deceptively mundane element of this sensation being that it is universally attainable, or at least imaginable, is exactly what makes it useful.
I was sitting under my lofted bed in my desk chair, and I'm almost certain I was listening to Mr. Tambourine man at the time. Jesse Javier and I had taken a bit of a break I think from debautcherous conversaions and reassuring each other that "talking about the trip" was normal ( I recall a moment of intense relief when after nervously bringing up what it feels like for the 100th time and wondering if the meta-conversation was getting at the headspace of my trip partners, Jesse, the certified veteran and participant turned trip sitter said to me simply "you gotta talk about the trip."). I remember feeling like there was a very faint vibration....an almost quite sound in your head, almost the quiet buzz of touching a washing machine through a wall upstairs, just a very distant and yet near sensations of a bassline. Or a...bottom. Something that felt profoundly "there", and I remember saying aloud that it felt something like love, or that it was the fundamental truth of the world was a very quiet reassuring baseline of love, or compassion, or....something. Again, these conversations always reveal the failings of language, and this extremely nebulous recount is no exception. The feeling itself is unattainable, but I remember being able to take that quite reassuring truth, that there is, something, a sensation, vibration, a baseline, a bottom to everything that exists even if I can't always here it back with me after the end of that ironically sobering night.
After spending several fitful hours listening to jazz in my bunk between 2 and 6 in the morning while Javier continued to toss, neither of us sleeping, we got up and reevaluated the night. I think Javier ended up having a pretty mixed time, saying he would be reluctant to try this again, and I think that in general it was not a fireworks-worthy first time, but I actually had a very positive experience overall and enjoyed it. Later that morning I was supposed to visit the Improv Palace for the very first all-school improv team meeting, a somewhat symbolic beginning to a true era in my life and at that school. I remember feeling the most wonderful afterglow that overcast May morning, biking to the dining hall, and getting my car. When I pulled out of the WIll Vill parking lot I was stopped by a woman who had come to a stop in front of me, hysteric over a bird (a pigeon I think?) that she had either hit or noticed was injured. She was not a student, but seemed unreasonably concerned about the bird, and was holding it in her hands. I got out to ask if I could help and I think offered some paper towels for her to hold it by which she accepted. Just as I was explaining "I have to leave, good luck I guess" she took her attachment to the bird to another level. I think the afterglow of the trip had made me maybe slightly more willing to participate with these two living things, locked in a microcosm of the mortal struggle we all endure daily, but that cosmic willingness to participate faded quickly when she interrupted me to explain what a rush she was in, and that she could not continue providing the level of care for the bird she had initiated. Instead she asked me if I could "please maybe take it to a shelter or something?". Clearly in over her head, she was just trying to save face by pawning off the gruesome and karma ladened task of replacing the injured bird in the manicured lawn where it was found and inevitably destined to die. I could sympathize with not wanting that kind of blood on your hands, and if I were I pushover I absolutely would have accepted God's call to sacrifice that day, but instead I tried my best to make the case that she would in fact be doing no more harm in leaving the bird where it belonged in the first place, and hopefully making the case that she could leave the scene of the crime as I would, guilt-free and unmolested by the law. She reluctantly agreed, and I continued on with my morning, still steeped in the after-acid-afterglow and wondering what strange auspice that could have been.
The notion of a "bottom to everything" has continued to chase around the romanticising parts of my head. I think it's a poetic way to visualize things, really, it's the kind of idea that I want to give agency to and so I perpetuate it when I can, whether figuratively, creatively, or otherwise. It's probably not surprising that the descriptor I feel is most apt for me is that of a note, a very deep bass note, or vibration, considering music and musical ideas are one of the only things to directly stimulate the spiritual part of me. A vibration just feels right in more ways that the abstract description of an acid feeling or a visual metaphor. For instance the idea that there is a fundamental frequency in the universe fits it very nicely with the pseudo-scientific turn metaphysical aphorisms about "vibes" and vibration in general. I find myself consistently swept away my the simple statement "everything is just vibrations" mostly just because I feel like it's kind of true. The scientist in me says "yes true in a very reductive, unhelpful way! Bahaha" and is content to chortle self importantly having dispelled that thought. The more willful unified-theory seeking part of me says "yes but" however and I'm inclined more often lately to put my eggs in the latters basket.
If I really want to make the assertion that the universe is, as far as we can see and for all the good it would do to say so, just "vibrations" I should start with the obvious plea to reason that cursory comparisons to science will lend to the argument not because they are important, but to get them out of the way. The most obvious and succinct way I can start to prove my reductionist point is going down a well worn academic trough, that biology is applied chemistry is applied physics is applied math, so on and so forth. Once you get to the math and physics, you end up with the philosophy and epistemology, what are numbers and why can we use them, which conveniently do prove that a vibration is really just a mathematical expression and is therefore just as useful to this argument as is all other rooted in math, which is to say very and yet not at all, but that's neither here nor there. Next you take a look at the physics and meta physics, stuff that gets backed up by all the numbers and science, and in the modern age we can skip all the steps about pendulums and prisms and just start right away with electrons, something so basic to most education adults they need not be defined as integral to existence. Again, I would point out that the math and numbers don't exactly suggest the presence of a "thing" which could be imagined as not in motion, or as static and unchanged, but rather a distribution, a cloud, a probability density which changes depending on a very complicated set of circumstances. That to me, already sounds pretty much like a vibration. It is admittedly not mechanical as most conventional uses of the word are, but syntax aside, any definable point moving about in relation to another might as well be the definition. You can apply almost the same logic to virtually any other particle. light after all is a wave and when it's not it's a particle which is still moving because of some reason. Even gravity was recently proven to be a wave, which is fundamentally the kind of vibration we're talking about. Using this admittedly broad definition makes it difficult and useless to disprove, but I'm really not trying to write a peer reviewed paper here, merely suggesting that there is a physical basis for just a broad assertion as "it's all a vibration" beyond a simply spiritually indulgent desire.
The more interesting things to look at through the proposed lense of vibration to me, are two fold. One is fairly obvious and isn't perhaps best served by being described in this sort of simple way, it's patterns. From cycles, to repetition, shapes and motion, complex vibration seem to be the governing force, the driving vector behind so much. The second interesting thing to examine this way is more difficult to say in a word. The patterns of oscillations which seem to explain much of the chaos in the world also seem to easily leak into the infinite, the interminable, and the irrational. Like the Mandelbrot Set, or the circumference of a circle, or the infinitely regressive harmonics stacked on every fundamental, seemingly bound systems of vibration hide very provably infinite sets of results.
I can't help when thinking of these broad arcing narratives to think of Humboldt, who I hope would appreciate the musings and ambition. I must admit to myself the inherent futility of trying to to connect such broad topics without much license to, but then I have to remind myself that I'm really only trying to highlight a few interesting coincidences. Coincidence, as it happens, is one such broad phenomenon that I believe could be brought to its knees by some far off futuristic advancement in pattern recognition. Isn't prediction possible if only we could take a more accurate picture of the now? Nevermind, I get ahead of myself.
One of the big time vibrations which can be made directly responsible for a lot of things on earth are the milankovitch cycles. When graphed using our people numbers and earth terms to understand, they look basically like oscillations, exhibiting all the principles of a regular old vibration. If you could watch the universe sped up on a loop, I'm sure the three notes that make up precession, eccentricity, and obliquity would make a funny little chord. In turn, these millenia long cycles have incredible impact on all life on earth.
Once you start there, pretty much any natural phenomenon can be reduced back to a cycle of repeating patterns. The seasons are obvious, as are the tides, orbits, etc. The color of plants depends on the wavelengths of light which the sun emits, and the range of those wavelengths have governed the amount of energy hitting the earth since the dawn of time, and ostensibly therefore those vibrations have allowed all others to propagate. Inevitable you have to make the jump somewhere from one source of vibration indirectly causing another, and there might be a chance to argue that there is in fact something in between one wiggle and another wiggle which is not only essential for existence as we know it but also therefore as fundamentally import and valuable as the wiggles themselves so bam, boom, not everything is a vibration. I think it's another side effect of taking a too practical, too higher-order top down look at things because transmutation itself is a phenomenon which can be described as conjoined patterns of wiggles. If you have solar panels on your house and you flick on a light in the day time, the light coming out of the bulb is a visible wiggle made possible by a wiggle in a wire, broadcast thanks to a very stable complex set of wiggles which exist in the walls between the switch, outlet, and breaker box which all eventually receive sponsership from a set of wiggles being made hot and fresh in the solar panels on the roof through some black magic fuckery which still needs to be licensed, approved, and funded by the deluge of bright wiggles arriving in droves from the sun itself. At no point in that chain of events did a vibration or a wiggle ever stop to become some other equally fundamental element of the universe, no transmutation ever limiting the basic element of the wiggle from getting through.
This could be taken as "too easy" an example since electromagnetic waves are all already pretty well established as the products of mathematical descriptions which place them firmly on the "wiggle" side of the spectrum to begin with, so I'm inclined to suggest a more abstract, higher-order example to prove the point. However, a more useful task is to I think forgo the notion that there is a somehow more complicated earth process which resists the definition of being made up of a system of wiggles, and to instead point out what two things every possible example of that kind will contain: matter, and energy.
Right away these two basic basic properties apply to rocks to people to stars and cold flecks of space dust. Until we figure out dark matter which is doubtful it doesn't count and if it did it could probably also be dissolved this way. Anything that is, is made of something and ultimately is made up of some small point. Now I will give an honorable mention to the Higgs Boson and whatever other uncomfortable idea of a particle physics is giving the responsibility of "giving mass to things" because if my years of glances at watered down headlines has given me any rudimentary insight into those things its that the working principle of a boson is also that is works through a wave, or a field, or some mathematical function which again smells an awful lot like just a vibration to me, and therefore proves this point doubly. Bosons aside, all matter being a point in space inherently implied in any real practical sense that the point is in motion, motion that is always the result of some force, some energy. It's a transfer of little bits from here, to there, and it'll happen more of less this way, because this is the frequency at which things of that size and energy move.
It's overly reductionist, but again for any one but the recipient of a generous NIH grant it might as well be true. Nothing that is, can every really be seen without an inkling of periodic motion, some suggestion of a ration at which it occurs, an informed direction in which to travel. This is not to say at all that things are predetermined, or that the universe operates like clockwork or without a constant toss of the dice, on the contrary I think the noisy chaotic diaspora of events and collisions, sounds and cycles and time warped patterns is just how the gears of the universe sound. They are probably one of the most reductive levels of causality you can imagine in our lifetimes not because the vibrations that make up strawberries and comets and Metallica and the like are themselves something divine, or some great order, but because that's as close to the bottom of everything as you can hear.
So such a long winded and indulgent case for the new age notion of vibrations being "everything" leads me back to my second point, and the first new anecdotes mentioned. Sound waves are a great deal easiler to grasp than a quasar, and I know for a fact that they share almost nothing in common in terms of physical properties, but for the very spiritual sake of making direct comparisons I think it's helpful to consider the Harmonic series in relation to the "bottom of everything".
Most geeky musicians, mathematicians, and physicists, and probably a bunch of other random people know about the harmonic series. It's essentially a set of ratios which govern the infinitely increasing series of harmonics that are generated from any one fundamental frequency or standing wave. If you pluck a string, blow into a beer bottle, or hit a drum, you are adding energy to that system whose physical properties govern the speed at which an audible wave can be produced. Usually the notion of audibility depends on a lot on the resonant properties of the object, although resonance is kind of a concept of its own, I'm reminded of the fabled "Earthquake Machine" devised by Tesla which could allegedly destroy any building by adding a small amount of motion to a weak point at the precise moment which would amplify the resonant frequency of the building and cause it to fail catastrophically. The Harmonic Series is a set of numbers which describes the way such a fundamental frequency would produce additional frequencies, each progressively higher and fainter than before it. Besides the golden marvel that these ratios are consistent from a piano to a rock to a yelp, this also means that any single small vibration has within it the ongoing possibility to stir an infinite number more frequencies than the first. It's the harmonic and auditory equivalent of the golden ratio, or the circumference of a circle whose ratio is pi, or the infinite length of a coast line, or Zeno's Paradox of the half-way rabbit, and on and on.
I think this notion of infinity locked up in a seemingly finite event is as wondrous and astounding as it is incomprehensible. Rightfully so, I can't and frankly don't want to imagine every infinite note ringing from a wine glass or the resonant pitch of a fan. The fact that it's there, though, seems to bring the reductionist notions I've been referring to all the way back to the most grand dense assertions of the universe that you could hope to reach. It would seem to imply, if you are just a very very complicated set of wiggles wobbling through time and space, that your sum of vibrations has some resonant frequency (and you physically do as well, the human eye is about 8 Hz I believe), and that resonant frequency which defines uniquely you has a first, second, third, fourth and so on harmonic frequency, rising infinitely high, and an equal set of subharmonic frequencies which range theoretically to wavelength which would span galaxies. it's an audible, real, tangible confluence of cosmic scale which permeates virtually everything around you.
It's at once the frayed edge to a leak into the infinite and a singular oneness, a deafening silence of unity and harmonious vibration which must be the sound of "Om" of the Dao itself resonating within you and without you.
When I say "the bottom of everything" I think that's what I'm trying to refer to. That faint notion I heard or felt on that trip, some great big vibration, that sense of oneness, that is, to me the bottom of everything. That note, that vibration is the fundamental frequency of the universe or all that we may ever know, and everything else that has happened and is happening is a harmonic frequency propagated by that fundamental "0th harmonic". All other vibrations are in infinite regression and expansion from the first which interact and change and amplify one and another and form by now such a wild insane chaotic cacophony of sound that some vibrations have come out sounding like people, like a blue light, like crying in the rain, they sound like the ocean and a hot day and a mean word and a good song and strawberries and some vibrations even make birds and oreo cookies and cool clear water and they all resonate with and without the most holy unknowable vibration in the universe that is the Dao, the bottom of everything.
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