All You Touch and All You See is All Your Life Will Ever Be

I am, by disposition, the type of person who holds onto tickets. When I go to a show or a movie, I tend to hold onto the stubs I have until they’re accidentally thrown out or disappear into a pile of other small scraps of paper. I’m not entirely sure why I keep my tickets, but an obvious answer suggests itself: Like the giant broken condom that resulted in the birth of Christ, the event this object was a reminder of had imbued it with its sacred magic and made it special to those who care. This doesn’t quite explain why I keep the stubs of movies I didn’t much like, but there really isn’t a good reason for that, and all it evinces about me is that I hold onto more trash than I should.

But for the good shows, the ticket is the souvenir, one of those rare French words that are just perfect. I don’t actually need it to be able to remember the show, but every time I come across it I’m reminded, and in that moment get to savor my experience anew. That’s really the magic of certain objects; that, beyond and despite their dumb uselessness, they can actually store a certain amount of meaning that we’ve given to them, and always make it available to us. This isn’t really profound at all and I’m sure everyone who’ll ever read this already has this little insight, but it’s still their magic.

So it is that, in one of my favorite novels, Life: A User’s Manual, almost every one of the hundreds of little stories that are told during the course of the novel is told only when the narrator comes across the object that centers it during a description of the rooms of some apartment in a fictional building on a fictional street in Paris; a journey through the world of objects always points us back towards ourselves. Moreover, whatever we may think of our metaphysical natures, we’re firmly rooted in the physical world.

The object that, aside from this assignment, got me thinking along these lines, and which is now in my possession, is my ticket to a Roger Waters concert on September 20^th, for his Dark Side of the Moon tour. While by no means the best concert of my life, it’s certainly on that list, and was an exhilarating experience despite my execrable seats and the feeling – which Floyd fans know generated The Wall – of an incredible, impenetrable gulf hanging between any member of the audience and the artist on stage much greater than the handful of measurable yards separating the two.

The ticket itself is remarkably generic, and through an unfortunate twist of fate (I bought my ticket the day before the concert from an online reseller and was forced to buy two, neither of which I could scalp well enough at the arena) I have two. Through a wholly different set of circumstances (I traded tickets with a stranger to sit with my friends for the second set) I ended up with two tickets for seats in different roles. Both look exactly like all Ticketmaster tickets do (5”5/8 x 2”, with vertical perforations at ¾” and 3”3/8 from the left), are somewhat crumpled, untorn (they scanned, rather than tore, it at the venue), and retain only the slightest traces of the odor of cigarettes and pot that all such concerts come with. Now that the concert’s long over, they’re no longer capable being used in the one way they were designed for, and are in almost all conceivable ways totally useless. Obviously, if they have some magic, it has nothing to do with their physical properties or utility.

The magic is that the simple act of looking at them gives me the feelings I felt that night. I can relive, rather than simply recall, my enjoyment at simply being there, my disappointment at finding I wouldn’t be able to scalp my extra ticket, my delighted surprise when songs like ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ or ‘Mother’ were played when it would have been incredibly obvious to play something like ‘Hey You,’ which wasn’t, my boredom when it got to his solo work and my disgust with the lyrics to his latest song, ‘Leaving Beirut’ (‘O George, O George, That Texas education must have fucked it up when you were very small’ and ‘We were the English dudes … But now an Englishman abroad is just a U.S. stooge’ are excrescence by any standards, but when you’re arguably one of the best lyricists in the history of rock music and have written ‘Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage,’ ‘It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around,’and ‘Day after day, love turns grey like the skin on a dying man’ it’s a fucking travesty). The whole experience is there for me when I consider a small, useless strip of paper. That’s the magic.