* * *
Years ago, I used to occasionally awake filled with a sense of overwhelming melancholy more intense than any I’ve known before or since. It took the form of a diffuse yet intense yearning, a feeling that I’d been touched by something while I was asleep, something inarticulable which involved, maybe, having been adrift on distant oceans (or amidst the clouds), and having visited shores pristine and uncharted, or standing atop a great mountain and looking out and across forever, or something similarly ineffable. That’s the imagery that I tended to be left with, but the overwhelming sense was one of bittersweet loss — of having dreamt, felt, experienced something beautiful and magical which had but recently fled, but of its always being ungraspable and completely impossible in waking life, even as its traces remained upon me for those precious ephemeral moments between sleep and wakefulness. I felt it, those mornings, as an almost physical pain, an indescribable pang, and, it has to be said, it could make me feel like crying — but at the same time, I wanted the feeling to linger, to remain wrapped in it aching, to continue to believe in everything it so intangibly yet so keenly seemed to hint of.
Well, once, one such morning awakening was, it seemed, scored, softly, at its faintest edges, by these two songs, “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done”, and that sense of all-encompassing melancholy was all about them, and they’ve never been the same since.
* * *
[Interjection: I know, I know - all of the above is totally and embarrassingly overwritten…but that's what happens when you try to express something that (I'm convinced) is plain inexpressible.]
