Wide Eyes
A day at a music festival
I had a good weekend.
This past weekend I went to the music festival Portola, an electronic music festival in San Francisco that brings together some of the biggest names in electronic music (like Skrillex!) to perform on a pier by the San Francisco Bay. I’ve never really been a music festival person, largely due to the fear of the logistics of it all and the tiredness of it all and the crowds of it all. But this year, as I continue to focus on meeting people and Going Outside, I decided to take a crack at it.
I ended up going with a large group of people, some of whom I knew well, and some of whom I did not, and having a wonderful time. After eating lunch together in the morning at my place, our pack moved from show to show, seeing artists like Little Simz, Thundercat, Kavinsky, Kenny Beats, Jyoty, and Skrillex over the course of a long but wonderful day.
The day was perfect — a wonderfully sunny day in San Francisco, one where the city’s characteristic fog decided to take the day off, and the skyline stood impressively behind the stages.
I read somewhere that our minds relax when we look at horizons because our gazes soften. When our eyes narrow and we focus on our immediate surroundings, we are most tense, looking for danger. However, when we look more widely, at the horizon or our periphery, we relax. At each of the stages, eyes widened, as I took in an enormous crowd and a stage, lights and disco balls filling the view and periphery.
French writer Romain Rolland once used a term “oceanic feeling” in a letter to Freud to describe a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole.” What could be more accurate than the moment when you lose sense of your own body in a crowd? Being on the same wavelength gains a different meaning as the sound waves reverberate through thousands of bodies, as we all bounce to the beat, as the world seems within us and without us, as the lights match the music match our moves match each other. The feeling was oceanic, as we waded through the music together, a part of this greater body of bodies.
The whole experience of the festival was so beautifully human. It’s as if someone created a checklist of all of the things that made people happy to create a music festival: being outside, moving your body, being around people, feeling like a part of something larger than yourself. Add in nostalgia from hearing Skrillex play “Bangarang” 12 years after it was released, and you have an absolutely incredible recipe for a good time.
How many places can we bounce around with our friends, screaming and laughing? During the festival, we were kids again, jumping around, dancing and eating, talking to strangers and living in a world where things were simpler. There are too few moments where we can act like children, fully free to do whatever we want, be as loud as we want, be as happy as we want.
In the days since, I’ve been slowly recovering from walking over 17,000 steps that day and possibly giving myself shin splints. In my classic introverted ways, any long, sustained social interaction leads to a multi-day energetic hangover over sorts, where I feel drained and existential. This led me to a video from a creator I like named Sisyphus 55 called "do you want to be loved or do you want to be yourself?” It covers many ideas around identity and authenticity, but the part that stood out to me was this quote from anthropologist Ernest Becker:
The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one’s whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality.
This breakdown feels resonant with what I see as driving forces in my own life. Even as I continuously push towards becoming more community-driven, more a part of the world, less selfish, I still find myself desiring individualism, to be something more than just a random Joe. I have a rebellious streak, wanting to be different in many small ways, just like everyone else, whether it’s my refusal to buy certain brands if they’re too trendy, or my high school avoidance of mainstream music.
These motives also feel representative of my experience at the festival. It might seem like a stretch to call the experience of being in a crowd at an electronic show a surrender to nature or laying down existence to a higher meaning, but it seems appropriate. The concert doesn’t differ that drastically from some of the religious experiences that humans have participated in for centuries. It’s essentially a ritual, in which a congregation focuses on a uniting factor (the music) to leave behind their focus on themselves for a while in favor of swaying with the collective.
Yet, this surrender motive doesn’t cover everything, evidenced by the elaborate outfits you see at concerts and festivals. And ultimately, each of these events must eventually end, and everyone goes home, back to being individuals, trying to carve out their own personal meaning, and looking at pictures and videos to remember what it was like to be a world for a moment.
After the festival, I was just a person again. I no longer was a part of the crowd and I could only focus on my memories of what had once been. And in my tiredness, I fell into existentialism again. Was it worth it to push for experiences that dissolved the self if it led to the introspective melancholia afterwards? Or did one have to find individuality among those moments as well?
Or perhaps could they co-exist, certain days for surrender, certain days for the individual? I had an incredible experience, yet found myself feeling extremely low afterwards. I had seen the benefits of an oceanic feeling, of letting go of my individuality, but I found myself tired and sad afterwards, especially looking at unflattering pictures of myself afterwards, looking for a individualized heroic personality in those photos and videos that wasn’t there. Despite all of that, was it worth it? Yeah.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - mangalica mink by blvck svm - really easy to listen to blvck sam!
FILM - Bottoms (2023) - I had fun
POEM - “And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So” by Wendy Xu - With more sparkle and pop / is the only way to live.
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