In the dark cave of acoustics, with eyes closed, the notes sent out are secret messages. Their harmony may be an invitation to join up, asking allegiance of fans and followers, who then become managers, producers and photographers, or roadies and groupies, and a myriad of other close traveling mates, united in faith, that keep any caravan of music alive&emdash;a caravan always moving on to the next town, musicians exhausted or not. But Travis is no caravan, he is hard beneath his leather suit jacket and guitar, and he is, for now, playing with a knife at his throat. He is the definition of solo: alone. And he wants to remain that way even though it means there is nowhere to go. Health or success; it seems to be one or the other. He knows his shows to be pointless in the measure of great things, in the big cosmic meter stick of light years. They are God damned pointless. Art, music, writing, gives no one, can give no one, meaning. It does not feed the poor or stop wars. There are absolutely no answers, except that there are no answers. The paradox slips, tragically into the guitar’s strings and some bent halfway note crawls out distorted, and everything, in the moment at least, is lost. There are other ways to recover. There are other ways to blast the people in front of you, but why the misstep? Purpose is a lost cause when you meander down the path of the transcendent, leaving behind those who have no motivation but the embodiment of their narcissistic selves in silly little bipedal forms&emdash;silly little creatures that make electromagnets and learn how to take the sound and the song to a level that has never been attained in all of human history; even the Beatles could not play loud enough in a stadium to hear themselves in the end.

Travis has power in amplifiers that did not exist for one guitar even a generation ago, and then never existed before he learned to emancipate those who listened to him, loud and blasted apart. It is his destiny to blow them away. And he does try. But not because of noise&emdash;because of one note melting into another note, the transition just unexpected, an unknown variable in the equation of music that is thousands of years old and hardly ever re-invented. Though it is random and unrepeatable, it remains fate. He takes it slow. He leads them, from religion to spirit, unsuspecting lambs and rats, both to gullies of life that they deem unforgiven or forsaken&emdash;not up but down. He has been told that God works in mysterious ways, keeps the meaning hidden in his trench coat, as Travis pulls on the sleeve of Life, trying to get its attention, until the arm falls off, and he has learned to call amputation, purpose. You think he likes it? Hardly. He is love found along the way, even when all is lost. The believers say this because what is, has not necessarily worked out in their favor. When it does work out in their favor they call it God’s will. When it doesn’t, they say that God works in mysterious ways. But Travis has God trapped right inside his six-string moment machine. We are all, without question of judgment, God’s children. Travis’s guitar is not God and he is a monkey, and God is nothing but mystery, if only because we can all recognize that God is sure as hell not a monkey. But we are… monkeys with guitars and stages and lights and attention and rumors and gossip and rhythm and music. Travis is hardly mysterious.

He asks them to leave regret and guilt behind, and be done with what they have done. There is no mystery in it. He asks this, with his sound, with his song, because it is all he has ever asked. If it could just all be still, and tonight he plays ahead of himself, instead of behind. He’s pulling at the ethereal nature of existence, and knows it this night. Or at least he is consciously seeking confirmation from the strings. He thinks, and is not lost, in terms of the keys, and plays, while begging so much that he cannot attain what his heart really desires. His best hope against the eternal vacuum and disappearance, entropy or rapture, is his sweet, holy, rounded, kind, reaching sound. He is asking for eternity, and listening to the awful staleness of his playing, he is seeing that he cannot have it. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

We have so many eyes with which to see now—so many different kinds giving glimpses of sitcoms and atomic bonds and galactic chains—but he closes his eyes, and sees inward, listens inward, and that is when the sound of the future comes to him. That is when each pitch is colored, every measure a room, every verse a person, and every chorus a premonition. What is it called when the premonition occurs the instant before reality subjects you to it? Maybe joy. “Your place is among the stars,” a raven-haired beauty whispers to him, with cold but blue alluring eyes that always look up at him. She is so sad. He can feel the wash of loss that surrounds her white face in a formless black lake. “You will cry for all eternity there, but not while you are still alive,” she says, and he smiles, lets his head roll back. But there can be no doubt that she speaks a warning. From his lightwave-heated spot in the world, his stool, his guitar, his little stage, under the bright sun of attention and purple gels, he listens as they listen—those that came to see, so that they could listen.

What he does is refuse the world and puts his attention down his bicep, his femur, his wrist—lets the woman with dark black hair and steel blue eyes lapse to wherever she came from. He moves into his calloused fingertips, where the mashing of metal strings on electromagnetic pickups cry out piercing notes, whose progression constantly surprises, dances—his eyebrows raised in delight—and whose vibrations are shoved through amplified spaces between him and the throng of the watchers who do not know where this is all going. The words, the plans, the images in his head are drowned out by the decibels available to him, turned way up. He is in cinder block clubs or maybe on porches overlooking patches of the Broad river—everywhere is meaningless. Nothing is really there. The music: everything. They are not even there, the black bobbing and shadowed silhouettes of heads that stare from out of a red sea, while he is yards up the beach on the shore. With his senses merged into this electronic harp, his reach for the sound at his fingertips is infinite. Small dots, plankton in the water, moments of knowing appear. Touch occurs, though floating it seems impossible. He begs his soul to stay where the light is. That way he will not disappear—the real him. Then temperature, then muscles, and then finally light, and he lands on the ground as he finishes his song. It is done with him. He has brought forth the lyric, has always brought forth the lyric, because of love. And then, he begins again.

Past the enamel red of his guitar, past the strings, his hand, he suddenly sees his boot stomping hard the stage to the beat, so much so that it hurts his ankle. He feels the solidity just before the rapid fire notes of his clawing at the instrument, melt into an angry E minor chord that he’s sliding, tearing down the neck of the guitar. Somewhere in the dark, someone yells out jubilantly. Travis does not perceive it, cloaked now in a chemical flame. He grits his teeth, feeling the majesty of this righteous fury burning itself out though it remains as white hot as a star. The machinery of fate builds scaffolding and gates to surround and quell him—to put him out for good. He sees choice is an illusion and every note bears the sound of some forgotten cause—drifting debris of the past and the pearly white smile of his most sinister nemesis. The song comes to an end and the crowd goes wild with cathartic applause and yelling. He is hollowed out. There is no power left. He has blasted it all through the speakers. There is nothing and no one to fight but the future.