Again: as my wife’s set began, my skin contracted, I became a rock, tingling underneath, and my head started to race. Was this because of that amygdala, which was triggering all sorts of common sensations that can only be caught in clichés? No. I heard VanWyck’s fingers on the guitar opening up the other, true dimension in which I live, and her voice wiping out all that happened in superficial life. “Talk to me darling,” she sang, “I am all ears.” Even when I hear her for the hundredth time, it is as if I am waking up from a long sleep. “We’re all alone here,” she sang, “I could make use / Of a story.” This is all that matters, this level of feeling and beauty. And always the accompanying feeling: I wanna do something. My life should be: this! Energy bursting.

In 1963, Roland Barthes wrote that a good work of art “is never entirely non-signifying (mysterious or ‘inspired’) and never entirely clear.” The work has a suspended meaning: “It offers itself to the reader as an avowed signifying system yet withholds itself from him as a signified object.”

At the Alma Löv Museum, thousands of meanings dizzied through me: suspended, inspired, mysterious, signifying, “never entirely non-signifying” — the whole Barthesian specter raving in my body. At every performance new interpretations manifest. I wanted to never stop feeling this way.