OK, it's time for another essay with only dubious connections to lake monsters. For those looking for more, no worries, mates, there's a lot coming, I just have to sift through it all. The only reason I write now is because I accidentally gave myself insomnia by listening to a few songs on my Zen.
I must confess: music, more than any tangible thing, has always been the teddy bear for my soul, both as a child and as an adult. And, beyond my own expectations, I can say with surety that there hasn't been a year of my life more riveted by music than this year of 2003, nailing down in harmony both my tragedies and victories. Perhaps this is because in times when life seems to be changing most, even more tenaciously do I cling to a tune or two or twelve. Put some days, months, or years into the mix, take care to keep songs connected to events within your memory, and you have a fully functional time machine in order. I may travel the world and never discover anything on the planet more magical than that.
You see, tonight I tried to fall asleep to the Beatles, specifically White Album's last track, Good Night. After not hearing this song for what must have been almost two decades, I stumbled across it one night in Buenos Aires. And just like that I was five years old again with my parents tucking me in on the night before Christmas. I could remember the smell my house in winter. At times it sounded like my dad singing, not Ringo Starr. I can't say it ever happened like I this memory, but I can't say it ever didn't happen. And so, in the murky medium I rest happily.
Such a cas reaches well into the past, but In similar ways have more recent events been bookmarked by particular music. Stereophonics for my old college days with Ken. Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan for the happy days of this summer. Train and Coldplay for my last trip abroad. Radiohead for intellectual ponderings or collegiate papers. TechItch for my days working in graphic design. Sigur Ros and the Frida soundtrack for distinct parts of South America. A. Tollman for when I read Heart of Darkness. Powderfinger for NZ and Australia. And Guster, for so many events its too complicated to mention. Not to mention several others for old friends and old haunts. How can music construct such a complex biography? And, is this an addiction? If so, perhaps no worse than academia. Does it add or subtract from the travel experience to link yourself back to the old world with music?
If I could weigh in, I think that it is too much of an anchor to carry along with you, to listen only to songs you've brought with you from home while traveling. After all, brand new memories require brand new sounds to catalyze the memorization process. To this end, I've bought a couple new CD's here in Oz. They're both great, however the Powers That Be won't let me convert my own legally purchased CD's to MP3 for my player, which is a bit frustrating since I don't have, nor do I want to carry bulky CD's and a fragile CD player while traveling. These obselete greedy corporations still haven't come to grips with the fact that their glory days as the middleman in the distribution of music are over, and music should cost, at most, half what it does right now. (trivia bit: even today, the artist only gets 12% of what you pay in the store.) Until they recognize this, I'll just have to keep stealing music. Even music I've already... bought... if that makes any sense.
But beyond the cynicism, music is deeply woven into the fabrics of the brain, somewhere between the conscious and the sublime, and I don't know if I could live the same life without it. There's songs I've listened to more times than I can really justify why, and there's others that I don't dare listen to, because I'm not ready to face the monsters within them.
I think I'm finally tired now, so I'll leave you along a similar, though not entirely similar, train of thought, that I had typed up earlier, knowing it would be useful somewhere. Here goes; I leave you with the much more capable Douglas Adams:
Mathematical analysis and computer modeling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature - the way that plants grow, the way that moutains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people - all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity.
Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word "natural" that we have often taken to mean "unstructured" in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.
They can all be described by numbers.
We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin.
And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.
People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.
I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.
Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented by numbers. From the organization of movements in a whole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rythym that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping a drum - all of these things can be expresed by patterns and hierarchies of numbers.
And in my experience the more internal relationships that there are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the hierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem to be.
In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind - by which I mean that part of your mind that can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying ball - the more that part of your brain revels in it.
Music of any complexity (and even "Three Blind Mice" is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about.
Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you can reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been out of it.
The things by which our emmotions can be moved - the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music - all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers.
That's not a reduction of it, that's the beauty of it.
Ask Newton.
Ask Einstein.
Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a ball must be truth, but he didn't, because he was a poet and preferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of laudanum and a notebook to playing cricket, but it would have been equally true.
Because this is at the heart of the relationship between on the one hand our "instinctive" understanding of shape, form, movement, light, and on the other hand our emotional responses to them.
And that is why I believe that there must be a form of music inherent in nature, in natural objects, in the patterns of natural processes. A music that would be as deeply satisfying as any naturally occuring beauty - and our own deepest emotions are, after all, a form of naturally occuring beauty.
From pp. 181 - 185 of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
No mediocre MN music, or are those memories of my apartment not as fond as those including the Stereophonics? No matter, but I feel your Guster confusion, through and through...
On a side note, I begin teaching Music again here soon, Music and American culture...this'll be a near 6 weeks of lessons for my 11th graders on the subject. Starting with the civil war, and going through the White Stripes. take care BC...
ps-xmas doesn't feel like xmas when i'm somewhere other than the familiar.
Just surfing and found this while doing a " care abyss gaze" google search. I like you and love your mission. It's a beautiful thing to read about a person who is actually doing something true and meaningfull. I want to peruse more, the Christams Eve essay was awesome. Good luck in your travels and have a safe journey.