Music Hath Powers 2nd Movement
There was a time when I could write like a banshee with certain music playing – I could, quite literally, not stop the subconscious, or what ever that is inside of us speaking and seeking outlet; that flow of mind or soul or heart straight through a pencil onto the page. I cannot describe it accurately. It flowed out without stop, without censor, without the necessity for grammar. I wrote some interesting poetry and letters that way. Now some four plus decades later, the same thing can happen with just the right melody or tune or what ever it is that defines the nature of a song that compels the words to come out like water out of a hose. It closes down the censor, as I call it, and lets nothing but feeling or heart or soul or slop come out. Don’t stop that music!
Vanity Fair: ‘Hitchin’ a Ride’, Moody Blues: ‘Ride My SeeSaw’. In the old days I would lift up the record player stylus and put it down again and again and again just so I could keep writing and see what came forth. Not just so I “could” keep writing really but so that there “would” be an opening of that magic casement from whence unheard, unvisualized, unthought, unimagined treasures of word combinations would flow out in jeweled (or so I thought) strings.
Nowadays, the marvels of modern electronics allow multiple replay with a mere flick of a finger. The right music can still activate that casement – “Open Sesame” works each time. But not with the electronics I have available here and now. The song that just got me going in the old way, the song that gave rise to all this has ended. I was just feeling that old release. Was there depth available? Was there ever really any depth available? What is it in that soul of ours that seeks expression and pretends to depth? Insight? Hardly possible when one looks even slightly askance at that wisdom produced by so many over so many millennium – nothing new to be added there. New variations on the theme? Well, there is some hope there. The theme being of course – at least in this instance – the human condition. That marvel that compels the individual, defines the culture, describes the species. Who are we? Not just as that species but as that individual with desires rampant, mind so engaged that many religions, especially in their esoteric sects, spend their whole essence trying to get us to turn it off, if even for just the briefest of moments. We organize, we memorize, we collectivize, we quantify. We think! We agonize! We contemplate.
Yet, are we all of that merely in response to a recognition that is truly unique to our species – the prescience of death? Not just understanding after it has occurred – elephants have been shown to have a very real cognizance of a death occurrence. But we humans are part and parcel of a condition of temporality realized. I know, so what?
Because the what is that filler we create to add significance. The filler we use to override that horrible rationality that pervades the daylight of modern life and shovels that filler back into some place we can so easily close the door upon. How Keats filled. How Mozart filled. We think it genius. I think it merely some condition of spirit that allowed them to ignore the oppression of the norm, ignore the whole conception that we only pretend at the act of creation. How often have you heard: “I’m not creative”. Bah humbug.
One could say, of course, that we were made “in His image” – so creation is what we do, who we are, and what is to be hallelujahed in us. How many people strive to carve out from the necessities of this oppressive, demanding existence those brief moments of creativity? Think of your mother, your father, your aunt, your sibling – are there not ordinary people of ordinary existence who find a way to create, to seek to outlast temporality. It is not from taking the “long” view but that rare gift of living moment by moment where the mind finally quiets into the task, the censor finally being closeted for an all too brief moment, a moment not of survival but of art – however mean, however common. That is the art that leaps out at you throughout Venice. Countless people took the time – if only to hire someone else who could quiet their mind to let the creative leap out.
So much of political revolution is in response to censorship of thought, word, or deed, or community, or what ever the censor that dominates us finds expedient. Just as in the macrocosm so to in the microcosm. There is a censor that seeks to condition our human condition. Survival it might be. Replication of the species it might be. Responsibility it might be. But censor it is. Go not softly into that dark night. Rebel, I have only my censor to lose. Otherwise, I have a distinct sense that I can count on it marching with me into death, forever talking, forever overriding, forever demanding no until it is too late to recognize its shallowness.
Changing Temples 