Music:Spirit :: Spirit:Music / 11-16-10

When I can't contemplate, worship, or philosophize, I still have a way to reach for God/Spirit/Tao/Meaning. It's by making music.

And in alarmingly increasingly oftenly times, I find myself unable -- or unwilling -- to dedicate the time to accomplish any decent contemplation, worship or philosophery. I can do each of those in a halfway indecent manner all the time. Almost well enough for them to be worthwhile. But not quite.

Fortunately, to rescue me from myself, there's music.

Lots of humans before me have praised music-making for its creative nature. You'll probably have heard someone say, about art, that to make it is to commune with the Creative Force responsible for our very existence. (It's permissible to call that Force "God." Plenty of people do so.) And we can start there, but I have a much more mystical destination I'm aiming for. With lots and lots of verbal darts.

Because creativity IS, after all, a big part of what makes us unlike the other two-eyed, four-cheeked mammals out there. Everything you see when you look out the window, no matter how ugly it might be, is the result of natural forces or artificial creativity. (Except the second-generation Hummers. Those beasts are the result of evil. Pure, no sugar-added, evil. The bad kind of evil. Look away.)

Writing a song, painting, producing a novel, sculpting: these are so quintessentially human activities that they rise above human. They become quasi-divine abilities. (Blogging is somewhat beneath that level, I admit.)

And now that I've made my quota of jokes for this post, I'm going to temporarily raise the serious level a couple of notches.

To investigate one layer deeper, it's not enough that these creative juices exist. It's their just-out-of-our-grasp-to-explain-ness that strikes me as so very special.

What moves me most about music (and you can substitute other forms of art if they're more your thing) is:

Its not fully known path. "What will come from this? Where is this headed?"

Its wind-like nature. "You can feel it, but you can't grab it."

Its water-like nature. "It moves, it ebbs, it flows, it builds, it progresses. It can fill a space. Its power can be used in so many ways."

Its omnipresence. "All observed and observable societies employ it."

Its omnipotence. "All can receive blessing, happiness, joy, revelation -- and maybe even meaning -- from it."

(Funny, these all are ways people have chosen, for millennia, to illustrate what they call "spiritual" or "divine.")

Before I return to music as water, I want to make a couple more pointlets.

Music has immediacy. It has presency -- a Johnvented word which I define as its "being present in the present and not elsewhere or even elsewhen." It's here, you can sense it, but you can only have it in the moment. You can remember it, but that's not the same as experiencing it happen. Like the present, it only exists while it exists, and it doesn't exist out of that bar-less cage. A plan or an outline or instructions for the performance of music, those things exist at all times. The instruments themselves continue to exist when we're not playing them.

But the music only takes place at its moment. If you miss it, tough beans. That portion of it is gone, forever. It is when it is.

Also, music has a way of acting as a metaphor for our bodies. Music is physical and physics-based, as there are sound waves involved, so far as we can tell. Just as our bodies obey a number of physical laws simultaneously in order to function, music can exist only when the right waves coalesce at the right time. And yet there's something non-physical going on in both cases, right? We experience consciousness, whatever that is, and we gather it's not purely a chemical reaction. We experience music, and the waves resonate in our inner ear and transmit messages to our brain, and the brain conjures up emotions to accompany those messages, but there's more than simply that chemical reaction going on.

I can teach kids that a C-E-G combination creates a major chord, which suggest happy or bright feelings, but those feelings don't flow just from the wave patterns or the accepted conventional associations that go with major chords. They seem to happen on another level, which is probably good, since they're feelings and sensations, not equations. (Feel free to write an algorithm for "peace" to disprove me.)

And then, crucially for me, the way we talk about music has a way of sounding like the way we talk about the Tao.

It's adaptable. It's malleable.

It fills areas. It envelops them too.

It works around stuff. It even moves around walls and people and objects of relative animateness.

It escapes definition. Playfully, almost.

Its source is hard to find, but its effects are easy to observe.

It can be used, harnessed, wielded, yet remains impossible to hoard.

Hm.

To wrap this up, ponder bad music. To you, bad music might mean opera, country, a kid singing out of tune, grunge, or an hour spent watching America Idol. But I'm not talking about matters of personal taste here. As much as I dislike certain brands of music, I know a good performer when I hear one, despite the medium.

I mean consider poor music: poor in effort, poor in creativity, poor in originality, poor in execution.

It just... it just feels so dirty, so wasteful, so irresponsible. So sacrilegious.

And you could say the same for other forms of art, no? Life Theory Moment: The reason so many people despise modern art is that they feel cheated by it, like it ought to do something special, accomplish something, set something in motion, like it ought to turn wheels in their head, at least make them quizzical, but NOT make them indifferent.

So something done wrong feels like sacrilege... then its opposite, that same thing done right, I'd like to call sacred. So it is for music.