I stopped on the way home the other day and dropped $50 on some CDs. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which my wife discovered recently and we’ve both been enjoying; some Sigur Ros that I hadn’t heard before; Le Tigre. A mixed bag. The Sigur Ros is even more gloomy and ethereal than the other stuff I’ve heard, but it’ll still serve as good background-to-writing music. Most of the Le Tigre songs are fun new-wave pop while others are blatantly political and juvenile. The Yeahs disc seems a little harsher than the other one we’d listened to, but since I enjoy a good girl-band rockin’ out, no complaint here.
It’s refreshing to have so much new music around all of a sudden. My car rides have been getting stale, and I’d been listening to more audiobooks than anything else. I had the craving for new music.
But just what is it that we take from music? Emotion? Some kind of catharsis? Why do we feel a hunger for it, and then feel satisfied when we hear it? I’ve always used music as a stimulant for imagination, a gateway to something more. It was an inspiration for stories, setting the mood or suggesting a premise.
But I know people enjoy music for its own sake. I'm not sure I ever have. When I went to that Bishop Allen concert with Chili, we wondered at the people who go to clubs and just stand there, entranced, staring at the stage and swaying slightly. They never seem to enjoy it. It’s like they’re trying to commune with something greater than they are, but they never seem to break through. And the music is always so loud that most of the meaning is lost.
Maybe the music doesn’t have that much to offer, after all, and so they take their communion from the high-volume assault instead, letting the music get inside of them not with any meaning but by shaking their bones.
I guess what I want from music is the stimulation. Maybe, transformation. Make me think new things; make me feel new ways. Put me into a mental state so unique that I will never be able to share it with another human being (not even by playing them the same music). And yet make me want to share it, so much so that the fact that sharing it is impossible will break my heart. Because maybe this yearning will inspire me to speak, to attempt the impossible. And maybe I’ll achieve a thing or two that are good enough.
It’s not that I’m utterly alone, listening to music. There is me, and there is the music. The music understands. After all, it is what’s doing this to me. The music and I work together to create this mental state. The great tragedy is that the music cannot create the exact same state in someone else. Other people can love the same songs I love, but they cannot love them in the same way. They'll never really understand it.
Worse: I cannot understand it tomorrow the way I did today!
When I feel I’m going crazy it’s thoughts like these that drive me there.
Everything’s so mutable. Every second gone forever. And I will never honestly remember what it felt like to hear a song yesterday, to eat a pizza yesterday, to be in yesterday. And yet – those times are still back there!
I got married on April 4, 1997 and I always will have got married on April 4, 1997. Nothing can change the events of that perfect day. Yet I cannot feel them again. Remembering it is 95% fabrication; it's self-storytelling. Every second of that day and every other day is written in a four-dimensional medium stronger than stone, and yet it might as well be written inside a mountain.
How small is a moment? How wide is the slice of time we call “now?” Can we hold an entire song in our minds can call that "now?" Or must we be satisfied with a phrase, a bar, a note? Hold that note, we cry (silently, because we are holding our breath.) Because as long as it lingers we don't have to move on, and begin to forget.
And where in space and time are the Alzheimer’s patients who talk as if it were years ago, whose children cannot be their children because these children are too old. Their real children must be young now, and in some other room. Have these patients found a way to burrow into the mountain, to excavate the past and feel it again?
Or have they unhinged space from time, making their children truly young again, but moving them far away from where they are, from where the rest of us see them?
Kurt Vonnegut thought it might be possible to come unstuck in time. You still had your one life, but you’d bounce back and forth in it, experiencing now the birth of your child, now your military service, now the time your grandfather sink-or-swim threw you into that pool. Once you came unstuck like this, you lost your childish belief in free will. Yet he seemed sanguine at the possibility. “The trick,” he said, “is to ignore all the bad times and focus on the good.” And also, I suppose, to live through as many good times as you can while you still believe in the possibility. Make it good, he implies, because you might be coming back here.
I wonder if losing free will is a fair exchange for this kind of immortality?
But haven’t we lost it already?
The past is written and buried in the mountains. Why isn’t the future, too? Why are past and future so different? Is listening to a song we love again and again like a little time-loop?
Or are we just moles, burrowing through the rocks, examining the strata of our lives, then leaving them behind?