Musical Living

                Now and again, life appears fragmented, incoherent, and intolerably strange. We spend an enormous chunk of our brief existence here trying to thread moments together, to find the hidden fiber that will bind the fragile bead work we've made of our situations. We hunt for deep structures in our lives, patterns that go beyond the everyday, we strive to find signs that we are part of some higher order, something we can point to and shout, “Yes! That’s it!” Most of the time, we are alienated from ourselves, and part of this alienation is the smug certainty that “I” (whoever that may be) am the only one who feels alienated.

                There are, of course, at least as many ways of attempting to cope with or overcome this alienation as there are human beings. One of the most common means of coping with our human isolation is the way of refusing to acknowledge it, refraining from looking into it, denying it when the subject arises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this method, and it works, as far as it goes. And yet sometimes I wonder why one of the most common nightmares we human beings have is one of running headlong away from some faceless menace, a featureless monster too fearful to be looked at.

                But I’m not here today to talk about all the means of dealing with alienation; I’m here to talk about music. Music, in its own way, is just as universally human as eating, sleeping, or feeling like you woke up someday from a vague someplace and found yourself in a slightly hostile land peopled by folk you can’t quite comprehend. Music is what sound was made for. Music lifts us out of the vicious circles of our thoughts and attunes us to something we lost sight of when we were going about our lives. Something like memory always clings to a beautiful piece of music, where we feel like it was discovered, or rediscovered, rather than made. And in a way this is the literal truth, since every singer rediscovers, revivifies the song each time they sing it.

                Music celebrates, exults in, exists in, precisely those aspects of time that give us the most anxiety in our own lives. Without time, there could be no music, because no single note could ever be a melody. Taken as a random collection of isolated tones, music would be entirely incomprehensible to us. Another way of saying this is that music exists entirely as a movement, that the individual notes take on meaning for us because of the way they are arranged in time. Music has no fear of time, for time is its native element, its necessary support.

                Though music depends on time for its existence, it is just as important to note that music loses itself in time. By the time the note reaches our ears, the performer has already lost it forever. Music frees us briefly from the confines of time, but only because it gives freely of itself, does not seek to preserve itself. The only purpose of music (if we may speak of something so great in terms of purpose) is to move us, to delight us, to lift us momentarily from the prison of our aloneness. What higher goal could there be?

                Music represents, I believe, the very best possibilities of the human spirit. It points us toward a way of living that allows us to accept the stupidities of life without judgment and without bitterness. It reminds us that every person we meet is a world in themselves, a world whose particulars we may never know but who thinks and feels and hurts and hopes just as deeply as we do. It teaches us to be humble, recognizing that we are, after all, simple beings who get a kick out of listening to complicated sounds.

                Personally, I try to think of my life as a piece of music, one with its discords and counterpoints, its major and minor chords. I try to think of the dreary routine of everyday life as a necessary supporting rhythm that will build into something more satisfying in time. I try to think of the people I encounter as voices in a great harmony my ears just aren't big enough to pick out. I try to think, I hope to think, that some higher necessity threads its way through the notes of my days, guiding the melody of my life to some kind of resolution.  And though it may be a sign of childish naiveté or gross self-deception, I try to assure myself that I’m not the only one who feels this terrific sense of fragmentation.