Friday, April 22, 2022
3:40 a.m. Let’s talk about music. There was a time in my life when I listened to classical music extensively; another when I listened to what they call New Age music, or Space Music, beginning with “Lullaby for the Hearts of Space,” by Kevin Braheny, after hearing it as background in the Higher Self Seminar that Shirley MacLaine put on in Virginia Beach in 1987. A few years later, it was John Denver, and Karma Moffat, both as a result of Kelly Neff. Long before any of it, of course, there was the rock and roll of 1950s radio, and the pop music of the 1960s, especially including Sergeant Pepper, and the Moody Blues.
But I don’t mean this as a stroll down Memory Lane. I woke up thinking about music and its place in my life – and of course, in our lives – in connection with yesterday’s discussion of influences that connect us to other parts of ourselves. Just as aromas can bring us back to something long forgotten, music can too, I’ll bet.
But there’s more to be discussed than that. There is the question of our inundation by background music.
Then set your switches, and we can talk about it.
Done. F, R, C, P.
Mention your shaman, too, if only to remind yourself.
In our Wednesday virtual meeting, our ILC group encouraged any threads of ours who thought they could be helpful to come forward and be more a part of our conscious lives. I immediately got, “Shaman,” and was advised that I could help him manifest by making a habit of routinely giving him even five minutes a day. Daily life would provide the subject matter, I was told, “but, listen.”
All right. Now let’s look at the question of music, background noise, unnoticed connections, and your lives.
You didn’t quite finish your thought about music, diverting yourself unintentionally by remembering the different varieties of music that had been in your life (and, you will notice, missing most of them, not to mention not itemizing specifics, which would have been a lengthy detour). But say a word or two on music and silence.
You are reminding me of things I hadn’t thought of for some time. I take it you intend me to talk of the presence or absence of music at various times in my life.
Actually, not only music (though that is the most evident form of external input) but also let’s broaden it to sound in general. Try putting it into bullet-points again, because there are a lot of threads in the discussion.
Well, there are, and this helped yesterday.
- Radio and taped music as ambient in stores, restaurants, public places
- Radio music or talk shows while driving
- Music as background at home.
- Long absences from TV, hence from commercials and music as well as programming
- Hampton Roads’ “almost monastic” absence of such music.
- My inability to work at Royster in 1985, because of incessant music
- Years of taped music in my car, some of it Hemi-Sync; years of silence
- John and Elizabeth’s non-stop NPR in the background at their house
- My brother John’s incessant TV, or so I am told, always on
- Music everywhere in college years
- Car-pooling in Newport News, and the ghastly AM radio. The same in Trenton earlier, come to think of it.
Enough, already. So, to bring all this together –?
You may look at the life you lead, the society you inhabit, in either of two ways, though it would be better to think of it in both ways, if you can.
- It is suffused with noise-pollution in the same way it is suffused with air, water, and food poisoning. The cumulative effect is to distance you from the natural environment and produce an artificial one. Light pollution even prevents you from seeing the night sky.
- It is an enriched feedback system, mirroring for you your continuity with the rest of the world. In a negative way, reluctantly, your habitat-altering species is being brought to realize that it needs to invent ways to be responsible as a group for the effects of changes that have been brought forward unknowingly by individuals. No singer or orchestra intends to destroy your silence; it is what is done with the song – where it is played, and how loudly, and when – that determines if the music is enhancement or annoyance.
Now, you may think we have taken a detour, or at least a side-road, but not so. Here is the connection:
You are the center of your world, each of you, and at the same time you live in a world composed of the effects of everyone else’s lives. It’s always both, never only one, regardless how you focus your attention.
Even Thoreau at Walden heard the railroad train going by on its way to or from Boston.
Yes, and in his simpler day there was no unwanted community-produced music to interfere with his silence except, perhaps, the telegraph wires that acted as Aeolian harps. But “simpler” is of course a comparative. To him, the world got continually louder.
“This nervous bustling nineteenth century.” Little did he know what was coming.
If you cared to do it, you could see that civilization has been progressing toward greater interconnection in all ways. Could you expect that the interconnection of individual minds would not keep pace with it (if not, indeed, lead it)?
Your own struggle with music, Frank, is an outlier position. You have been drawn to it, and you have been immune to it, nearly unaware of it, and you have actively resented it, by turns. At different times of your life you have been deeply attuned to it – remember how you would listen to Mahler or Bruckner by the hour, while reading Colin Wilson or Thoreau or somebody, in those years immediately after graduate school? No point in iterating: Each will have his or her own memories of interfacing with music. Similarly, with talk radio. There were years when you automatically listened to NPR whenever you were driving, whether commuting to and from work, or doing errands or whatever. Then there came years when the sound of words or music from outside was an unwanted distraction from your own thoughts, your own world.
And I take it that your point is that my changing attitude toward external audio is something I haven’t considered in the context of the question of my life’s pattern.
If you will remember to associate this with yesterday’s discussion, it will mean more. Right now you have fragments of music running through your mind as background, just as at other times the background might be thoughts or memories or scenarios. All these fragments were accumulated willy-nilly as you lived in the world. But – thought-experiment – could whatever plays at any given moment be selected by “random” processes, or is it selected by unnoticed connection? We don’t intend to answer this question, only to pose it for you to think about.
This all seems pretty inconclusive, almost random, speaking of random.
The operative word is “seems.” More another time.
Today’s theme, then?
“Interaction,” perhaps.
Well, we’ll see as I transcribe. Our thanks as always.