between everything and nothing
what does pure perception feel like?
The idea today is a study of a transcendent musical experience, which starts in *perception* and goes from there, paired with the understanding that perception is relational at core.
The other day I was listening to the triple at work—I just put it on through some headphones… …my attention, split… …interpreting… …symbols… …this idea… …that thought… …the sounds were there, in the background, moving me here and there, I’d catch a whiff of their inner poetry… …earth shattering…. at times… then tender. Moment to moment. And I knew while working, I wasn’t really being with the music—that’s a different kind of listening.
Being with the music. That’s when it’s on a high volume like 85 or more and when you’re safe and sitting or lying down or in a space where you can move your body. When you follow the tones from the inside out. You’re in The Appel Room, live with a musician who cares about the felt structure behind the sound, one who has carefully arranged the sound material in such a way that you can follow the meaning throughout—from beginning to end, section to section, phrase to phrase, tone to tone.
But notice even in that sentence, the language makes the music seem like it is something other than perception or, more than one thing… …tone to tone, from beginning to end… …as if musical listening is adding up multiple things, tasks, things to pay attention to, together, as if to build something “out there.” But the reality is that the art of time is not even one thing but no thing at all. In direct perception (of music) you are left with no thing—and everything at the same time—you’re left with a glimpse of the highest hope: the light in the darkness. The air is luminous. Time just stopped. And you feel that the material world and spirit mind have meshed into one, as if you could briefly feel everything in every place. The world has become something you could feel, like flesh of a different kind, a transfigured kind that glows from the inside out, just like a flash, where the meaning of the world is contained in how good and lovely it feels, and then like a dream, it all comes back: the room, the echo, the smiles, the arms and shoulders first, then the face and chest.
Days later you’re able to put words to it. The whole thing, in a moment of total trust and openness, fused together into something with a dual nature, between a beginning and an end. And instantly, taking no time at all, the duality between beginning and ending was felt-understood as one thing: one articulation, one breath, one relation between the two. Then, even that relation—oneness—will further condense into everything and nothing at all…It’s a glimpse… …the music reveals itself as what it is: living sound-relations.
But you know that name does not give justice to the real thing. Months and years later, you question if it was really real. Trust yourself.
Part of the Articulation Series: Its Own Gospel, and The Song for Athene.
Transporting prose