Photo by Pollianapoltronieri
Music as an art is essentially playful we say you play the piano you don’t work the piano. Why music differs from say travel when you travel you are trying to get somewhere and of course, because being a very compulsive and purposive culture are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster till we eliminate the distance between places.
I mean with modern jet travel you can arrive almost instantaneously what happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place so you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey because the fun of the journey is to travel not to obliterate travel. So then in music though one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the completion of the composition if that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who wrote only the finales people go to a concert just hear one crashing cord because that’s the end. Same way as dancing you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room that’s where you should arrive the whole point of dancing is the dance.
Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away and then when they are 65 they don’t have any energy left. They’re more or less impotent and they go and rot in an old people’s senior citizens community because we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line we thought of life by analogy with a journey with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re dead, but we missed the point the whole way along it was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played, but you had to do that thing you didn’t let it happen and so for this in this way the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration. Let’s take uh Kozinski called man a time binder that means that he’s the animal peculiarly aware of the time sequence and as a result of this is able to do some very remarkable things. He can predict…he studies what’s happened in the past and he says the chances are so and so that happening again so he predicts those is very useful to be able to predict because that has survival value, but at the same time it creates anxiety.
You pay for this increased survival ability involved in prediction by knowing that in the end you won’t succeed you’re all going to fall apart in one way or another it might happen tomorrow it might happen 50 years from now, but it all comes apart in the end and people get worried about that they get anxious. So what they gained on the roundabout they lost on the swings so then if you see on the other hand that existence this is as I said my basic metaphysical assumption which I won’t conceal from you that existence is musical in nature. That is to say that it is not serious it is the play of all kinds of patterns we can look upon different creatures as we look at different games such as we look at chess checkers backgammon tennis there’s the tree game the Beatle game the grass game or you can look at them as you look at different styles of music berserkers waltzes um sonata etc. all down the line there are all these different things doing their stuff and we’re doing that now existence you see is spontaneous.
The Chinese word for nature means that which happens of itself. Your hair grows by itself, your heart beats by itself, you breathe pretty much by itself, and your glands secrete their essences by themselves. You don’t have voluntary control over these things so we say it happens spontaneously. So when you go to sleep and you try to go to sleep you interfere with the spontaneous process of going to sleep. Try to breathe you know real hard and you find you get bald up in your breathing so if you’re going to be human you just have to trust yourself to have bowel movements and go to sleep, and digest your food.
Of course, if something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon that’s another matter, but by and large the healthy human being does it right from the start of life. He needs no surgical interference and he lets it happen by him by itself so so with the whole picture that is fundamental to it you’ve got to let go and let it happen because if you don’t you’re going to be all clutched up you’re going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don’t try.
Author: Bliss
Dedicated to making a positive difference for people, animals, and this beautiful planet!
