Sparta Butte . . . | buy this photo |
On the road in the American Northwest.
Sparta Butte . . . | buy this photo |
On the road in the American Northwest.
THREE METAPHYSICAL MINIATURES
(I)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Once we have divided the world into living subject and
lifeless object, it is but a single easy step from lifeless
object to resource, and from resource to commodity.
This turn of mechanical mind has done this historically
with rivers, with forests, and now in more recent times,
also with music. Entire media channels are now devoted
to the non-stop pounding of sound of the most decadent
kind into the brain, especially the young, vulnerable brain.
Music becomes something that we no longer play, but that
we must have, that we must buy. Music has become a
life-style. The last phase of degeneration? Oh yes, what
does the Pope, or what does this or that political leader
have on their iPod? The first Hip-Hop President? Good god,
smash the damn thing! They say Jefferson practiced violin
two hours a day. And I swear it was a French translator's
fiddle playing that got Lewis & Clark and the great Corps
of Discovery safely across a vast continent and back.
The sound of real plucked and bowed strings. The sound
and the spirit of the talking drum. See the boy in West Africa
that walks six miles to his lessons, has a sense of rhythm
and time that can dance circles around Einstein, and
practices on an upside-down coffee can from dawn to
dusk as if all of life depended on it. And well, in a way,
one could say—perhaps it does.
(II)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
See the sad glamour of the contemporary musical virtuoso.
Technical perfection perhaps, but without the joy, the
passion and the intelligence which come naturally with
the journey of discovery into the new and unknown. How
many more complete Beethoven cycles do we need? Such
a great waste of an abundance of talent, such a poverty
of spirit, of meaning. Like making love for money, the
movements may look exactly the same, but everybody
knows that your heart isn't in it.
(III)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Where does matter stop and spirit begin? This is assuredly
a perennially wrong question if ever there was one, one
which both cannot be answered properly and will continue
to confuse the mind as long as it is posed in this manner.
That is because it assumes separation in space. If one
thinks in terms of sound, however, it is from the beginning
clear. Think of spirit or intelligence as a resonance body
(or bodies, for there is no reason to believe that there is only
one) which envelopes the whole of the less subtle and more
dense material body, the one nested within the other. There
is no separation in space, only a movement of resonance
from gross and physically manifest, and therefore measurable,
to the more and more subtle and less physically manifest,
and therefore increasingly beyond measure and the present
framework of empirical science. This is the only view that
makes sense to me, both logically and in terms of my own
experience.
II.12.2009,
Snow Wiki Camp,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
