Tuesday, March 04, 2003

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Richard Powers' latest novel, The Time of Our Singing.  I'm really enjoying this book, loving it even, and I find the common criticisms of his work - too much intellect at the expense of feeling, a too-precisely drawn dialectic, etc. - have no resonance with me.  I respond to his characters, and feel with and for them, much as I would any other great novelist's.  This feeling strikes me as the proper sort, and I approach his characters' lives much as I do my own, and the lives of those around me, with whom I am intimately caught up.  By this I mean that I come away from the back and forth of the day's emotion, and think about it a bit.  I don't always do so intentionally, but my 3am thoughts do drift, and in drifting, come to grapple with the larger meaning of my small, day-to-day feelings.  I honestly don't know what use emotion could have, beyond the basic fight-or-flight stuff, without the application of intellect.  I certainly don't want to be feeling's unwitting victim, thereby somehow victimizing those about whom I am given to feel.  I'm certainly enjoying his conflation/opposition of music and time, art and science.  When I was younger, I felt time much more intensely than I do now, at thirty-five.  I'm not sure why this is so.  I'm not troubled by aging, because in many ways I experience my movement through time as a growing younger mentally, as I grow older physically.  By this I mean that as I grow older, and gather experience, I increasingly view the world as more mysterious, more difficult to understand, and therefore more worthy of my full attention.  I'm truly grateful to have passed the point where I felt as though I knew everything - I suppose there is nothing more tiresome, and false, than a cynical, world-weary twenty-eight year-old!  I don't wish, for myself, to master time, or to live forever - in or out of this body.  I do hope that I am able to make good use of my time, and when I do wear out I hope to happily cede my knowledge, and the resources I consume, to another, hopefully better, person.  Of course, the phrase "making good use of," implies, in itself, some desire to dominate or control time.  Music moves me for it's ability to compress or expand time - it is for this reason that music, of all the arts, seems to me the most intimate, and telling.  I've had a number of interesting experiences while immersed in the flow of certain long, sonorous, droning musical pieces, particularly the works of Morton Feldman and Eliane Radigue.  I've experienced myself as dead, very young or very old, and very large or very small.  Music is caught up in time in precisely the same manner as our lives, for certainly no musical work, or life, could make sense if it happened all at once, or never happened, or always happened.  When musical events (notes) stack up in time, as chords, it is perceived by the ear as consonance or dissonance, just as life events stacked up in time have certain consequences, which we later judge and categorize.  The time it takes for this or that thing to unfold - well, it just is, no matter how dearly we may wish for it to happen now, or, in certain instances, to never occur.  One of the central thematic premises, and plot devices, of Powers' novel revolves around the notion of the universe as indifferent to time's direction.  It just flows, and simply is.  The feeling that time rushes irrevocably forward, gathering loss, is nothing more than a matter of perspective, or prejudice (to bring into play the novel's parallel theme of race). Last night, I was reading the section where Delia, burnt to death one hundred pages earlier but ten years hence, experiences her house as burnt, her family scattered.  God, it just chilled me.  What is time telling me, or you, that we cannot hear, bound as we are to the sense of its relentless push at our backs? I learned everything about music once I surrendered my conventional notions of harmony, or beauty.  It took forever to let that desire for melody, and its inevitable resolution, go.  But once I did, music just exploded for me, and became so much deeper and richer. When I was younger, I imagined, frequently and vividly, the end of the world.  Brought up as I was, in a fundamentalist Christian household, I imagined this in purely Biblical terms - the sounding of the trumpet, the sun turned black as sackcloth, the dead walking the earth, the horsemen of the apocalypse riding a blood-red cloud across the sky, and so on.  I see this now as a dream of death, before I was able to conceive of my own mortality in more absolute terms.  9:11:53 PM