Puddle memories

3:03:30 PM      trackback [] 

Healed by The Cure

I was reminded again of the spiritually uniting force of music while reading Ernesto’s post on seeing The Cure in Mexico. For each generation or group it’s a different musical pantheon. A guy I used to date who was exactly 10 years minus 2 days older than me, the heart of the baby boom generation, told me he thought that there would be a new mythology in the world and that this new mythology would have as its gods Elvis, Jim Morrison and I can’t remember who else, maybe Janis Joplin. My thought at the time was, This man has dropped a lot of acid in his day. Monday morning I heard an “encore presentation” of NPR’s interviews on the 50th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival and they talked in reverential tones about certain performances of jazz greats that stirred the crowds in unified rapture.

Music is a spiritual medium and a concert in a large venue can be like a cathedral filled with charismatics, swept up in a tide of emotions and inspiration, feeling oneness with all those attending, all the world. I have been there and experienced it. I’ve even felt it alone in my car listening to the stereo. If you have music, who needs drugs to be high, to be soothed or energized depending on the situation and emotional need?

In astrological symbolism, music is ruled by the planet Neptune, god of the all-encompassing, fluid sea, boundaryless, all dissolved in the universal. It is about the spiritual but also about “spirits” in the sense of alcohol, which can dissolve the ego’s boundaries and make everybody in the bar your best friend, or so is the illusion (another theme of Neptune). It’s not for nothin’ that the AA folks replace their alcohol addiction with trust in a higher power, replacing spirits with spirituality. Maybe that’s why AA is effective, because you always have to go with the energy that’s there, but so much better to channel it in a positive way.

1:21:13 PM      trackback []