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| wedding rings together me and Liesel - 0910.03 |
Hi Mom, first a song. Our family listened to this song yesterday. It's a favorite of ours, introduced to me by Liesel.
PLUS, hello, SCOTTISH connection. Though Fairground Attraction is a British band, here they are playing at a Scottish festival, plus the lead singer, Eddi Reader, is Acottish and from Glasgow.
FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION - "Find My Love"
Hi Mom, Lots of stuff today in this edition of Musical Monday.
I had already saved this this article transmitted by Brain Pickings on how music helps us grieve.
I like what my wife said to me this morning. She said that I did well yesterday, Mother's Day, by not having a break down because I grieve in healthy ways throughout the year whereas she represses it all and lets it out a couple of times a year (usually Mother's Day and the anniversary of her mother's death).
These comments made me feel good. I need affirmation that I am working on my grief process because sometimes I think I am avoiding it and this blog helps me avoid rather than set to work on it.
But the blog helps as do my other little tributes, such as the daily alarm and giving an object daily kisses, as a stand-in for you, Mom.
I decided to copy in this Brain Pickings article. I tried to find a library copy of the Aldous Huxley essay she references, and my university does not own a copy. I may check at K. Indeed!! K-College owns it (of course). I will soon see if I have alumnus privileges otherwise I may have Sam or Lanny check it out for me.
Once again, in this article, Popova returns to this idea that music expresses what cannot be expressed in words. Toward this end, I have one song in particular, "Glósóli" by Sigur Rós. It's an ineffable song.
I like that the book Popova is featuring here is called Room for Doubt, like my blog, which is called "Sense of Doubt" from the song by David Bowie.
Popova paraphrasing Lesser accounts for essentially one of my favorite quotes from The Big Chill: "Sometimes, you have to art flow over you."
And after years of promoting EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY, apparently Thoreau had an idea about the transcendent humility of not knowing.
HOW MUSIC HELPS US GRIEVE
How Music Helps Us Grieve
“The springs of our reaction to music lie deeper than thought.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Scientists now believe that language and music co-evolved to simulate the most abiding truths of nature. Indeed, for as long as we’ve been able to articulate the human experience, we’ve made music about the most inarticulable parts of it and then used language to extol music’s power — nowhere more beautifully than in Aldous Huxley’s 1931 meditation on how music stirs the soul, in which he asserted that music’s greatest potency lies in expressing the inexpressible.
This, perhaps, is why music is so sublime a solace when it comes to the most inexpressible of human emotions: grief.
Wendy Lesser articulates this peculiar power of music in a passage from Room for Doubt (public library) — a miraculously beautiful book I discovered through Oliver Sacks’s reading list.
Lesser, who doesn’t consider herself “a particularly musical person,” contemplates the way in which music bypasses the intellect and speaks straight to the unguarded heart:
The springs of our reaction to music lie deeper than thought… Part of what music allows me is the freedom to drift off into a reverie of my own, stimulated but not constrained by the inventions of the composer. And part of what I love about music is the way it relaxes the usual need to understand. Sometimes the pleasure of an artwork comes from not knowing, not understanding, notrecognizing.
Nothing befuddles our elemental need for understanding more effectively than death, the great unknown and ultimate unknowable. Music, Lesser suggests, offers a gateway not to understanding death in an intellectual way but to befriending its mystery in that Rilkean sense — something she realized in a surprising encounter with music shortly after her dear friend Leonard’s death, which she hadn’t let herself mourn.
Lesser, who had traveled to Germany for research on a book about David Hume but had somehow found herself at the auditory oasis of the Berlin philharmonic, recounts:
I had been carrying around Lenny’s death in a locked package up till then, a locked, frozen package that I couldn’t get at but couldn’t throw away, either. As long as I was afraid to look inside the package, it maintained its terrifying hold over me: it frightened and depressed me, or would have done, if I had allowed myself to have even those feelings instead of their shadowy half-versions. It wasn’t just Lenny that had been frozen; I had, too. But as I sat in the Berlin Philharmonic hall and listened to the choral voices singing their incomprehensible words, something warmed and softened in me. I became, for the first time in months, able to feel strongly again.
Revisiting the question of not understanding, or what Thoreau celebrated as the transcendent humility of not-knowing, she adds:
Later, when I looked at the words in the program, I saw that the choral voices had been singing about the triumph of God over death. This is what I mean about the importance of not understanding. If I had known this at the time, I might have stiffened my atheist spine and resisted. But instead of taking in what the German words meant, I just allowed them to echo through my body: I felt them, quite literally, instead of understanding them. And the reverie I fell into as I listened to Brahms’s music was not about God triumphing over death, but about music and death grappling with each other. Death was chasing me, and I was fleeing from it, and it was pounding toward me; it was pounding in the music, but the music was also what was helping me to flee. And, as in a myth or a fairy tale, I sensed that what would enable me to escape — not forever, because all such escapes are temporary, but to escape just this once — would be if I looked death, Lenny’s death, in the face: if I turned back and looked at it as clearly and sustainedly as I could bear.
Complement this particular portion of the wholly magnificent Room for Doubt with beloved writers’ reflections on the power of music, these unusual children’s books about making sense of loss, and psychologist Irvin D. Yalom on the role of not-knowing in our search for meaning.
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This search for meaning through the not knowing will continue. But now, some music.
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Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - 2004
Forward to 3 mins 20 seconds, as Dhani Harrison looks off to the right and smiles. And then Prince appears from nowhere, spends a little under three minutes murdering every guitarist in the world, throws his guitar away and walks off.
"Glósóli" by Sigur Rós
Transcendent, ineffable majesty.
AWE.
"The Satellites" by Brian Eno and Karl Hyde - 2014
And this song has something to do with motherhood...
Tracey Thorn - "Nowhere Near" from Out of the Woods - 2007
Had to use the Deadpool soundtrack version after watching it yesterday.
Chicago - "You're my Inspiration"
"Careless Whisper" WHAM! UK
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Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 309 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1605.09 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
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