Musicality

Music is namaste manifest, despite traditional and originary meanings, it has become accepted to represent a sentiment akin to the light in my heart recognizing and respecting the light in your heart.

Sing the song of your soul. March to the beat of your own drum. To exist and, more importantly, to create in this world is to let that musicality express itself.

Music culture is a reflection of soul culture. If a song resonates with you, you feel it. You dig it, and so feel it beneath the surface. Music is the sound that is noise with purpose with an added layer of rhythm.

And the beauty of it is that it has an organic quality. Good music flows, it comes naturally to us and good music that doesn't flow does so that it interrupts this process in such a way that that makes it natural to the process.

If we take noises to be the basic building blocks, the random nucleotides in this aural (and in many ways sub-aural) experience, then sounds are the individual genes that make the sequence and order of these noises relevant. Music then is the string of DNA that separates the sounds into the coherence necessary to make something complete and whole.

Music as the expression of the soul is not just song, but all creative acts. Emotions are the verses, chorus and refrain that make up the arias of the inner experience. To convey emotion through the arts -- whether it is contained in our traditional models of what is considered art or not -- is to unleash not only this light from within but also the self-same darkness embodied by and necessitated by that light.

But where does this light come from? What is the source of this music within us that compels us to dance and sing and write and paint and perform and sex?

In that we refer to these kind of cathartic releases as communion with God and that they were once used in the kind of ancient rites that connected us with the Earth, with the Forces of Life that we depended on for survival in a way not seen in the industrialized world of today, this light cannot be from the Self.

The Self is too preoccupied with the here, the now, the past, the future, the physicality of that eternal argument between mind and body. To react so instantly and so strongly requires the freedom of that which is unburdened by this kind of responsibility created by life.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida says that everyone "must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either giver or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility." Where a few pages earlier he stated that "It is from the perspective of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible."

So the Self as the projection of this mortality is responsible. And it is this selfsame mortal nature of the Self that makes its rejection a crucial step into nirvana.

While it is not able to Originate this light, in this capacity the "I" can however, help to shape the release. The creativity of the Self is in its ability to filter this expression of the Other. What the Self does is to translate the noise, give it purpose as sound and so music so it can be more readily recognized by the corresponding Self of Others. It frames it and packages it so it can be received, a different kind of Gift than the value of a Death.

There's something primal, something moving about music that occasionally catches us off guard. It reaches in when we aren't paying attention and pulls us almost into a trance-like state. It awakens us at the same time as it lulls us to sleep with its complete control over us.

Namaste.

And so we react; something internal responds and seeks to return that energy.

It's primal and messy, but powerful and beautiful and so completely natural in ways we cannot realize in our everyday lives. We dance, gyrating bodies caught in a maelstrom of sound, whipping us with all the force of a wind in the trees. We sing along, harmonizing, humming when we don’t' know the words, trapped in this Other that controls us.

This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can only become what it is in being paralyzed by the [transie], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God. Then the person sees itself seen by the gaze of another, "the absolute highest being in whose hands we are, not externally, but internally."
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The secret of the mysterium tremendum takes over from a heterogeneous secrecy and at the same time breaks it. This rupture takes the form of either subordination by incorporation (one secret subjects or silences the other), or repression.

This reaction is the reception of that Gift as it is immutably translated to a form more readily accepted by our subconscious.

In this sense, I'm very much speaking of Music in the kind of terms one might describe more aptly as pure music. Music as the transcendental experience.

But music as we hear it is not always pure.

It is created by this Other, but reproduced and transmitted by the Self. As such, music becomes a matter of power, it becomes a tool in the duality known as power economy, the binary between those who do have authority and those who do not because it naturally comes from a place of significance.