09.21.06

“Of Love and Music” 07.07.2005

Posted in 2005/2006 Beginnings at 4:29 am by Miracle ♪♫

My “Sartre” once spoke of silence. Having the unfortunate shroud of a so-called adult mind — which makes it far more inferior to a child’s, — I expected to hear nothing more. For me it was silence, period.

But he was maieutic and continued to quiz me, “What do you understand of silence?” Space and Nothingness sought attention to be loosened from my lips, but while those two words were being processed within, the philosopher’s query revealed much. My tongue flicked back the words and banished them for the moment. Space and Nothingness would be of germane use some other time, I decided.

The next idea that this thinker proposed was remarkable. It was like nothing that anybody has ever suggested I do with silence: “Why don’t you try it” he challenged. I did, and at this moment, I am silent. Silence has now a different meaning in my life — listening.

The definition gave birth to a realization that silence and listening are, as a matter of fact, the first steps of the greatest things I hold dear in life. They are… of love and music.

Love and music are profoundly synonymous than one could imagine. A person could lose himself in amazement and intimacy in both music and love, one can take so much but has to give more than that he has taken, and most importantly, both require careful listening otherwise they might as well cease to exist.

Throughout the history of man, listening has been acknowledged to be an instrument for spiritual development. What a fulfilling course it must be to listen through music and love. Therefore, in some manner, music becomes a religion as it casts awareness only to those who listen and as it imparts what every bible preaches — Love.

In Plato’s Symposium, music has been said to hold the principles of love in application to harmony… Numerous words have been uttered by wise men pertaining these things. Nevertheless, music and love remains to be partially comprehensible to man. “Love in search of a word,” was Sydney Lanier’s interpretation of music. Romantic and beautiful as it may seem, may it not stop us
from searching for more meaning and answers.

As the dear metaphysician urged me to “try it”, so do I wish to encourage everyone the same way. If all of us stop for a while and just listen, there would be order and enlightenment, and much could be heard. If silence is of listening, and listening is of love and music, and love and music is of life, what perfect harmony must it result in? Hear ye…

John Cage: I have nothing to say — and I am saying it — and that is poetry. (from John Cage’s Silence 1961 “Lecture on Nothing”)

S I L E N T

L I S T E N

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