Prelude And Fugue

More and more when I’m typing on a keyboard I feel like I’m playing a piano. The laptop has keys. A piano has keys. The parallel is compelling. I like to picture myself as a shy Victorian man hammering out whirlwinds of lush music on a baby grand. Concertos. Nocturnes. Arpeggios. Glissandos. Arpeggios. Adagios. Allegros. A salon full of people sporting ostrich feathers and top hats. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let your ego go wild. Even in a fascist dystopia. Though the proposition is somewhat ludicrous. And sad. I don’t want to get too carried away here. There was a time one could live somewhat askew to the reality of things, a little aslant and out of the picture. Now you’ve got to be alert. The old ways are gone. The new ways are just getting started. New ways to resist. And insist. Like the beginning of Monk’s Crepuscule with Nellie, tender and woozy, with its percussive ascension and off-balance shadows. Waitress with a tray of espresso. Sad candles in the dimness of a bistro. Sartre writing madly.

Outside is dimly heard the broken music of the street. Cars, trucks, people, pigeons, crows, jackhammers, industry, attitudes, attorneys, perturbations, accelerations, shops, molecules, abstractions, riddles, quarrels, accents, appointments, aspersions, asphalt, sirens, emergencies, currents, helicopters, jets.

The music of the spheres is the music of proportion, the movement of celestial bodies. It’s not an audible music, but a music of the soul. It pervades everything.

Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.

“Thus, the thickness of things is opposed only by a demand of the mind, which every day makes words more costly and their need more urgent,” wrote Francis Ponge in 1933 in a proeme titled Témoignage, meaning testimony. 

“No matter. The resulting activity is the only one in which all the qualities of this prodigious construction, the person, from which everything has been called into question and which seems to have so much difficulty in frankly accepting its existence, are brought into play.”

Piano notes are so clean, so pure, that it would seem a travesty to compare to them words, which are inherently messy, and whose roots dangle like raw pink tentacles hoisted out of the dirt, their connections to the rhizomatic underworld temporarily severed. A cluster of notes in a melodic line are self-contained and unrestrained. The patterns are impromptu. Words require networks. Earth. Microbes. Fungi. They have histories. Resonances. Laminations. Stratum. And are forever jealous of music.

Music is supremely good at creating a sense of anticipation. There are many compositions in which the music seems to be building toward something, epiphany or high. There’s a delicious sensation in a heightened tension. Anticipation of an abstract reward can lead to dopamine release in the striatum. By avoiding the tonic, the listener subconsciously wants to hear it, and so it creates a very powerful sense of musical energy. The anticipation of something marvelous. Something mathematical and jeweled and metal and wood. Something maned and grammatical like 73 jumping horses and two chariots going round and round a center pole on a circular platform at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Robin Guthrie, Carousel, released August 28, 2009.  “A sonic palette with a personality all its own,” quipped music critic Joshua Klein.

Certain questions are raised. How does one go from the inorganic to the organic? How does a brew of chemicals become a milieu of tubes and testicles? How does a fireball become an eyeball? How does a rosewood become an oboe? How does a word become a worm? How does a worm become a word? How does a gourd become a chord? How do atoms become spasms? How do feuds become fugues? How does pilin become Dylan? How does Bach become rock?

If you listen closely, the beauty of the joke is obvious. Turpentine had nothing to do with it. It all began with a contagion of laughter. A set of allegorical equations languishing in a pile of engine blocks and coefficient levers. The remarkable cathedrals and soap bubbles extending from Mr. Potato Head’s combustible locution. As if nothing mattered but ping-pong. Or the furniture of unmanageable outfields. Each pebble is a fascinating world. Especially the ones encrusted with adjectives. There’s no need for concern. All life is messy. Evolution cries out for underwear. Even the cheese has something to say. It's hard to disagree with a world this incoherent. You might try walking in the sand. Before the color orange became a muscle, the disorder was all about feathers. And now it’s all about trains. My railroad nerves and everything they unlock.