Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky"
---old Guns n Roses song
Resonance. It's the thing I long for sometimes. I love the way that a sound just fits, somehow, in ways I lack the vocabulary to properly share. It's a "dry clean only" fit, a Christmas-stocking-made-of-felt fit, and a fit just like the feel of a hot iron rolling out a wrinkle. It's a guitar line steady as an oscilloscope.
Of course, it's not a resonance of aural sound to which I refer, but the resonance inside. I do not believe, for example, that the ample mythology surrounding Ravel's workhorse, "Bolero", results from the literal giving and taking and rhythmic percussion within the piece, but instead from the gift of the listener's imagination. I wonder, sometimes, if things we take for granted today, such as the music, of say, Head East, will someday inspire similar flights of fancy.
But I want that feeling deep within my bones--that dolphin song resonating hundreds of miles away. I want that sense of being on track--my ears are against the tracks, and the train is on its way.
I have an album of Tom Heasley's work, ambient tuba, which resonates in the bass sectors of my mind in the way I mean. It's a bit hard for him to resist whale-song and other similar deep-voiced things, but I'm less worried with what is coming from speakers these days. I have that desire for a bone-rattling insight, a sense that I am taking my particular untrained ear and training it on the right sounds.
I've read so many quotes by so many folks who found wordly life too scalding, and longed for child-like innocence. I imagine folks in 20s Paris dives, pulling the cigarette out, stamping it out, and saying something clever about a return to lost youth. I read the parable in which the children enter Heaven first, and I've noticed that the path to wisdom often involves elimination of the unhelpful preconceptions. Even that modern sophisticate, science, requires me to leave behind those notions I cannot prove.
I'm entirely concerned, however, that I am an endless bundle of unproven notions, yet somewhat less disconcerted that I revel in my particular undemonstrated hypotheses. I will not have the "hints" book handy when I sit down to play this video game. I live in this virtual universe, and I have have never been successful in creating alternative characters.
Today is the day of post-Christmas "things I will do this year", a time of high hope and new ambitions. Although I rarely set up resolution lists, I find myself full of flawlessly (or imagined flawlessly) good intentions. But I really don't think it's about a "to do" list. I wish to live in resonance, in some kind of harmony.
I love the sound of the tuning fork, that sense that there is one guideline to ascertain whether one is in tune. I love the idea that one must choose light over dark, kindness over cruelty. I also love the fuzzy haze in which these absolutes are shrouded, because I'm not sure I have sufficient sunblock on for the full, stark light.
I like the way in which a slinky spirals in whorls as long as its length permits. It's a kind of unity, I guess, and it takes some determined doing to bend it out of shape. I've seen that optical illusion art in which one looks endlessly into hallways that themselve are impossibly endless. I've looked into some imaginary kaleidoscope, and watched the prisms whirl.
I know that my pragmatic thoughts will be simpler--more thought, more kindness, more exercise, less weight, more thankfulness. I will eschew excess chocolate, embrace order, and be grateful for remission in its literal and metaphysical forms. It's not a matter of saving my own life, as I'm attracted to the notion that seeking to save one's own life is a sure way to lose it. It's a matter of finding a place in the pipe organ. Perhaps I'll be a bamboo pipe, because silver is scarce. But I'm ready to sing.
As I walked by McKinney Town Lake Park today, I saw a water bird swimming in the water. "A cormorant!", I said to myself, as if I were Scrooge discovering it's not too late.
I do not know why a cormorant in the water gave me joy, but I'll take joy where I can find it.
Grace is so elusive, and yet so abundant. One wishes to be like the fellow in the Springsteen song: "I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched", or perhaps the man who can save Rosalita because the record company just gave a big advance. But I am afraid that my little part is less the stuff of juke joint poetry than the stuff of eating broccoli and keeping my temper.
The train is on the track, though, and I hear its hum, and I'm feeling the rhythm of behemoth on rails, and I'm ready to roll.
