The Consolation of Muscle Memory
"If it weren't for music, life would be a mistake."
False! I have you now, Friedrich Wilhelm, my friend. I have your myopia. Don't worry--it's the same as mine.
What you are saying is true only for a certain kind of cognitive mutant. I share your particular kind of mutation, though I daresay to a lesser extent.
If not for music, I would have practically no experience with manipulating the world. Here I mean doing music, not merely listening, no matter how intently. As someone who's getting more cerebral by the week, so quickly in fact that I can see it happening of its own accord, destroying my boundaries, music keeps me sane. Otherwise all I'd have to show for my life would be some markings in recording devices of carious kinds, and a particular arrangement of neurons in my cranium, which is a depressingly small chunk of the cosmos. Oh, and a few stories those I've known would tell about me. And a few people modified. But all that will have blown over in a century or two.
Music, as those who don't perform it are wont to say, is the language of the emotions. False! There is emotion to be sure, but the histrionic manipulation of heartbeats and frissons and galvanic skin response through auditory entrainment is secondary in performance. What counts is mastery! It is all you have in life, and all you need. Mastery. In it I feel big. I have surcease from the rest of my life, where I wonder what I'm doing and whether anyone will ever understand. And I can play out the facsimile of an engaged life.
Poetry doesn't do it, because it's just another outflow of the cognitive faculty. But muscle memory! Ah, there's something to ground you, to make you feel actual.
I highly recommend it.
Consider: "The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."
False! I have you now, Friedrich Wilhelm, my friend. I have your myopia. Don't worry--it's the same as mine.
What you are saying is true only for a certain kind of cognitive mutant. I share your particular kind of mutation, though I daresay to a lesser extent.
If not for music, I would have practically no experience with manipulating the world. Here I mean doing music, not merely listening, no matter how intently. As someone who's getting more cerebral by the week, so quickly in fact that I can see it happening of its own accord, destroying my boundaries, music keeps me sane. Otherwise all I'd have to show for my life would be some markings in recording devices of carious kinds, and a particular arrangement of neurons in my cranium, which is a depressingly small chunk of the cosmos. Oh, and a few stories those I've known would tell about me. And a few people modified. But all that will have blown over in a century or two.
Music, as those who don't perform it are wont to say, is the language of the emotions. False! There is emotion to be sure, but the histrionic manipulation of heartbeats and frissons and galvanic skin response through auditory entrainment is secondary in performance. What counts is mastery! It is all you have in life, and all you need. Mastery. In it I feel big. I have surcease from the rest of my life, where I wonder what I'm doing and whether anyone will ever understand. And I can play out the facsimile of an engaged life.
Poetry doesn't do it, because it's just another outflow of the cognitive faculty. But muscle memory! Ah, there's something to ground you, to make you feel actual.
I highly recommend it.
Consider: "The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."
posted by A. D. at 9:54 PM
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