Part II: Perceive. Understand.

looking to evolve

Maybe it was nice before: deep, soulful, thoughtful–all words that think to explain the magnitude of our being even though much about our souls are unsayable. But that was then. Should I be able to let it go? Move on? Maybe it sounded, what’s the word, “good”? If I hold on to the sound, will I be able to let go of the poison that created it? If I have learned anything from my narrative, it is that this poison will not creep into the sound, but that it lives and thrives in the folds and crevices of the frequency. What about those frequencies are so alluring? Why isn’t it hideous, repulsive? If anything is true about it, then there must equally exist something about it that is false. Of which am I aware?

What does it sound like? I would hope that in listening, I could hear the sound, but my mind fails me. I’m only now recognizing the sound of years past. To feel it in the moment is but a portion of the sound that contains within it a vast knowledge. “That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them”.

Sin. Conversion. To truth? What is the truth of the sound? Does poison remain? Still? Steeped in my sin, I could not hear or see the sound I felt so desperate to create.

Years ago, I sat in a booth at a fattening restaurant with an Air Force pilot who explained to me the nature of a sonic boom: a jet accelerates to the speed that is faster than the rate at which sound travels. This break being both audible and visible, I sat in confused darkness. How could I not know the intricacies of what sound is, what it means, how it moves, what it looks like…what it sounds like?

I listen to what I played years ago, after my two years at Walden pond, and hear so much misunderstanding. I can see more clearly, but my perception wanes still in unrecognized despair. I hear, yet fail to understand.

The questions I dread asking: “what does it sound like?” now morphed into “what does the sound mean?”

I know of the broken link between seeing the sheet music while not perceiving the music itself: this realization is what broke me–the disconnection not existing within myself, but rather, from myself. None of it was mine, none of it made for me, by me, or even with me in mind.

So why, then, do we, allofus, everylastoneofus, continue searching for ourselves in music? Is it not a lie?

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