(In)Coherent Beauty
How music breaks monopolies of the mind
Three years and miles of sea
Somehow I carry you with me
You’re in every face I see
But the city brings sweet relief
Until you find meI might as well be lost in Hollywood or London town
Than be lost in you, you
I might as well be lost in Oslo or Tokyo, Seoul
Than be lost in your world
…
Flying to Brazil for Christmas, I found myself digging through old music archives on my phone. Bored of current playlists, I sought a refresh with what I used to listen to about a decade ago.
Interesting how much of a reflective process this can be.
Came across the song that opens this article, Keep Running, by Gemma Hayes. I had not listened to it since twenty-eleven.
The immediate feeling was one of home-ness: “Wow, I know this.” My mind instantly traveled back to when I first discovered this song.
I could picture reasonably clear where I was in my life at that point: where I worked, whom I dated, and the things I used to think; the things I used to do, what I used to dream about, and what I desired for my life.
When I compared this past image of me to present me, my perception is that I’m almost an entirely different individual. So much has changed in my life, that listening to Keep Running crystalized who I am not anymore.
I could see my progress through a series of (now perceived as) successful transformations, not without their hardships, but certainly a positive evolutionary journey.
It also gave me a pleasant feeling of familiarity, grounding me back in my own self. I silently said “This is still such a good song” as I got satisfied to validate my own taste from back then, as an indication to the taste I have today.
In other words, I was glad to witness my coherence. Keep Running informed me that, at least concerning my music taste, I was ok back in 2011; therefore I must be okay now — even if sometimes I lose perspective of it.
Music & Wandering
I’m using the song incident as a metaphor for a broader understanding of the transmutative process we all go through in life. A process which, in the present moment, can be hard for us to evaluate.
It is quite habitual to posit “Am I adequate?” in reference to what surrounds us: friends, family, colleagues, community, or merely, Culture. Regardless of the stage in our development, we might just as well crucify ourselves emphasizing what is not quite as we wanted it to be. And by “it,” I mean ourselves, our lives, and things around us.
In the dictionary, one of the definitions for wander is “to move slowly from a fixed point or place.”
Personally, music has this profound capability to affect my reflections. It gently carves out space where I review my story and my feelings, reflect about my actions, and about events in my life. It helps move me from that which I think I am in a particular moment, stripping my thoughts from occasional doses of self-deprecation or insecurity, to that which I can be.
Music works as this fantastic self-inquiry mechanism, breaking the monopoly of fixed perspectives I might hold, opening doors to novel interpretations of my reality.
Structures of Interpretation
The reason why Keep Running caught my attention this time was that, for a split second, I pondered what if, in the lyrics above, the words “you/your” were replaced by “I/me/mine”?
Yeah. Our life dramas are very much our own dramas. And we get really creative projecting dramas that are not really out there, but very much in here.
In the renowned Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl depicts the horror of the Holocaust in a first-person narrative, where he takes the reader so intimately close to life on concentration camps that it feels disturbing to visualize this real side of humankind’s raw nature.
He beautifully conceives that when a (wo)man is deprived of everything, (her)his family, all of (her)his possessions, (her)his identity, and waits for the day in which (s)he will be murdered, the only thing this person has is the choice of switching (her)his mindset about what is happening to her/him.
Writes Frankl:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
What Frankl means is that we cannot change or control the events that happen in our lives, but we can manage how we engage with them. Hence, the dramas we birth out of what happens in life is very much a product of what is happening inside of us.
The good news is: becoming aware of such self-created stories, I can choose to work with them. I can integrate them and carry on. Moreover, I’m proposing that music can, and forgive the pun, be genuinely a valuable instrument.
In Identity and Identification, I attempted to add color to the forming of the self-suggesting that our process of individuation is somehow painful and calming, both necessary. Integrating such polarities is an effective way to reframe the reality we see and understand that a coin does have two interrelated and interdependent sides: negative and positive.
What I called somewhat inappropriately by “dramas” are actually the highly charged emotional states that we routinely experience every day.
Our emotions are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our feelings about a particular situation or event we experience(d). Subconsciously, the primary goal we assign to these stories is to explain to ourselves the reasons why we feel the way we feel — thus forming our narrative.
Emotions carry another critical function: they connect to our values. We get emotionally charged when our values are being threatened or not respected (both by others and by ourselves) as a representation of felt internal incoherence.
Acknowledging our emotions is a crucial step to understand ourselves better, and cultivate our own voice. Getting in touch with our values helps guide our discernment and our choices, which in turn mitigates emotionally charged states and makes us vibrate more coherently.
On the same breath, music, as a form of art, emotionally moves us. I would argue that more important than to digress why it has this effect in us, is to allow it to blend with your emotional state and do its “job.”
I’m not suggesting that music to be used as a redirective tool to remove us from (negative) states of sadness, boredom, or anxiety, etc. Instead, that we enhance through music our understanding of the different and necessary emotional states we experience, which together make for an integral human-felt experience.
In that the coin, in fact, has two sides. We can only gauge one in relation to the other. Incoherences are a fundamental part of that which makes a truly coherent being.
…I turn around, and everything changed.
I turn around, and everything changed.
