Music, The Beautiful Arrangement Of Time.

 

Music has always been important to me. No matter how hard life has been, through catastrophic accidents, surgery, the death of a beloved wife there has always been one thing that never failed me: the power of music to evoke and inspire emotion. While this was liberating and joyful in my youth it has grown even stronger and more powerful now. Two hours of playing guitar will shift the most oppressive mood and renew my energy and enthusiasm for life and work. Without it my creativity as a writer and a human being would be greatly diminished.
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As a musician I have an average amount of talent. My playing relies more on expression and feeling than a high degree of skill. I don't have the finger speed or the dexterity to give Eric Clapton a run for his money. But within my limits I have been able to develop over the years a particular personal style and delicacy of expression. More recently that has meant an extraordinary amount of pleasure when I'm playing well. Rocking a finger back and forth on the fretboard to enjoy the sensuality of vibrato on a single note has reached an intensity I've never experienced before. And this got me thinking:

'What is music, exactly? Why does it have such a profound and gloriously uplifting effect on me? On anyone? Why is it such a luxury that I'm almost embarrassed at what seems pure self-indulgence?' 

Until about a fortnight ago when I had a sudden epiphany, and new definition:

Music is the beautiful arrangement of time.

The beautiful arrangement of time.

 Music is the beautiful arrangement of time. It has its unique appeal to us because like us it moves through time in a linear way. Every piece of music has a beginning, an understanding of complex relations between chord and melody, descant and rhythm, and then an end. Like us. We begin, grow in wisdom and complex understanding, and then we meet our end. We are born, we perceive the beauty of the world, and then we die. Music is a miracle of human experience, a transcendent experience available to every one of us. Through music we can explore the human capacity for consciousness of both our own finite mortality and the transcendent beauty of the created universe.

Music has two unique qualities: emotional power and temporal presence.

First, music allows us to experience true emotions in a fuller, more individuated way, separate from our own personal experience. We gain access to emotional states and moods that we might never have had in the normal course of our lives; supreme and spiritually uplifting joy, empathetic understanding of anothers grief, the surge of supercharged awareness found in moments of crisis and life-or-death struggle. And with this comes an enhanced capacity for feeling, not as simple emotion, but as the process of making value judgements. Qualitative judgements about right and wrong stem from emotional reactions to the good and bad in life. The greater our emotional sophistication the surer our moral judgement becomes.

For me the search for a particular tone from a guitar has paralleled my own moral and spiritual search. Personally there's always been an inner sound to chase, a pure tone that's  expressed in the words: an electric guitar should sound like shattering glass. A bell-like ringing in the middle register and a brittle, crystalline splintering of higher notes cascading to the floor. When, on rare occasions I can reach this perfect tone when playing I find my mind becomes detached from the physical experience and I observe myself from above, calmly and dispassionately, while still perfectly aware of an inner response, a connection between that ideal sound within and that ringing sound from the guitar. This experience, this moment of pure connection becomes a touchstone, a marker of absolute truth and beauty.  

Music makes us more sophisticated, more deeply informed as emotional beings. It broadens our emotional experience base and enhances our range of emotions for life's situations, nourishing us and arming us for life's vagaries. It enables us to discriminate between subtle distinctions of feeling, by directly comparing feeling states expatiated directly by music. It gives us personal, direct experience of the differences between, for example, boredom, lassitude, ennui, apathy, anomie, alienation, despair, despondency and chagrin. But enough about Wagner..

And music does so without the limits of words, which are paltry symbols for the real power, range and depth of emotion. Even the English language, the most voracious in terms of stealing words from other languages, cannot come close to describing the totality of human emotion. For me this is intensely frustrating. As I get older I find I experience emotion in more subtle and nuanced forms; refined, specific and almost infinitely variable states which blossom more fully with time and experience. That I can't fully express this in words denies me the ability to capture and compare emotions that each give more colour and power to experience. Poetry seems flowery and futile, arcane and antiquated. Even haiku, which capture a poignant moment, mood or experience so sparingly evoke emotions more in what is left unsaid than what is made explicit.

Tempo, rhythm, syncopation and swing.

Neuro-scientist Susan Greenfield remarked in a lecture that beyond the cochlear and the retina both sound and sight are processed by the brain in exactly the same way, and using exactly the same electrical impulses. The only difference being the area of the brain involved and the way we perceive the results of the transfer of sound as vibration in the ear and light as an image on the retina. The key difference in perception was, in her view, that vision, what we see, is measured in intervals of space (distance), and that sound is measured in intervals of time (duration). We see only objects in space. We cannot see time, for the simple reason that we are captives of time, traveling through it in a linear way, the future becoming the past without us ever glimpsing it. We can only infer time from what we see, which is the present moment endlessly renewed.

I became aware of this dimension to music recently when listening to a digital library of thousands of songs in the small hours. I found myself hungrily skipping from track to track, cutting some songs short, skipping others after an opening riff or melody triggered the appropriate memory, moving on to the next and the next trying to consume music faster than it could be played (Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown from my '60s childhood, Albinoni's Trumpet Concerti from my questing '80s). It occurred to me that music is a luxury precisely because it uses up the one resource we truly have, our time. The seconds of a life slip away, and we can only hear so much, so many times, sacrificing the possible for the familiar and needed.

Schopenhauer saw music as the highest art form, the supreme act of will, turning the full power of our instinct for survival into direct contemplation of the underlying reality of life itself. It's also the ephemeral art form, passing, only available as a thing in itself by us using, spending our time to experience it. Until the last century music could not exist separate to the eternal present of a performance, a unique combination of human skill, sensitivity and the zeitgeist of a particular place and time.

Perhaps no composer has understood this better than John Cage, who demonstrated his belief that duration is the essential building block of all of music with two remarkable works. The first,  4'33", is a three movement composition (for any instrument or combination of instruments) of absolute silence performed, in all seriousness, for the first time in 1952. The second invokes the almost imperceptible passing of eternity in 'Organ, As Slow as Possible' (1985) which is currently being performed by the organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, and is scheduled to last for 639 years. The performance began on September 5, 2001 with a 'rest' lasting seventeen months.

Space and time, truth and beauty. Music has the power to connect us with reality in its highest form, the supreme tension between finite mortal experience and eternal values. Not bad for an experience that asks only that you open your ears and listen.

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Terrorism Without A Cause.

Two news items have got me thinking about terrorism. The first was a report of a female suicide bomber who blew herself up in Pakistan. The second was watching a BBC reporter outside the Boston hospital where the Chechen Marathon bombing suspect was under guard. The reporter was attempting to determine whether the double-bombing was terrorism or not. His half-mangled conclusion seemed to be that if done for 'a cause’ the bombings were terrorism 'within a strict definition', if not then they were presumably just a 'crime of alienation' like the Sandy Hook shootings, a crime born of despair and the ready availability of excessive firepower.

This is a pointless rhetorical argument. The Boston bombs were anti-personnel devices, not powerful enough to seriously damage a building, but packed with enough nails and metal pellets to inflict the maximum human cost in both flesh and blood and spiritual annihilation. Anyone who saw the footage will have seen the state of panic and terror the two bombs evoked. And in a country where assault weapons are readily available the choice of nail bombs is an explosively emphatic link to decades of terrorist history, from the IRA and ETA (the Basque separatist movement) to Jihadist murderers all over the world.

This then is terrorism. But more than that it seems to be terrorism without a cause. While the full facts are yet to become public it seems that the links between the older brother and Chechen militants are so tenuous that an FBI investigation two years ago concluded that there was no real threat. Seriously misjudged in hindsight, but nonetheless indicative that the two young men involved were in fact living the American immigrant dream: peace, a good education and a positive future.

So why the bombings? Why the choice to throw away the opportunities life in Boston offered to two young immigrant men? Why were they, in the phrase chosen by their uncle 'losers'? Because, in my opinion, the Islamist fundamentalist theology is simply adolescent nihilism. When faced with the choice between the relentless competitive individualism of American life and the easy, egocentric and resentful role of 'victimized minority' they chose the latter. It's a short step from 'victimized minority' to the self-aggrandising delusion of 'heroic resistance fighter'. A role description that allows logic to be tossed aside and murderous hatred to become righteous anger.

They chose conspiracy over community. They chose to be vicious and murderous. They chose resentment and spite. They chose the most inhuman and cowardly means to self-gratification, dressed up in fundamentalist rhetoric. They committed the most selfish and ugly act a modern adolescent can employ to get their fifteen minutes of fame.

By coincidence I've been re-reading Roger Crowley's 'Empires of the Sea' a history of the 16th century struggle for control of the Mediterranean between Suleiman the Magnificent's Ottoman Empire and the forces of Christendom under Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. The parallels between that time and this are striking.

On the one hand we have Suleiman's vast empire stretching from India to the Danube basin and Gibraltar. An empire driven in its conquests by the single-minded fanaticism of Islamic Jihad, uniting disparate nationalities in hatred of the infidel, using the insult to religious 'honour' of the Crusades to justify the religious hegemonic imperialism of an Islamic theology, while glossing over the bloody imperialist Jihad that made North Africa and Spain a network of Islamic states and the Mediterranean an Islamic lake in the 5th/6th century.

The Chechen independence movement, following a pattern that has swept the Middle East, has evolved into an Islamist movement determined to create an Islamic state. All the complexities of democratic process, political rights, ethnic rivalries and forms of government are swept aside by the self-righteous certainties of fundamentalist brotherhood. The same certainties that Islamic fundamentalism provides to the Taliban, and the same brutalities that flow from it, are also currently at play in Syria and post-revolutionary Egypt.

The fundamental organising and economic element of Suleiman's expansion and warfare in the Mediterranean was slavery. His admiral, Hayrettin Barbarossa, made fortunes and funded fleets by the wholesale kidnapping and sale of thousands of coastal populations from Portugal to the Adriatic. Defeated armies would be offered the choice of forced conversion to Islam or enslavement. When his raids glutted the market he would simply slaughter prisoners by the thousand. Unlike the heartless economic rationale behind Western slave ships, Ottoman slaving was a religious and cultural pillar. Christian slaves were both beasts of burden and a proof of Islamic virtue. Christian infidels were sub-human, animals, chattels.

Christendom itself was riven by division. Protestant Reformation, inquisitions, humanism, the beginnings of individualism and long-standing national ambitions kept the European world divided to the point where Charles spent more time and treasure fighting the French (and Dutch, and Flemish and Lutherans everywhere) than the Turk. Yet this didn't allow the Ottomans to conquer and convert infidels to Islam except at the point of a sword in sea battles and slave-raiding piracy. In the end Christian navies, suspicious of each other and hard to unite for long, won the decisive Battle of Lepanto in 1580.

Am I comparing the actions of Islamist terror bombers with the religious empire of the Ottomans? No. But I am certainly equating the 16th century Islamic Jihadist mindset that saw people as chattels to be kidnapped and sold (or slaughtered) by the thousand with the current Islamic jihadist mindset that sees people as unworthy of compassion, consideration or even the basic human right not to be blown up to justify an irrational, bigoted and macho cult of death.

Both see infidels as less than human, as worthy of contempt, vicious abuse and indiscriminate murder. And not just infidels. Women, Muslim women, face the same attitudes, the same lack of humanity, the same essentially abusive, spiteful and vindictive behaviours directed toward them. The promotion of Sharia law is itself an attempt to put 6th century bigotry in place, to justify vile and abusive behaviours (which is why news of a female suicide bomber struck me as the Taliban's ideal tool - a hated, worthless female destroying herself and the infidel).

The false argument, for example, that the hijab is no more sexist or discriminatory than the bikini is part of the push to culturally align entrenched Islamic misogyny with Western hyper-sexualised marketing as two examples of the same thing. The difference, however, is plain. The hijab is mandatory. Observance may be relaxed in some places, but it's still a mandatory repression of women under Islamist theology. The bikini is a choice. Aggressively marketed in a sexist culture it may be, but it's still a choice. And free choice, however influenced it may be, is the most basic of human rights. As my spouse says, 

'No-one will shoot you if you don't wear a bikini'.

The future may seem bleak when we are confronted with terrorist bombings that speak volumes of hatred for the West. And the answer certainly isn't a return to the equally blind and bigoted religious violence of the Crusades. You can't fight this fire with fire. All you are left with are ashes. 

But, as in the mid 1500s, those things which appear to divide us: individualism, politics of the stale Left versus Right variety, the splintered sectarianism of Christianity, the endless struggle for human, civil and women's rights in a global, corporatist age, all serve to protect us, to maintain our culturally robust Western culture. Progress and individualism are the most fundamental values of Christianity. The monolith of Christendom may be gone, but that's because of those two values.

Christ's message of personal, individual redemption may have been distorted by churchmen and institutions for centuries but the two values of individual worth and progress are the basis of all the West has achieved in culture, art, science and human dignity. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, from Erasmus to Einstein, from Copernicus to Hubble, progress through individual choice has been the great strength of the West. You don't have to be a Christian to see the value of that.

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On Being a Samurai.

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Writer, thinker, teacher and trainer, therapist, shaman, initiate, musician, mystic, intellectual, samurai, priest, magician, psychic, empathic, mythologist, shape-shifter, husband, father, lover, Kabbalist, Tantric and Gnostic.

It's been a long, strange trip.

About twenty-five years ago I was a management consultant running a communications skills workshop for a team of young professionals: psychologists, social workers, speech therapists and so on, all intelligent young women in their twenties or early thirties (I've certainly had worse jobs). During conversation it emerged that one woman, a social worker, had a particular skill that she would occasionally agree to do for people. She read palms. She went pink from embarrassment when it was brought up, but agreed after some encouragement to read mine.

She took my hand in hers and leaned forward until her face was over it, her blonde hair falling forward around her face, and gently stroked my palm and began to speak. But not about lines and ridges and loops on the skin. She just slipped straight into a trance state and spoke in a faraway voice about my life, my past and my inner self. It was fascinating. And accurate enough about the real me to give me food for later thought. After she finished and her face regained its frank, friendly countenance I said,

"That's an incredible gift. You really should develop it."
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"Oh, no." She said.

"Why ever not?"

"Because I don't want to be thought of as a freak."

I know how she feels.

For most of my life I've been fighting that particular epithet.

But while I may not be a freak I am definitely not one of the normal. And it's true that my natural milieu is among the peculiarly gifted, the psychics and second-sighters, the freaks and the fey. I don't like it, but it's true. It's what I am. Like the list of qualifications above. I am all of those things. For an introvert with a healthy level of paranoia hiding this has become second-nature. Experience has taught me that keeping  my light under a bushel is far better than trying to fend off a pack of freaked-out village idiots with a pitchfork, a smile and a plausible explanation.

But no more. 

I am what I am. 

All of it.

I became a samurai in 1992. 

I've been a martial artist since I was eight years old. Forty-seven years of judo, karate, iaido (Japanese sword kata), halberd, spear, longbow, crossbow. Anything and everything up to and including small arms. Years spent studying and developing subtle forms of thinking and awareness and spiritual attitudes (Zenshin, Zanshin, Mushin and the rest) that began with Zen meditation and led in the end to ritual magic and Kabbalah. I spent years refining my skills and my spirit, up at dawn and building a Tree of Life the size of a cathedral down by the Brisbane river, with the ten spheres each filled with their own kata, and connected by long galloping runs with blades whirling and sweat running.

Now, here in Canberra I can see every inch of it in my minds eye, recall every blade and bird and tree, feel the sun burning off the grey mist in autumn, scorching the ground to dust at midsummer.

Like I said, it's been a long strange trip.

But it takes more than simple competence or even a lifetime of acquiring skills to become a samurai. There's a simple qualification that goes beyond this. You have to serve. You have to be accepted as a retainer by a noble house. Which happened to me in '92.

Her name is Maeda Asano and she came to Brisbane to teach Iaido at the club I was attending, and to demonstrate Ryushin Ryu Kenbu, a combination of dance, sword, fan and spear work used to tell stories of Japanese historical events. Meetings between famous samurai, incidents during famous battles, demonstrating the techniques used at the time. She was also a 'living national treasure' in Japan for her ikebana flower arranging.

She would have been in her 60s then. I volunteered to do some PR work for her, and arranged ABC news to interview her and show a demonstration of her art in a bamboo grove at the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. I was also able to involve her in an Asian Cultural festival and a highlight for me was leading a huge procession along Brisbane's Southbank with Maeda San, with my youngest daughter Ellen marching along between us. Despite my having only 'dojo and sushi' Japanese, and her having no English we were able to communicate and I was much taken with her grace, dignity and bearing.

At the last training session, just before she left, I presented her with a box full of Australian bird feathers I had collected, yellow cockatoo crests, beautiful reds, greens and blues from rosellas, and black and white magpie feathers like the black and white of hakama and dogi. I'd prepared a short speech (in hastily scribbled phonetic Japanese) expressing my thanks for her generosity and patience, and formally offering myself for her service. This I carefully read out in the car park, surrounded by mystified fellow students. She listened seriously and intently. 

She accepted the box with a graceful bow, then quickly snatched the crumpled paper I'd read from and tucked it away in her kimono. She then took a purple and gold fan from her obi and presented it to me with a smile. She had formally accepted my offer.

I've been thinking about her a lot recently, particularly when I found the fan last month while tidying up the study. I found out this afternoon that she passed away that day, January 7th. Which I suppose makes me a ronin, and my own man. 

I don't have the words I said that day. 

But I do have a haiku I composed for her, while watching her perform in the bamboo grove.

                                 When she moves her feet
                                 turn small circles in the dust,
                                 Maeda Asano.

I'll be transferring this blog to a new website soon: leekear.com