This Post is Now Entitled

This blog post finds me having experienced many changes, none of which I feel inclined to blog about. I do need to say this to the people I love who check here to see if I’ve written anything. Everything’s okay, or going to be okay. The kids are wonderful. I know I’ve got a lot of much-appreciated but unreturned phone calls out there, and I mean to return them every day, and then don’t. I’ll get there.

Music.

I enjoy music very much. Listening to it, playing it, watching it being played. I like wondering about how it works and why, or how it doesn’t work and why, and then talking about such questions with people who wonder the same things.

Music is dear to me as a key to memory and emotion, personal or communal. It says simple things sometimes, and sometimes things words can’t say, and at such times it communicates things beyond our capacity to articulate, but within our capacity to understand, with parts of our brain and body that don’t normally get to do enough understanding.

I believe music has the power to make us better people, more loving, more engaged, and more real. It has the capacity to collapse and dissolve the self, at least for a moment, into the mysteries of the heart of another, or of a whole room of people. It has the capacity to bring great joy, and break the heart in such a way as to leave it open to be filled with love and truth.

I also think music has the power to pass on and intensify our many baleful pathologies, such as violence, hopelessness, and greed, any of which are only aspects of humanity’s one evil: a devotion to self.

Musicians are prone to self-devotion, as we all are, but sometimes it seems to me exceptionally so. I try to monitor myself to see which team I’m working for, and I have to say that I don’t always know. In every way I’m aware of, I try to work for and root for the love team, musically and otherwise.

My hope is that musicians will choose to be on the love team, and then monitor themselves continually to see whether they’ve betrayed their team. It’s a vain hope, but you have to believe in something.

I wrote that, “the love team,” and now have become aware that lots of people are going to have in their mind’s ear a cushy, floppy, bland brown banana of a sappy sweet music. Nuh-uh. True love has for its backbone truth, which it seems to me is always at least half hard, sometimes almost unbearably hard. But we can take it, with practice. It’s an acquired taste, musically and otherwise.

I’m listening to Auset and Brad right now off their myspace page. You get the impression they’ll never jump teams, and I know they’re on the right one.

Now I’m going to go try to match my work habits to my aspirations, forget about what’s troubling me, and go work on music. No, not forget about what’s troubling me. Forget I said that. Instead I'll go see if I can’t make some kind of sense of the trouble that my fingers and strings and body can understand, even if the brain that’s writing to you now doesn’t quite get it yet.