On music and sense(s)

I drove blind through the city streets last night, sick with the internalisation of my emotions. It was music again that carried me along, directed my soul. The blindness was crucial. My sight was no longer important...Dick questioned the importance of sight in her comment to a previous post, and now I have understood. Only my hearing was enabled as I drove. Hearing creates my emotions...amplifies them so I can hear them. Smell also has this effect from time to time: I walk through a smell and into another emotional state, another time and place. It is not sight that does this. Sight does not recall things for me. It gives me things to recall, but hearing is what allows me to access them. I was blind, but now I hear.

I am living my life through music and sound at the moment. I experience feeling through music...It is music that saves me, and deadens me sometimes, awakens me to death and void and the safety of oblivion. It takes me away and gives me feeling again, focuses my soul. I ask again: what is it about music that can do this? This hall of harvested heroes is not for visual display. It may be looked upon, but it does not display itself for looking. It contains sounds, it is sound. Sounds and music give me space; visual objects restrain me. I see things that are representable; what I hear cuts straight to the feeling, bypassing the obviously symbolic. Of course it is a thing of symbols, codes, the making of meaning, and it is only a certain level of understanding that allows its effects, as I have already suggested. But the visual just doesn't do it for me. The aural gives my internal state something to attach to.

Of course there are different modes of listening...attentive, critical, indifferent, unconcentrated, distracted, physically-responsive...[Rogers, btw, in his great and densely eloquent way, ponders listening as a cultural-historical category.] But what is to be said of those moments when all of these modes collide, as they did for me last night? I could hear absolutely all of the instrumental and vocal parts, as if they were being written out in front of me: as blind as I was, it seemed as if I saw the music.

On reading Rogers' response to Kafka's Auf der Galerie [Up In The Gallery], I should acknowledge that I am writing under the shadow of what Rogers calls "the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic." Certainly, at this juncture in my life, music has serioulsy narcotic powers over me: I have already written of taking it as a prescription...I was, in the music, everything that Kafka and Rogers between them suggested, but at the same time it was so utterly different. I lost my self, and the dangerous pleasure of self-pity overwhelmed me. But so often I seem to find my self in a musical space, when it gives voice to my internalised, otherwise inaccesible state. I cried last night, but hardly without knowing it: it was a fierce, sick crying, one that not only foreclosed my masculinity but my femininity as well, a foreclosure brought about by their violent collision.

I could have cried 'Stop!' at any time...but it would not have been a thrusting over-articulation of masculinity, or at least not in the way that I immediately understand such a phrase. At the most, it would have been a desperate defence against being swallowed up by the womb which enclosed me and stripped away the handles on which I hang my identity, and in this sense maybe it would have been a masculine kind of response. But overall, I feel that the cry of 'Stop!' which did not come would, in its desperation and response to complete submission, would not have articulated my masculinity.

At the time, it didn't seem to matter what music, but of course it did matter intensely: the next track took me somewhere else, allowing me to externalise again. It was the change of track - the Stopping that happened without my request - that gave my masculinity its space again. All of this is more evidence, for me, that the ever-exalted heroes of gender are more troubled than the idiots believe.