I really like the subway program that puts musicians in the subway. There’s something about hearing 30-40 seconds of music in every train station that breaks me out of my morning-thoughts and puts the world a little more in its place. I used to feel fairly uncomfortable in airports—from the stress, the rush, the weight of bags, my own tiredness, and so on--until I started listening to “So What?” on infinite repeat whenever I was walking through one. I didn’t expect it to work, but it makes me so much calmer. (and now “So What?” gets in my head whenever I think about airports.)
Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.
So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:
Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?
Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.
A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.
I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.
The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.
It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)
All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:
The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.
Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?
