Music, music, music. I have been buried in thoughts about music lately. Music was always artistically my control group - the place where meaning - jokes, irony, paraphrasing, social commentary, politics was sifted through a fine filter, leaving everything but pure form, pure pattern, pure communication out. Very early I had the idea that art was made of three parts:
- Literature, spoken and written
- Images
- Music
I saw this as a gradient - from the square meaning of words to the pure abstraction of music. In the middle I had images - a media that was able of both.
I have never really found any flaws in the thought. It is still true in some way, but I have stopped giving one or the other precedence. After reading Wittgenstein I started to consider it all language, aspects of the way we can communicate and aspects of the limitations we have in our cognition of the world.
I tried to play the Bach Fugue and my body still remembers it. The quirky fingering that is necessary came to me without thinking and twisting my hand in weird ways was not at all as strenuous as I remembered it (I am not longer sure it is more difficult than some of the Chopin nocturnes I have played by the way). Somehow we always forget that our body is the most important part of art. We see it as something spiritual, but an artist has to work with his body. I never really thought about it until my own body started to malfunction, but these days I have the heightened awareness of the hypochondriac. So something obvious, something I always knew without knowing, has become obvious to me.
I am not sure how to fit the body into the system above. There is something strange about the idea that we have of spirituality. I think that it has to do with the limitations of our language. I thought of it after hearing this fantastic clip that @roused posted in a comment.
I get tears in my eyes when I hear it, something spiritual is sent to me, but the images shows me another thing. This is simple bodies, playing simple music, bodily music - listen to the instructions Mr. Taj Mahal gives the bass player "... fiddle it like that... " and then some humming, some body language. Nothing fancy just swing. At the same time incredibly complex, hard to explain with words, and just plain obvious to anybody that listens with their bodies.
Funny thing is that the same thing exists in both literature, painting, sculpturing, and a lot of other thing we do in our lives.
My friend @shortcut has started to write some posts every morning - #morgenseiten he calls it - morning-pages. Here is his explanation of the project:
It goes like this: you shall each morning write from the soul, anything going through your head.
He writes a lot more, but this is the essence :) (Read his first morgenseiten post here)
I have decided to try the same. I write from the top of my head every morning or late morning if I have been sleeping late. I only correct typos and make a headline afterwards. Else everything is left as written. Expect some of it to sound like stage directions.
