Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Rhythms Choose Us


..."Don't want your grip, don't want your greed..." screams Metallica into my ears through a pair of headphones that never fail to accompany me through these nights. One of my best friends that stuck through thick and thin. The next number to be streamed into my ears is the number called "One" by Metallica. With a thumping rhythm, a melody of its own, this has always been one of my anthems, drumming in my head through all my highs and lows. Sometimes I wonder if it’s we who identify with the music or the other way round, we are identified by the music..? Do we choose the rhythms or is it the rhythms that choose us...is it that we choose to live or life that chooses us..? This thought takes me far off to Valencia, Spain where a friend who I met during my travels, lives. I've never been to Spain but I've seen enough of beautiful Spain on tv, heard enough about beautiful Spain from people who've been there, or so as they said, listened to enough songs about beautiful Spain, enough to be able to imagine Spain in its famed splendor. My friend, the lead guitarist of "Eudemonia", a band that experiments with 'philosophical music', is a serious musician.
From one of our conversations, I started feeling that we cannot create music, but rather that the rhythms flow into the mind of the composer. Maybe a fragment of the ‘Universal Music’ that for some reason, or no reason at all, chooses one of the abundantly scattered subconscious minds from us out here, and seeps in note by note, until we have a rhythm in this dimension in a form that all of us can interpret...a song! What actually is the element that we call 'inspiration'? It definitely is not something resident in out minds, as we do not have inspirations throughout the day. Is the term 'an inspiring thought' even sensible? It's the 'inspiration' that brought about the 'thought' in the mind. Hence, the 'inspiration' and 'thought' are two different entities. So if the 'inspiration' is not another thought of the mind, then how can it be classified. Is the 'mind' even the seat of the inspiration at all......?

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