Jessica: I am never merry when I hear sweet music. Lorenzo: The reason is, your spirits are attentive.” These words from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice attest that there is in music something of this world and something not of this world as we normally sense it. I listen to the New York Philharmonic, and something in the playing of that great band, the distinctive voices of brass, woodwinds, strings, and percussion, their contrary rising and falling, their aspirational ascent becomes unbearable. I become in those rare moments, the music. It plays in me, or rather, it plays ME. I become the waves of which we’re all made. It is unbearably delicious. Our part in a musical flow: we seldom achieve it in our day-to-day experience. It’s for the artist to render.
Art, in the words of author Sue Monk Kidd in The Mermaid Chair (Penguin Books, New York, NY, p. 148) “explodes our notion of order and conduct.” “I look at the trees out there…or a piece of art like Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and I lose myself.” We can lose ourselves in other ways, in our impositions, our holds upon our bodies. There’s music in the wrists, everywhere. Free them, free your wrists, bring your awareness to them, of flow, of space, of fullness, and be patient. You may find an almost ineffable sense of waviness sweeping over you. We are all of us, waves on an infinite sea. When we find that in part, in our wrists, in music, in art, we prove it everywhere. It shatters, explodes, our holdings, our sense of our selves as a firm. Our parts, in music, of the body are not so much parts of a whole as they are of the whole. When we find that oneness of flow, of energy, of real world waviness, as one physicist said, it is, as I see it, the most of heaven as we may find on earth. Today if we’ve no Philharmonic or Bernini on hand, it might just be enough to free the wrists. Join me in that, won’t you. Be the waves. Be the music.
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