axamendes

The first cup moistens my lips and throat;

The second cup breaks my loneliness;

The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs;

The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration---all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores; At the fifth cup I am purified;

The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.

The seventh cup---ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves.

Where is Elysium? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.

-- Lu T'ung

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This time is a very convenient time for writing at the moment. Lunch finished at one, and I have an awkwardly placed meeting at two. In my line of work, which requires some prolonged and deep thinking, an hour isn't really much time to get anything substantial done. So I've left my machine friends to do some testing and I am freed up.

An excess of rumination leads to melancholy. I think this is a fair statement. It's been my experience that when I spend too much time thinking, about anything, I tend to find myself becoming withdrawn and introverted, and by association, I become melancholic. My job requires a lot of deep thinking, which I am good at doing, but if I am not careful I find it also has the effect of dulling my personality.

That I am good at thinking is down to nervous tension, I think. I've been described as a racehorse; highly strung but therefore able to run very fast. But that same nervous tension, when left unchecked, will wear out the nervous system - the cells spend all their time firing signals, and little time to recouperate and restore themselves. Eventually they become exhausted, and the firing rate drops well below normative. And that is the melancholy.

The solution I stumbled upon was simply a particular class of time alone. Time alone from other people, but also from myself. Time alone from thinking about things. It's my own category of meditation. I don't think about anything. My mind becomes empty and I stare into space. I become entirely vacant. It's not a pleasant thing, nor is it unpleasant. It's not a volitional thing; it happens of itself, and ends by itself. I don't know myself in that state; I am empty and because I am not thinking, the thoughts that produce I do not arise. I am not there.

These periods only last a few seconds at most, I am sure it is no longer than that. But they serve the effect of resting those parts of the nervous system that have been overworked.

As you can see, this is a sort of stop-gap solution. The better trick is to avoid overworking them in the first place. This runs against my natural bent - I've score deep grooves in my mind with regard to habits of thought, and it is hard to "remain shallow", i.e. to remain more buoyant and not sink so deeply into the ocean of mentation.

But, over time, thanks to the influence of good friends, and their unconscious instruction by example, I am learning how to be trivial and facile, and to move around more quickly and less exhaustedly within the hierarchies of my thinking process.

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There is something about playing music that has a conditioning nature on the psyche. I was talking with Kelly about this the other day. Over a long time, I feel greatly improved as a person by the act of playing music, baroque particularly.

I thought for a while about why this may be so. I think it is to do with catharsis. I always thought of catharsis as a dramatic thing, you know gutted to your core emotionally through watching a play, coming away weeping. Sometimes, certainly, it is like that. But most of the time I think it is more akin to combing one's hair - a habitual untangling that happens every morning without much comment, except for those occasions where it doesn't do its job.

I've come very close to crying on a few occasions with certain pieces. The most recent occasion, and the one which made me think, is the Chaconne from Purcell's King Arthur. The piece starts out in a major key, but towards the end it drops into the relative minor. During that period of minor key, the dynamic becomes quieter and quieter, and the notes slide downwards slowly, like a leaf falling in autumn. Something is collapsing into itself, giving up, falling away from hope. But then, right at the bottom, the bass line catches the wistful mournful descent of the melody, gently pushes up on it from below, redeems it I suppose, and at that moment, it pulls back into the major for a magnificent finish. It's giving me goose pimples just describing it.

I nearly cried when I was playing it in the string orchestra. Music is more powerful played than listened to. To play sadly one must be sad. Although the action of playing is mechanical, and perhaps one can identify the movements necessary to produce say a mournful quality to a section of music, it is not sufficient. One must actually live out the drama in the playing.

I think it is this sort of sympathetic resonance that has such a conditioning effect on the psyche. I said baroque music particularly, and I think that is because its aesthetic is beauty, elegance, grace, refinement; and above all reason. The emotional content of the music is always framed by this aesthetic. And so by playing baroque, one is encouraged to experience emotions through this aesthetic. One is, in effect, being taught how to combine intellect and emotion.

Bach is above all the best for this. I cannot tell you what I see when I listen to him (I'm not yet skilled enough to play most of his work!); it is too far removed from the everyday world. He opens a window into another universe; a place of perfection, symmetry, pure reason and harmony. And what he draws through this window, he fashions into pieces of profound and yet strangely delicate emotion. It plumbs the depths, but is never base. It rises to the highest heights, but is never too abstract. It reaches everywhere within me, and touches every place with a sense of rightness, and belonging.

It's so incredibly simple a thing, and yet so complex in its unfolding. It caught me entirely unawares, and yet now I look back its influence upon me was there from the beginning, and the changes it wrought within me were, though subtle, cumulative.

The more I work with this instrument, the more harmonised I feel, and the more integrated I become. The music sings of redemption; I play the music, I become it; I too sing of redemption.

I knew better than I knew when I named my violin Gavriel!

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