The Old High Way of Love, Blog 3: Across the Universe

In the modern era we have learned to be wary of music’s primal appeal to areas of our souls that incline non-critically toward belief since, as our politics have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate, belief, no matter how exalted it might feel, often yields behavior that is grotesquely inhumane. The Spanish Inquisition aside, perhaps the most egregious historical example of this dynamic is the way in which Wagner’s primal energies were coopted by Hitler to render glorious-seeming not only the waging of a monstrously destructive world war, but also the systematic and unspeakably brutal murder of four million Jews. The cooptation, by the way, was quite conscious: Hitler actually studied the conductorial methods of Wilhelm Furtwangler with the purpose of importing them into his own over-the-top oratorical style in order to render it more persuasive.

I think about that whenever I happen to notice how our forty-fifth and forty-seventh, president, who has publicly taken pride in his Aryan heritage, will deploy, when saying something he doesn’t want anybody to disagree with, hand behaviors that resemble a conductor’s bringing a piece of marshal music to a close, as if to say, “End of discussion.”  While Hitler’s fascist rhetoric was delivered in the alternately soaring and plunging tonalities of German opera, Trump’s vocal range, such as it may be, is staccato and minimalist, like a Reich-ian chorus chanting over and over in nine-eight time: “I-am-right-I-am-right-I-am-right-I-am-right.” Human speech itself being musical, politicians who crave being worshipped corrupt its music frequently enough, channeling it into horrors both real and imagined. In short, the more musical speech is the more hypnotic it can be. This may have something to do with why in the Middle Ages the devil played the fiddle or, alternatively, if he spoke with a brogue, the bagpipes. If we dance to the devil’s fiddle or we march to the braying of his pipes—that is, if we listen and accede to his suggestions and seductions—we are certainly and securely of his cult.

The inverse is also true, though. Each of the world’s religions has its musical traditions, its hymnodies, its cantorial rites and vedic chants which, besides inspiring sublime experiences and noble aspirations, are also instrumental in producing behaviors that are generous and empathic and in the social arena sometimes heroically altruistic. Thus there were also in the Middle Ages those angels, who played, not fiddles or bagpipes, but harps, inspiring votaries to beauty and grace and love for their suffering fellow creatures.

A pop song, of course, being as it were low church, simply makes a person feel good—or, more specifically, significant—because some aspect of their and everybody’s life has been deemed important enough to be repeatedly and enthusiastically believed in by a voice singing about it on a current of sounds whose harmonic structure manifests its rightness over and over. No matter how low church this feeling may be, though, it’s also, well, for want of a better word, cosmic. And for that as for all else we can thank the Big Bang, who knows? Even the smallest things in our lives here on earth are, like the earth itself, aftershocks of said Bang. All material things, we are told, even gravestones, for God’s sake, vibrate with it. Atoms vibrate, as do neutrons, protons, quarks. And vibration amounts to the physics of sound, which is as much as to say that, like music itself, it travels in waves.

There is some speculation among physicists and music theorists that the diatonic scale is not simply the product of a human musical tradition but that the post-Bang universe itself vibrates in waves according to intervals that roughly embody it. If this is true, it may not be an accident that, inasmuch as biology—which is us and the animals and plants—and physics—which is the rest of the cosmos—mesh at some point, we are wired, it seems, to hear the diatonic with a profound sense of connection. As Big Bang aftershocks intervalled according to a more or less uniform pattern, cosmic vibrations pulse, but they do so in concert, harmoniously as it were. In this sense they may be said to create a kind of universal chord in a universal key containing all the more delimited keys we recognize. It might further be said that this key, by virtue of its universality, never departs from itself to, say, the dominant or sub-dominant. That is, it’s not a return, this chord, because although it pulses outward it never actually effects any sort of departure.

The universe, in this sense, is quite certain of itself. Since it shows no need or inclination for testing and reaffirming itself it could be said to embody materially the “peace that passeth understanding” to which Hindu tradition and much later on neo-Platonism have attested. If all this is valid, the rightness of belief we feel as a result of listening to even the silliest of pop songs is in fact cosmic. That may explain, even, why so many of us will often claim that a certain recording artist or a certain song was responsible for “getting us through” particularly difficult periods in our lives, a claim usually reserved for prayer and faith and all those high church things. It may be that the confusion of depression or grief or anxiety or teenage insecurity is often somewhat miraculously resolved or at least mitigated by song itself, which cuts straight through ideation with the eternal “om” syllable that, some have said, has sounded the universe outward since its inception—and which the Beatles sounded at the end of “A Day in the Life” with an E Major chord pounded in unison on eight or so ingeniously mic’d-up pianos right there in Abbey Road studios.

The “om” syllable, in addition to being a musical key, sort of, a single non-departing chord, and in that it is, you know, a “syllable,” can be thought to constitute an utterance of sorts, a linguistic phenomenon whose primary nature, insofar as it means anything, is perhaps that of continuous affirmation. “In the beginning was the word,” we read, and we might add that the word was of a single syllable. As the word, it may follow, it contained within it unparsed all other syllables and words that are, ever were, and ever will be. The limitations that may characterize the lyrics of a given song are more than made up for by the music surging under and around them, because that music seems to be saying everything that the lyrics don’t and even, in a sense, more. In the face of the one universal and all-containing syllable, which never diversifies and never ends, what can the conceptual integrity be, really, of even the most carefully crafted diversity of syllables that not only sound different from one another but also have taken on different meanings? “Integrity” implies integration, so it seems only natural that the all-embracing meaning-feeling of music itself calls for actual meaning, however limited, to be grafted onto it, conveyed by syllables as articulated into words, and words as articulated into sentences. Meaning takes on more and more complexity, developing shadings and nuances that require the brain to depart from its primitive desire to just “know what’s what” and venture into the bramble-patches of doubt or ambivalence, hypothesis or irony, metaphor—even, God help us, allegory. 

Maybe, all told, we feel we’ve lost something in those bramble-patches and we’re willing to risk a few lacerations to find it again, whatever it was—the Why of it all, perhaps. Could be, too, that our desire for it emanates from another feeling we have, which is as primal as the one with which we respond to great affirmations. That is the feeling that, as The Book tells us, in our time here on earth we see only “as through a glass darkly.” Call it primal anxiety, this feeling, call it the need for stability, security, the need to know where and who we are and what everything is, and how, and why, and whose is what, and who we run with, who we hunt with. It’s the need, primarily, to understand.

Language is a tool for constructing understanding. With it we speak to one another in order to gain and impart knowledge, to develop and encode a sense of what the boundaries are and what our own coordinates may be, to learn who to look out for, and what it’s best to avoid even though it doesn’t look at all like a lion nor does it roar. Simply put, we need all those nuances and shadings, the words, the syntax, the rhetorical and figurative devices. Language, after all, is what we do. Music may verge on language—as every good classical Indian drummer knows with his or her substantial lexicon of spoken syllables for drum beats and intonations—but it pulls back in a kind of contiguous zone where feeling crosses over into meaning. Similarly, language desists in an analogous sector where it all but scats into nonsense for the sake of the music—that is, into undifferentiated feeling. Scrambled eggs, as it were. But the two interpenetrate a little before drawing away, not so much violating as infusing one another with what each has that is, in a sense, soluble in the medium of the other. In that interpenetration, music becomes song; from the other direction, language slips into poetry. It is in that one moment of mutual infusion that both primal needs—the one for belief and the one for comprehension—get met.

As such, when we listen to or sing a song as lovely as McCartney’s or a hymn as stirring as Mozart’s we feel like we’re understanding something very big and quite wonderfully profound, so we sort of expect from the language of the song or hymn some degree of coherent, even compelling, reasoning. When this is unavailable to us, either because we don’t know Latin or we think too finely on the point of emotional maturity in relationships, the musical structure carries us through and rewards us, the reward being mostly on the side of music’s cosmic ur-affirmation. Likewise, when we read a poem, if the language isn’t at least a little musical we might derive the satisfaction of sophisticated meaning, but it will feel less affirmative, perhaps even a little flat. Language that eschews musicality altogether might as well be taken for prose in its most transparent sense as pure cognition, along the lines of an abstract or an engineering report. And music that eschews at least a sense of containing meaning is basically noise, even if it’s called “Revolution #9” and John Lennon pastiched it together on his eight-track, and when you were seventeen you used to listen to it over and over with the lights off and your head practically wedged under the old stereo console in the living room of the House of Pronouncements.