An edition is being readied for publication as we speak. Be sure to pick your copy of "20:00" soon. Maybe I'll even autograph it. :P
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Meeting John Cage halfway?
So I decided to try a listening exercise on the way home today. It takes about 20 minutes to walk to my apartment from the Fine Arts building and it's usually a pretty mind-numbing experience. Lots of time for thinking but not much else, right? Well, not really. So I tried to emulate John Cage and listen for every sound I could possibly notice. Obviously, since I'm not a Zen master (or master at much else) I didn't expect a mind-altering experience. It was intriguing, however, and I learned a few valuable things. #1: Ventilation systems on top of buildings are loud. Multiple times on my walk I would think that I was in a period of silence only to realize there was a (fairly loud) hum coming from nearby. #2: The Doppler effect (approaching sounds get louder and vice versa) is still cool. My 8th grade science teacher illustrated this by running down the hall past her class, yelling at the top of her lungs. It was a well-known occurence to the students. #3: There is a rather quiet beginning and a loud climax to my walk before a gradual dying away. Like an ABA' form? The last part of my walk is along Limestone, crossing a major intersection. Then, the fascinating part is that once through the intersection, there will almost always be a period of "total silence" or at least absence of traffic noise on this busy street. Suddenly, life's pace slows down dramatically. Today there was a solo birdsong during this portion of the composition...I mean, walk. And #4: This made the experience more interesting and showed me how lazy the human mind can be, thinking things are boring or taxing.
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That's brilliant!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI'll take 2 autographed copies, thank you
The Vietnamese Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hahn has written many books about mindfulness (over 80, I think). The first one in English is called "The Miracle of Mindfulness," which basically says we can wake up to the miracle of life by applying mindfulness, just being fully in the senses. Being with any one of the 5 senses fully means we are not thinking about something else, otherwise we are not fully in the sense perception. How do you listen to music? Are you actually analyzing or criticizing the music, as you listen? Then this is not fully connecting to the sound. Noise can connect us to the present moment and the miracle of life. Perhaps this process of "coming home to the present moment," which Zen masters and other meditators talk emphasize, is a kind of "music." It certainly is a miracle that we are alive and can appreciate the world through our senses. If John Cage did nothing more than bring this up as a possibility, then he will have contributed a lot to those who are willing to play like this. Good experiment Chris! Keep listening.
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