noticing this

I like music a lot. In the past I’ve been a big fan of alternative music. Circa Survive, St. Vincent, and Julian Casablancas were my jam. For several years I had on rotation a cooing mix of introspective and sadness-infused slow-march ballads that carry the astral beauty only found in loss. I imagine if I put all the album covers together, it would look as if the night sky were wrapped in cellophane. During my first month in Paris in a tiny apartment without WIFI, I pretty much just had that playlist and another that I’d downloaded on a whim before a flight—Soulful Disco. This meant that when I listened to music, I got a choice: either to be haunted by my past or confronted with boogie. The tonal juxtaposition achieved a Neon Genesis Evangelion-like eeriness, where Fly Me To The Moon punctuates every episode like a joyful meditation on death. Stuff like Shake Your Body and When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going did not work well then as my potato-peeling anthems.

When I was starting to get better after my nasal coblation surgery in January, all of a sudden I was more receptive to happier music. Then, I came to a place where I enjoyed pretty much all the music I was hearing. Then I started to experiment with (gasp) not listening to music.

There is the case of too much music. I used to play music to help me study or write, run, workout, etc. (I still do sometimes), but I’ve learned to wonder what noises I’ve been drowning out. One of my teachers at Tattva Yogashala, Sunil Sharma Ji, said it well when he expressed that Western yoga classes play all sorts of music. “But your breath is already such beautiful music!” And listening to things is great, but we have our own internal music—the sounds of our bodies, and all the stuff going on in our minds. I realized that by drowning myself in music, I was drowning out my thoughts, railing myself onto a familiar track so that I wouldn’t confront the terrible roar of silence.

And Sunil said something which deeply challenged me: music is one way we can distract ourselves, and television and video games and such too, but we also distract ourselves with books. Certainly, all these things have the power to inspire, to teach, etc., and are very capable of doing so for a quiet mind. But how much of my reading did I do because I was unable to sit with myself? How much joy, learning, and inspiration from it did I miss because I didn’t take the trouble of organizing myself first?

Here’s me some years ago, writing about how even though I was taking literature courses, I didn’t seem to be experiencing what I was reading:

Two semesters of British
Literature and I’ve got
to return to you Spencer
Bacon Shakespeare I’m
I’ve forgotten you I never
really experienced your
pleasures I read you
but not really and now
that I’m here I know
that I wasn’t there when I
sat and I leaned down
and words passed through
a machine

There’s a frantic pace to it that comes from the constant reiteration of self (“I”) and the lack of punctuation, embodying in form the very opposite of what the speaker (me) of the poem wants: to slow the hell down and really hear something.

Here’s the first poem I wrote on the Watson, I think it was on the plane to Edinburgh:

If there are thoughts let them be heard
I hear
no thoughts
in here

I’ve had the pleasure of carrying around a book of Rumi’s poems for a while now. Here’s a fragment that pokes out at me at the moment:

“Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.”

It’s this kind of respite from noise that I needed, and that I’ve gotten. In a macabre, surreal (and narcissistic) sort of way, the problematic bits of my nasal turbinates that went up in smoke in January carried around the world and became a pandemic cold for everybody, as well as a shrewd imposition of global isolation—and for some, solitude.

Art comes naturally from a quiet mind, but so does learning, and so does clarity, ability to see. They all feed into each other so that art is an authentic and essential expression of both the individual who makes it and of all that’s around the artist, or to put it in more transcendental terms, of the very universe itself.

For me to begin to quiet my mind, I’ve needed to learn to stop constantly filling it with distractions and to take the time to really sort through what’s already in there. Sometimes I don’t succeed in that. Right now it’s hard. I distract, sometimes to soothe or numb myself, when I know that the hardest and maybe the best thing I can do is sit with myself until, whether the cause of the pain stays or goes, the pain I experience transforms into something else.