the lovely world
If you’re like me, you can’t speak those words without some spiritual overtones flavoring this. There is some good and bad tastes that accompany that for me. I asked the universe for something simple: does anyone recognize this music. Just dots on a page I once was able to read and translate into sound. Someone heard. A call went out. People responded. 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? If Kevin calls me next, well, that will another essay.
A private correspondence ensued. A flurry of activity and people sharing thoughts, and notes going up on bulletin boards and you might have thought all this fuss and business was dealing with a crisis of a dying person’s last request. Even now, as I try to understand the reality of it without blowing it up due the sentimental energy that is driving me to tears…
Here was the call, the title influenced by a song, by Hem.
It was innocuous enough to not be heard. Someone dear to me read that and escalated it. The CALL went out. The CALL was iterated! It echoed and resonated and it came back. CALL and RESPONSE. Music. And like anything, it came back with much more than anything I might have expected. This was not just an echo in a canyon. What is this? Evidence of love? I can now share this thing I have been carrying for so long. Was this the message my one time music teacher intended? Myrna von Nimitz, San Antonio, Texas, so long ago it was another world. When she said, “never lose this-” is this what she intended?
STARLIGHT EXPRESS gave me this…
Music is something I carry. Many of us do. This line from Starlight, God, source, I don’t know… It feels mystical and right and… Here, you call it.
Only you have the power within you.
Just believe in yourself -The sea will part before you,
Stop the rain, turn the tide.
If only you use the power within youNeedn’t beg the world
To turn around and help you
If you draw on what you have within you
Somewhere deep inside.
After all these years of singing it in my head, getting it wrong… You needn’t beg the world to turn around and help you. It never occurred to me, you don’t have to beg, you simply have to ask. Quietly. Innocuously. The world, the entire universe, will respond!
There is the message. Quietly asking, putting something out there with no expectations. A tiny note. Explosions tend to run people off. But a quiet note, that draws attention. Someone else gives a note back. Call and response. Hooks. We’re drawn in by music. This whole thing may seem contrived, but seriously, this is life in real time uncoordinated or planned and so let me give you this song drawing deer out of the forest, which I only discovered yesterday…
Call and response.
The Universe can do nothing but respond to the melodies we play. The Secret is real, but it is frequently more nuanced than we allow. What’s the old saying, it’s not thunder that grows flowers, it’s the rain.
And so, as this call and response group email went out and came back like the tide, one of the waves brought me this:
Life without music would be a mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche.
My life was solid about music in the beginning. I moved away from music. I made a mistake. Or, and more likely, this was the silence before the next movement. Call and response. The Universe responding, the wave brought artifacts.
I want to share this first. It’s tangential, but it feels right. There is this autobiography by Willie Nelson, and an anecdote that stuck with me. He always has an entourage looking out for him. One day, he managed to escape. They went nuts looking for him, and finally caught up to him, on a beach in Hawaii. He was hitting golf balls out into the ocean. The entourage chastised him for not informing of where he was and what he was doing. He replied, essentially, he wasn’t lost, he will return. Everything always returns. And, as if to emphasize the message, the universe answered: a wave delivered his golf balls back.
Artifact in this email group I was adopted into gave me the quote by Nietzsche, and a personable anecdote about a father lamenting his son couldn’t hear, and a request for that quote to be invisible. Oh, we humans sure hate seeing things that remind us of pain. Like any reasonably feeling human being, this person, the teacher in this story, this song, was sensitive enough to the parent to respond by bringing down the quote.
Call and Response. It’s what we do.
There is no right or wrong in this call and response. It was right! In many ways, it was really really right. It spun this situational music in directions that can produce it’s on movement and score and future themes. It was also a mistake. An opportunity was lost. An opportunity to find ways to experience music in unusual ways.
Because of this thing I am feeling and wanting to share, and this is pure feelings, as I listen to this thing from my past, over and over- accompanied by this thing I was given, a CALL from the RESPONSE from my call… A whole symphony emerged. My response isn’t the right one. There is no right or wrong, it’s just the theme that emerged as I responded, and it’s the right piece at the right time to end this movement, this melancholy song in my head for the last 30 something years…
It’s the second (slow) movement from the seventh Beethoven Piano Sonata, Opus 10, number 3. CALL, RESPONSE, call…
Parent emoting, ‘take down those words! My son is deaf, you’re insensitive.’ It’s as powerful a statement as Reagan saying, “Gorbachev take down these walls!” Not verbatim, but it’s that powerful a meme! This is a John interpretation, so forgive me if I have struck cords you struggle to resonate with. Play it out, wait, add a note, spin this into a new theme, it’s okay. The rest that follows is my response, which also ends on a call, and an echoing theme for you to watch and realize- we are in concert! I have edited the response here, slightly modified for Medium.
Response, and a call for more magic:
Angry parents are challenging, aren’t they? We can’t undo the past, for sure. But even now, this feels instructional. It’s a great anecdote. It’s a song in the making, a call and response song. Parent was hurting. He wanted more for his son. We all want that! That wanting is enough to drive us insane trying to make the world safe, knowing it aint safe, will never be safe.
Father is missing out, too. His grief is so loud he can no longer hear… Son may be deaf, but he can access music.
I wonder if wearing hearing protection and touching a speaker, feeling the beat, rhythm from base, might have moved that conversation, that call and response, just enough to release the block and flow some emotions… Poetry with beats, music. Trees swaying with wind and rain… music. Maybe even greater access because how many things do hearing people not hear because they take it for granted?
In nature, when everything goes silent, and we are given pause… Clarity between the notes! Between movements. What will the next movement be? Sad? Angry. Scary? Chase music?
Tiger tiger burning bright, in the forest of the night… What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
Is the fact I am about to get eaten the terror that has silenced this forest of the night’s audience. Inhale, hold, watch, wait, what’s this? Thank god, it wasn’t me. Thank you dumb human for walking in the forest at night. Now everyone sing, “in the forest, the flaming forest, the tiger sleeps tonight. Full his belly, he is tired, and sleeping so tonight…”
Without music, life would be a mistake. This is an artifact to contend with.
I am partly deaf from age related nonsense, 24 years of airlines, one rock and roll too many, (Starlight Express!), coupled with another odd condition, hyperacusis which trends me towards cowering from sound. This is an artifact I must contend with.
My son loves music. He loves rhythm and making noise, which is the right thing to do. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave me this and it’s dead on right. Don’t get mad at kids for banging on pots and pans. That is the discovery of the science of acoustics. Artifact.
I have been around enough deaf children to know how much louder they can be from hearing kids. How do you communicate that nuanced concept?!, (which means every deaf person still has to struggle with sound, and how many of them are so instilled with fear because they’re walking on eggshells around the hearing for fear of offending? Teach them sound and music, please!…) God bless the deaf, because they have catered to the hearing more than anyone appreciates. So much so, they have a culture so tangible that this is a real thing; some folks have declined medical remedies that might give them hearing. Artifact upon artifacts. I have met people who were, are, or partially deaf afraid to use their voice for fear it’s not right.
That may feel tangential, but as I move towards greater deafness, my relationships with my son becomes more problematic. The phone thing (son is in California, i am in Texas,) is soooo challenging. The volume is up full, and words still sometimes fails to register, and sometimes the threshold of background noise pushes me into irritation, difficulty to focus, I want to run away… I super hate being irritated! Just another barrier for human in the trenches of life. An artifact I alone must contend with.
I walked away from music so long ago that I have lost knowledge and skills. I didn’t realize at the time that was the hearing condition driving that. As I was losing hearing, hyperacusis was growing in intensity as the brain turned up the perceived volume in effort to compensate for the loss. The more I avoided sound, the more I wore hearing protection in normal environments, the more I aggravated the condition! Call and response! Avoidance is a call that increases the volume of the response, even if it’s just a misperception of shadows.
All of my past music is still in my brain, but those poor neural pathways were so abandoned, the roads are now rubble and forests have taken over the paths. So, I won’t be teaching anything to my son. I hold enough appreciation for the old stuff my son is re-giving me that I can minimally attend. Seriously, he discovers Beatles and wants to teach me about the Beatles! I was giving him Beatles and such before he was even born. There was movement in this movement before the movement. Now, he is giving it back, and more, he is finding his own stuff and giving me new stuff! He is 8 and eclectic! Some of this stuff he has given me has made me cry! That little…
This small new circle of email folks don’t realize how much of a flibbertigibbet I am. Go ahead, sing it with me: “How do you solve a problem like John Ege… A flibbertigibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!”
AND SO, tangents aside, here I am, this morning- emoting, cause someone found me music. My music, a gift given so long ago… Revived. Repackaged. Received. There is no call and response without reception.
Inside my brain, a tiny path opened up into this small, forest clearing; a piano and an old friend was rediscovered… a table, a cup of tea, art mysteriously hanging on an unseen wall… Why are there window frames on invisible walls? Does that artifact make this place more real?
I may be partially moving towards full deaf, but I will have tinnitus ringing these halls like the life support system on TNG, (that analogy almost makes it bearable) and wondering if someone full deaf, though they may not have had a hearing person’s experience, but who ever has anyone else’s full experience or flavor?!, could have been given a special gift. Maybe that child could have had a clearing made in his memory, maybe more defined than mine, better paths too and from, like a eureka moment when Ms. Keller felt teacher writing on her hand… and suddenly there was substance in this dark, silent void. We never really give anything, but a hint that there is this something here to grapple with, something more to explore, in our own ways.
And so, I ask you, should silence ever be a response? When people don’t feel heard, they tend to get louder. Scarier. People tend to retreat from loud. A heard person will learn to speak softly. Some people learn to whisper instead of shouting.
If the world is loud and scary, isn’t that because someone isn’t being heard? It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about grappling with human emotions. Confounding, complicated, frequently discordant, and there is a way to resolve it. Every night before the musical started, the orchestra struck a note, and they aligned, and they softened and then there was silence, the audience inhaling, quiet, then there was movement.
A call. A response. Response becomes a call. We move together, rising and falling together.
I asked a simple, quiet question. Does anyone know this music? The response was bigger than life. It was a lightening strike that illuminated this darkness revealing a terrain I forgot existed.
PS…
So, while listening to my gift, the piece that opens this essay, the call from the past, my brain had a realization, a RESPONSE: Beethoven was deaf.
Never let a disability, a flaw, a quirk, a thing hold you back from being your most authentic self. Love, create, share!
Never let a disability, a flaw, a quirk, a thing cause you to block someone from being their most authentic self. Your job is just to share, to call. Allow them to listen, love, create and respond!
