Lately, it seems, I've transferred by addiction to something seemingly less harmful than alcohol, drugs or pornography. This isn't really the case, though, because any "addiction" is merely a cover for something internal, an projection outward of desires inward. My latest addiction is my other blog.
Why the need to do it? Why the need to share what I have been, over the past decade or so, hoarding? Attention? Love? Escape? Hope for a sponsor so I can be free of the drudgery of being slave to the wage?
I suppose I seek something transcendent in it, though those moments are few. Music, in my past, had always provided an escape, transcendence even. But I haven't found this since the late 90s. I believe music is merely the universal expression from the soul of its longing toward Truth. Artists, from death metal to gospel and the gamut in between, merely represents everyone's different point along that journey. Obviously, the continuum has expanded its boundaries.
So I find music that stirs me, that "moves" me in the sense that it expresses or taps into my emotional state. But transcendence? I get this on occasion through Christian music (though, for example, so too can the recitation of the Qur'an can elicit similar response). But often a Christian song that once stirred my soul will, years later, stir nothing at all but reminisce. Perhaps it is merely a trigger, as all music is, a memory machine of where we have been.
I find that rather than the longing for that surge of a rush, those moments I most appreciate are moments of peace, stillness, calm. I have found that it is this that I find in Christian music, mostly because it stirs up in my soul what has been deposited there through the Word.
I can find stillness of another kind through secular music though this seems to be fleeting; my expectations of what music should do limits the experience. But it does happen, often in strange ways. Most recently, I have stumbled onto what has been tagged "post rock". Perhaps it hearkens back to my days of "hair metal" and the euphoria associated with such loudness but for some reason the mood created by some of these bands actually moves me, though it's certainly an emotional response more than a spiritual one.
Eluvium's epic "Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image" carried me through a difficult state of mind not too long ago. With it's basic structure of guitar washed in distortion channeling back and forth for fifteen minutes doesn't seem like much for relaxing the mind, it would seem that the noise and my thoughts collapsed the wave function, so to speak, and I achieved a state of stillness.
But I long for that escape. I want to run (knowing of course, wherever I go I am still there...), to fly away, to wander and roam. In the end, however, I do realize that no matter the means, I still remain in the "stickiness" of the world and until I can embrace it, see through it, allow it to be resurrected, my longing to "escape" through music and give it all away, seeking connection in the comments, will be but a fleeting journey.
Unless, of course, I figure out a way to make money at it.
