Music of the Spheres

Today I was reading Harper’s Magazine, June 2008, when I encountered a quote from a musical philosopher, Victor Zuckerlandl, “Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without be remembered, the future without being foreknown.” (p 91). I stopped; time is a human construct, and I’ve written about this earlier. God’s time is then, now, someday all at once. Zuckerlandl is saying that musical time is the same as God’s time.

Wow! What a wonderful concept!

The review was of “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” by Oliver Sacks, and the reviewer, Zalmen Rosenfeld, also discusses music’s ability to change human emotional states. Now, I’ve known this for years. I am able to dissipate my anger (as generalized as my anxiety) by listening to hard rock music – letting the music drown me in its mesmerizing repetition and loudness. I usually follow this period of hard rock with a softer, more spiritual vocal music whose poetry has meaning for me.

For instance, my iPod has a playlist that includes Free Bird, Cocaine, and some Janis Joplin. This is my hard rock list, and I play it often when I’m on the treadmill, sometimes forgetting how long I’ve been there. Following this expiation of sin and anger comes what I call a spiritual playlist – Enya’s “How Can I Keep from Singing”, Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah”, Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “Wade in the Water”, and other such songs. It also includes the very staccato rendition of “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” (written by the same composer as Hallelujah) by Buffy St. Marie.

Songs connect with my emotions. I have trouble with lots of music; nothing peaceful in me resonates to the high notes of opera. I cover my ears and feel like cowering in a corner. Does this reflect the parental arguments when I was a child? Perhaps. For Zuckerlandl reminds us that music is then, now and someday – the arguments are very present for me when I listen to opera. Unfortunately, the cowering feeling also occurs when I am amongst much noise. My chest is getting tight just writing about this.

Changing my thoughts to Pachebel’s Canon in D, I can feel the tightness slipping away – or is it the clonazepam that I took earlier?

Still, I recognize in me the connection between music and my emotional climate, between the past and the present and how I perceive the future will be. Music can bring the past into immediacy and stretch it out for several hours or days. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” brings such past into now. I am transported to the back seat of a 1949 Plymouth sedan with Mom and David and me singing, and immediately to David’s funeral, and the loss of my beloved brother is once again unbearable…at least for a few moments. I’m learning to control this “flashback”.

I will never think that my choice of music is random, and now I know more about how to use music in healing my emotional wounds, transporting me into more people-friendly moods, and preparing me for whatever I face.

Therapy Plus

Just as growing old is not for sissies, therapy is not for sissies, especially therapy for post traumatic stress syndrome. Many years ago, a therapist at her first meeting with me told me that she thought I needed to work on PTSD about my brother's death. I fled and never went back, using a very flimsy excuse. I couldn't think too much about that then.

Now, with the emotional flashbacks, I have no choice to but to think and, worse, to feel. Last week after I had carefully enumerated how I had felt abandoned by various important people in my life, my therapist said that I needed to write down the feelings I had at the times of those abandonments.

The first was my father, and I don't recall the event of his leaving to go back in service and returning home only two weeks a year (he had to go somewhere). I can't put any emotions to that event except an intellectual knowledge that Mom, Brother and I drew much closer together.

Now, I realize that my brother played the role of father in my life even though he was only six years older. He was left to drive the tractor and help make the crop that my father had planted before he left. He was left to do the heavy work around the farm that my father had done. He was only 13, but he took on the father figure.

And, truly, he had been the one to take care of me most of my memory. I went everywhere with him - even to school occasionally. I have often wondered if others had siblings who occasionally went to school with them, but the people who would know are all dead; so I can't ask.

So, this brother of mine was father, brother, friend, confidante, teacher, and very handsome even at 13. And, I adored him. He was mine. I was his. No hanky-panky. No fooling around. I just knew that Brother would take care of me always.

Always lasted until he got a girl pregnant and married her at my mother's insistence. Then he moved her into the house with us and went off to work as a welder's helper on the pipeline. When he came home, I was no longer primary in his life. And, I hated his wife.

He died following an accident during at storm on an oil repair barge in the Gulf of Mexico. He actually died on the operating table in Morgan City, Louisiana, two weeks after my 16th birthday. Always didn't last very long.

And, I have finally re-created the emotions of that abandonment - both his marriage and his death. Let me tell you, that's not fun. I feel as empty as I did then. I feel as angry, as fearful, as hurt, as whatever as I did then. I cry occasionally. I stare a lot. I play a lot of computer games. I can't even knit much. My brain has shut down for the moment except for the this re-creation of those times.

And, it's hell. Intellectually I know that we have laundry to do, the floors are getting filthy, things need putting up - but I just cannot do anything except feel and re-member.

Okay, so now I have those feelings. What do I do with them? I am tired. I am useless right now. I am crying. I am feeling. This is not fun. And, I don't know the next step. I see my therapist on Monday afternoon. Maybe she'll tell me what to do next.

Meanwhile, as my online buddy Lindy says, just do the next right thing. Since it's 3 am, maybe going back to bed is the next right thing.