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.

Someone chided me today about not posting - soooo

Tomorrow I get to see my psychiatrist and my therapist. I haven't had my bloodwork done as a baseline for the psychiatrist; so I'm not excited about seeing him.

As I enter into a deeper kind of therapy with my counselor, I have filled out innumerable pages of information about me and my family. the last three pages are divided into little sections - one for every five years of your life. You are supposed to note everything that was important to you in that five years - in less than 2 inches of typing paper space. I don't usually write small. Ha!

And, How do you remember what happened of importance when you were 36-40 when it's twenty-two years later? I completed this section and laid the paper aside. As I thought of important things in my life, I wrote between the lines and in the margins. I don't know if she'll be able to read all the jabbering, but she will have a fairly good picture of my life...well, except for some childhood years when I remember very little - and there's lots of space left to write in those blocks.

And, why does this matter?

I've been having emotional and mental flashbacks to bad things that happened in my childhood. For instance, we were eating our usual Sunday evening supper of bacon, eggs and biscuits (sometimes pancakes), and I remembered as I chomped on a good piece of bacon that I didn't particularly like eggs in my childhood. We always had eggs; somebody in the neighborhood had chickens even after we got rid of ours. And, I always had biscuits, bacon(sausage or ham) and molasses for breakfast. However, some mornings we didn't have meat - some evenings we didn't have meat. And, Mom would offer me an egg. I don't like eggs without meat. Bleah. So, I'd eat my biscuit and syrup and catch the schoolbus.

Okay, this memory took about 10 seconds or less. And, I jumped into wondering if we were that poor - and, yes, I remember Mom buying me a new dress so that I would look like everyone else at times when we probably didn't have meat. She wanted us to look good even if we were dirt poor. Then I realized that I must have gone to school hungry sometimes. A biscuit and syrup isn't really enough breakfast for a schoolkid. But, I don't remember being hungry. And, how many other families were as poor as we were. I could think of only two that might have been.

Then I jumped from there to other times when Mom tried to keep up appearances. Dad was a drunk...a very talkative, and, by the time I was 13-15, a very verbally abusive drunk. He had hallucinations and delusions by then. And, he would declaim in a loud voice right after supper that he had seen me in some juke joint having sex with some guy or in a car by the juke joint. Places that he might have been at some time in his life, but long ago.

So, Mom would give me her car keys (a little 49 Ford named Freddie) and tell me to go away and come back after he was asleep. That was usually around 9 pm. So, I would drive the back roads of Quitman County, Mississippi, from about 7 until 9 - just to avoid my father's verbal abuse. Fortunately, I discovered that others were in similar situations - not people in my school, but other schools and other ages. We often gathered on the side of a road to shiver when it was cold and to talk and laugh and avoid talking or thinking about why we were there. But, sometimes, the roads were long and lonely, and I felt very homeless.

In the space of less than 30 seconds, I went from enjoying Sunday supper to crying and being afraid of being homeless (not likely to happen now - not sure about then).

There are other less graphic times of flashbacks when a word, a look or tone of voice triggers the emotions of "then" and I respond in "then" not "now". I'm getting better at recognizing some of these times, but mostly they catch me (and often my partner) unawares. And, they hurt. The feelings I feel hurt, and the way I respond hurts my partner. And, I want them to stop.

So, I've tried to write the important events of every five years of my life down on paper. And, I've cried a lot. I've hurt a lot - for me, my brother, my sister-in-law, my cousin, and my Mother. I don't know what pain they had. They are all dead except my cousin. I can't know what caused Mom to be as she was about appearances, but alcoholism wasn't really a word then - My Dad was the town drunk. He wasn't sick. No one knew about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and what World War II might have done to him. They only knew he was drunk. And, that was shameful.

That shame is punching me in the gut occasionally. It hurts as much now as it did then, and I want it to stop.

So, if I'm silent a bit, I'm just working on getting better and not hurting.