The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.

Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.


Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...

The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.

When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?

No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.

A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.

Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.

Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.