“You are made of music—lonely music when you are lonely, vast music when you feel vast, even happy music sometimes.”
– W.A. Matheiu
W.A. Mathieu’s book, The Musical Life, is a beautifully poetic exploration of all the different manifestations of music in the world and the ways in which they can be engaged and absorbed. More broadly, it’s a sensibility and a relationship to all being in which ‘Everything is alive and singing, or nothing is,’ and which invites deeper attention and awareness of the melodies and rhythms that surround us in every moment.
Everything is alive and singing, or nothing is. What we recognize as the vibrancy of our minds is at the heart of everything created, pervading and binding mice, minerals, and gravity. Each order vibrates in its fashion; every octave sings. Everywhere the oscillating flux is crooning its heart out.
Perhaps I am a tad crazy to believe this, a bit off the ecstatic deep end. But I teach music. I watch sound’s spark light up the recognition in people’s eyes during the magic moment of first hearing. I know life when I hear it. Sound, jostling and bashing us awake in the form of organized collisions of atoms of air, is nothing less than living mind.
Consider how a radio can be tuned to various frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum: AM news, FM music, citizen’s band cross talk, shortwave propaganda. Through each cubic jot of space courses a universe of coded waves waiting to be tuned into and decoded.
Our minds can be tuned to various levels of consciousness like a radio. The life energy of each realm has something to say. We can scan across the octaves and zero in on a particular energy and resonate with it, get some of it, skim off the cream. Painters are nourished by light, they feast on color; it’s their dinner. Musicians eat sound. The extra nourishment you get from tuning in through your ears is food for your musical sensibilities.
The secret of the musical life is to be open to vibration at every level, to appreciate it wherever you find it. It is to be as at home among the configuring atoms as among the dervish galaxies, as among the waving, rustling grasses. The bare act of imagining these musics brings them forward for all to hear as surely as Mozart, imagining his music, brought it forward. His was an act of sheer will met by the universal will. Your tuning is an act of will also; but you don’t have to be able to write or play such music, only to imagine it, or what it might be, for it to find you.
These imaginings are not focused, necessarily, on your ears. Use the part of you that leads through mazes and knows where to find fresh water and safe, dry houses.
Thus a physicist, straining past all understanding to open the mystery of matter, learns to listen for quark music. What molecular biologist has not imagined DNA music? You can lie still in your room and hear room music. There exists, thus, spider music, moss music, cloud and thunderclap music, music of Gaia, and music of the spheres; any or all of these are sensible to saints and sinners. As ye are tuned, so ye shall hear.
Do not be surprised if, at the core of some such music, you find your own foggy fear, or your own loneliness.
Or, at the flung edge of it, come up hopelessly lost. Gradually you learn how you yourself are a kindred one of those musics, one among many in a lavish opera. You are made of music—lonely music when you are lonely, vast music when you feel vast, even happy music sometimes.
The whole stream of your life, already musical, is simply waiting for you to hear.
From The Musical Life by W. A. Mathieu. © 1994 by W. A. Mathieu. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO
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