Friday, August 29, 2014

REALITY

REALITY. What is it? Is this too profound for a Friday? No. You have the whole long weekend to contemplate this. Visual reality is acquired through your eyes, but what do your eyes NOT see? You don't see anything microscopic or telescopic, but it is there! Have you ever looked at blood cells through a microscope? I have. Have you looked at the rings of Saturn through a telescope? I have. Without a telescope, Saturn looks like a bright star-no rings. Without a microscope you can see blood, but not the cells. You can't even see germs with the naked eye, but we know they are there. You cannot train your eyes to see what they cannot see. If you haven't looked through the scopes mentioned, your reality of microscopic and macroscopic is merely objective, NOT subjective. "Things" are there, whether seen, felt or heard. We have evidence.

Eyes are wonderful but ears are amazing, if they are trained.

You can listen to a band and a singer doing a song and take it all in as a whole. With training and practice, you can not only hear one specific instrument in that band, but you also can write down perfectly every note played by that instrument. You can hand the manuscript to a true professional and it will be pretty much identical. I have transcribed entire arrangements, so I have subjective reality on this. What else? You can hear all the chords in a song and you can even hear the voicing of chords with experience. What's more is you can choose how to hear as a whole, OR: individual parts, chords, voicings, rhythms, and more. What's more? Form. You can hear and understand the entire piece in verses, choruses, bridges, or movements. There are even forms in lyrics and other devices, such as those you hear in poetry or prose. Ears+mind can equal a very profound and analytical understanding of music. OR if you can do all those things, you can also do another thing. You can sit back and just listen and enjoy. Over time, however, you hear without analysis--you just get it and it transcends thought.