"Music as a Portal
I had heard "In a Sentimental Mood" by John Coltrane and Duke Ellington countless times in the background of the café where I go to write and think. But today I heard it for the first time. There's this poet I know who always plays Coltrane. Suddenly, I got it. Wow. I had been hearing this song in the background, but listening to it, attending to it, was like stumbling upon a pink peony in full bloom. I had not notice the beauty right there unfolding in outrageous delicacy before me.
I resisted listening to Coltrane, because I was pretty sure listening to Coltrane was part of the Allen Ginsburg/Beat Poet Playbook that this poet I knew followed to the letter. It was an element in the coat of cool he’d fashioned to hide the mundane, tattered aspects of his real life. It was his fashion statement and a borrowed mask. Not that we don’t all in some ways use art this way — gathering the trappings and accessories of aspirational identities.
Listening to In a Sentimental Mood, it struck me that this song, and perhaps all songs are portals; a sonic door opening onto certain a soundscape, a mood.
Henry Cartier Bresson described a photo as a decisive moment, but in music that moment unfolds in real time. To listen to music in the foreground rather than having it play in the background is a matter of attentive focus. To listen and to give your attention to the experience of listening, allows the feelings that music evokes to be more fully felt, to allow the emotion it evokes to wash through one’s body.
Delving into the depths my real life did not seem to allow
I remember listening to torch songs and thinking all of them are about being left or betrayed or making a mistake you can’t unmake, about disappointment and loss and sex. All of these things were in my real life, but in torch songs, it felt like I was entering a richer register, and it was giving voice to that which in real life had ground me down. Something in the music fed my soul, and it felt good to really delve into grief and sing it out, revel, drown, drench myself thoroughly, deeply in the emotions I tried to keep at a distance so I could function as a reasonably unhappy human being.
It wasn't about getting over the story; it was about really getting into it and letting it take you over for a time. There was something liberating about giving myself over to an emotion thoroughly. In fact, most of my life demanded so much, and yet asked so little of me. In singing the blues, I gave voice to that part of me that longed for something I've never had. Maybe that depth of emotion also allowed me to sing truths I couldn't quite bring myself to say or know. Maybe going deeper, feeling deeper is like the deep underground river that feeds the wells—one goes to the depths to get closer to the source. It's not that emotions are truthful; it's that they connect you to your feeling, knowing body—they bring you closer to the source of your own inner knowing.
I used to think my mind would lead me to the truth. I like ideas, and I like thinking, and surely following through and discarding what I've discovered I no longer believe, isn't that getting closer to the truth? Thoughts, after all, can also be portals to larger realities and ways of understanding and being in the world.
But if they do not take along the body and lived, sensual experience, they can only peer through the door. Thought alone, with emotion held back or unacknowledged, doesn't have enough volition, enough umph to get through the door. It can glimpse the larger reality but not participate because the emotional body is still rooted in the old ways that go with the old thinking.
Deep listening and the emotional body
In this sense, music is a portal that is also a kind of elevator. Or it has its own force field, so that if you perch on its threshold, the emotions within it contain a kind of magnetism that acts on your emotional body, pulling you to move—pulling you into a certain mood. Often it pulls ahead of the mind and its thoughts and sends them in a new direction—to a memory or a longing suddenly felt.
Which is to say music, because it acts on the emotional body, does more than offer an idea—it reaches our physical, energetic, and emotional bodies simultaneously. And if we attend to music, listen, the way that teenagers used to listen to records they bought, in their rooms, lying on their beds to listen to the album in its entirety. I imagine that before this, they had heard the songs, perhaps listened on the radio or at someone else's record player stereo, or perhaps it was something that an older brother or sister played, but in any case, it was enough to make someone get their own copy of it. Owning a record or cassette or a CD (I'm dating myself) is a declaration of taste and also of identity. Listening to an album, really listening to it, making the experience of listening an experience, is so different from the wallpaper music that came into being with the era of MTV. This experience of listening to something, attending to it, paying attention to the words, allowing the feelings and images that the song suggests to wash over and through you, brings to the surface all the memories and emotions evoked by the music.
Listening and what it means to step through the portal.
Like so many portals, music is an opening, something offered but it requires the listener to respond. You must allow yourself to be moved, which means giving it your full attention. To be moved, to allow something to affect you deeply requires an unhurried attentiveness and a desire to experience what might come. Perhaps you experience a connection which might also be described as a momentary experience of oneness; our experience is both particular and shared. Music puts the multitudes we are into form. Sounds invite us to enter a feeling state, to let a certain mood wash over ourselves, to visit a particular vibe where we find some parts of ourselves we had forgotten about, still living.
I am thinking of my dear friend Ed, who is a musician who composes music that opens portals to worlds of feeling and knowing. Not only opens them but takes you on a journey that leaves you in a different place/state.
When you dive into music and you aren't afraid to work with what you find, you find, as I have found, that even the worst moments contain wisdom, a catchy riff, or a strangely affecting melody. In art, as in nature, nothing goes to waste. The death of the old fuels the growth of the new, and what may feel like a tragic misstep in midlife turns out to be one's saving grace later, what now allows one to give oneself more fully, with more openness, to the music of life.
