Deprograming

Lately Courtney has been listening to an ambient/experimental station while drifting off at night, and I'm becoming rather enamoured with it myself. Theremins and odd synthesizer shifts, birds or car horns, there's a mix of the digital and the natural with no obvious logic. It's an ebb and a swell, a fall and a crash without reason. I can't find the pattern, and it soothes me.

Pattern is the operative word here. I can't really say for sure why this stuff has caught my midnight ear, but I think the lack of a (discernible) pattern is important. Lately I've gotten bored with music. Period. Literature, too - I pick up a book, I read ten pages, and my mind is somewhere else. I think the ease I've been finding from all this semi-random noise is connected; I think the pattern has grown predictable.

Music is, classically speaking, artsy math. Don't get me wrong - I love music, I love math. Like most art, it's a pattern that predicates meaning from its predictability. There's a system, a theory underlying any art - not the same theory, mind you, but infinite theories. That's the real secret to why some people "get" Picasso, Modest Mouse, the Residents, Joyce, or bathroom wall graffiti. There's a master logic, a pattern-system that underlies each one. The more one becomes familiar with the pattern-system beneath any given piece of art, the more familiar it becomes, the more it evokes meaning. That comfortable sense of what comes next, of things fitting comfortably into a prefabricated world view - that is the essence of "meaning." The new is nearly always a logical extension of the old.

And that's where this ambient/noise stuff comes in. I can't find the pattern. It's probably there, mind you, but drifting off at night to something with no predictions seems to take apart all my preconceptions of what should come next. The older I get, the more I seem to seek out standardization for my moments - a pattern for the day, the week, the year. It's that pattern that makes sense of it all, that gives it meaning. But a century of great thought has been devoted to westernizing the ancient eastern notion that no, there is no real pattern, there is no real meaning. There is only a naive desire to invent such notions.

The last couple of years I've felt like every time I grab a guitar each note has already been predicted, every time I lift a pen I'm just transcribing something . And now I sense that drifting off at night to something without a pattern deconstructs the day, undermining my expectations and leaving room for calm surprise. i sense a space growing where something new might happen. Very nice.