it's a bird-- it's a plane-- IT'S SUPER LOCRIAN

Oct 20, 2010 16:09



The fifth vibrational mode of a standing wave in a closed tube... on fire. Science is so cool.

And now another meme - this time from vazavati.

Leave a comment saying, "COMMENT" and I will give you five words I associate with you. Then post about what they mean to you, along with this, at your journal.

owls.
I do not share any deep spiritual connection with owls. I have never felt that any part of my soul is remotely owlish in nature. Owls do not have any place in my personal spirituality. I do not have any illusions about them being any wiser than any other animal. Basically: I just think they're hilarious and really, really fucking adorable. They always look so surprised and vaguely affronted! They have this cartoonish appeal with their perpetual annoyance and misplaced dignity and vague racism (all owls are racists) and seeing them makes me happy. I can't explain it any more than that. Owls just rock.

Paradise Lost.
I read Paradise Lost for the first time in my sophomore year of high school. My language arts teacher was pimping the annual PL marathon reading my high school holds, and trying to convince us that it was more than just a giant, inscrutable, Important Literary Work. I liked the lines of it he read to us and wanted the extra credit, so away I went, and finished my first reading of it in ten straight hours of Milton immersion. And never looked back.

Where do I start with this? I guess on the first page - the part where Milton swears he's going to justify the ways of God to man. I remember reading that, raising an eyebrow, and going, "Yeah, okay. Show me."

And sweet jesus fuck he did it. Sure, I may not be of his exact religious beliefs; sure, I might even take some issue with the explanation he spends the poem giving for the nature of God and man and the confounding relationship between; but he did it. He explained it. And he did in iambic pentameter, focusing on the point of view of the antagonist. What a badass.

I guess what's kept me addicted to it is just the scope of this work. I could study the thing for the rest of my life and never finish pulling things from it. Just the poetry, the technique of it, the perfection of the language, and the consistency, and the epic tradition, could keep me enthralled, but then there's what it's describing - you have to ask questions about religion and sin and blasphemy and botany and history and the nature of angels and the forms that good and evil take and look at the tiny, exquisite details that connect everything to everything else, and wrestle with Satan-- because something that is pitiable, even something that is justifiable, is not always good, and can you be wrong to pity it all the same? And angels are beautiful but they don't have Satan's fascination, and is that so wrong? And you can leave Christianity behind entirely if you want to-- because Paradise Lost is bigger than Milton's specific brand of Puritanism, bigger even than all of Christianity. Paradise Lost is an insight into the deepest binding part of every human who's ever lived, who's ever so much as thought about God.

We did PL in junior year English, and for the rest of the year it was a joke in my class-- every time we read anything else, someone would have to say, "Like in Paradise Lost!" and everyone would groan good-naturedly. I remember once a girl complaining that "You just can't escape that damn poem!" No, you can't. Once you've seen what's in it, you can't miss it in anything else ever again.

I've met a lot of people who don't like Paradise Lost. I think I was the only one in my junior English class who actually finished it. And, well, I could easily understand not liking the poetry, or finding it dry or boring or difficult. It is. (I attended the marathon twice and never once stayed awake for book seven dammit Milton GENESIS DID IT BETTER). But if you can't even dredge up a little bit of appreciation for just what it is Milton did with that poem-- the sheer audacity of what he ultimately pulled off-- then I honestly lose some respect for you.

music.
Life is made up of a whole lot of little things and a few very important big things. The big things are different for everybody, but my list of big things is something like (in no particular order): Friends, family, God, music. Music makes that list.

There is something divine about music. I'm taking a physics course now that is teaching me the how of music; start this wave moving, move these particles like so and they make these shapes that turn into sound, and we put them together and manipulate them (AND OCCASIONALLY LIGHT THEM ON FIRE) and thus we make music. It all makes sense, right? But then why does a minor chord sound sad? Why does that particular arrangement of frequencies translate to the human soul as representing sorrow, so much so that when a freshman aural skills class sings in a minor key, the pitch falls flat? How can we mark at the top of the page that a piece should be played con spirito - with spirit, with breath, with soul? There have been composers who rejected the Romantic notion of music containing emotion, who sought to divorce sound from the inconvenient human ideas we put on it. But even without emotion, music is mystical - because it is so damned vast and complex and mathematical while never being quite quantifiable.

Everything changes, but music doesn't. Music's just there, this river behind everything out of which you can draw incredible things in infinite combinations. Music's plastered over and curling through every big memory I have - I remember dancing to Louie Vega with my brother in our tiny living room in Ohio and my dad teaching me the keys on the player piano when I was five and listening to a tape of Hungarian children's folk songs on my toy cassette player for hours at a time, and seeing my first opera and being so happy I couldn't sit still in my seat, and a (pink) song written for me that I still keep under my bed, and long hours of the Improv Game at orchestra lock-ins and the manic happiness of Gershwin and of course all the people I've made music with-- my dad, my brother, my sister, Drew and Mizu and Krystal and Katherine and Nicole, T.J. and Love Ann and Dan and Ziggy and Becca and the DB and cello studio and choir and piano-- and then all the musicians I have seen, Vienna Teng and Balmorhea and the New York Philharmonic and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the rest, and all the musicians I listen to with the lights off and dance to alone in my dorm.

Yeah. Music's in everything. I think I was afraid, after immersing myself in it all through high school, to lose it when I came here; but even though I'm leaving it behind as a major, it's such an undercurrent in my life that I know now I can't lose it. Music is as stable as God, and the two concepts are inextricably connected in my mind.

pancakes.
There is a Ben Sollee cover of a song by Jack Johnson called "Banana Pancakes." It's about forgetting about responsibility and making banana pancakes with someone you love on a rainy day. Two or three times over senior year, lawliet_kun came over (on the requisite rainy days) and we listened to music in the kitchen and made pancakes together. I don't think we ever actually made banana pancakes, but we made apple pancakes and peach pancakes and pineapple pancakes (which was the most orgasmically delicious experiment of all time), and sometimes a whole damn breakfast just for the hell of it. So pancakes, for me, are associated with rainy days and a best friend and deciding not to care about important things for a few hours.

optimism.
Okay. First off: I know for a fact that my life's been pretty fucking awesome. Even when it hasn't, it's been pretty fucking awesome compared to the lives of most other people in the world. And a lot of this has absolutely nothing to do with anything I've done or accomplished. I've had a lot of opportunity handed to me, and most things I have had to work for, I've achieved. I am very, very fortunate in that regard. So my being an optimist isn't really an achievement of any kind; it's really just that I haven't been proven wrong about life being wonderful yet.

I guess, just... isn't it nicer to believe things will turn out well? Sure, things occasionally fall to shit, but why go into them waiting for them to fall to shit? Why not love the small things going well instead of the ones going wrong? It's not idealism or self-delusion. It's a conscious decision to find something to love in every hateful situation, to store up happiness for the times when it disappears. I'll admit I've had more happinesses than some, and I know talking about optimism when so many people in the world feel they don't have reason to hope can sound insensitive. How do I put this? Optimism, to me, isn't ignoring suffering or lacking an understanding of hardship. It's just... being able to find things to be happy about in the midst of that.

Aaaaaaaaand I am done talking out my ass for the day. |D

it's pronounced "meme", fizzix, how can i keep from singing, everyone is fond of owls, photopost, tl;dr, jesus

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