"The truth speaks to me from a peaceful place."
My earbud headphones broke yesterday. More precisely, only one earbud is functional. I've gone through so many pairs that it was just instinctual to go pick up another on my way to get groceries, but this time I paused and decided not to. The superficial reason why is that one earbud is enough to listen to speech if I want to (e.g. podcasts or Skype), or to appreciate the sort of rhythm-centric stuff that I think of as "work music", while also allowing me to keep one ear in the real world.
Here is the deeper reason: I'm starting to more fully appreciate the dangers of some of the shit that I listen to on an entirely too casual basis. In spite of my tough talk about despising rock music, I still listen to a lot of stuff that could reasonably be called that, even if it's at the fringes of the fuzzy set. I justify this on the basis that there's something interesting about what a band is doing, musically or lyrically, but of late I've started to appreciate just how hazardous this region of musical space is for someone like me: it uses appealing musical bait to smuggle the hooks of somebody else's personal mythology into the soft tissues of my brain.
I've always been . . . highly permeable. Things get inside my head, pingpong chaotically around with great force for an indeterminate amount of time, and then come flying out at random times and trajectories. Which is perversely useful in some ways and not something I would change about myself, but has driven me to build up multiple layers of defense mechanisms out of sheer self-preservation -- otherwise I'd be like a person without skin or an immune system. This is a big part of why I can sometimes come off as forbidding, inaccessible, disinterested, critical, or even callous -- I have to be more willfully closed off because I'm naturally more open. The alternative is being a basketcase. My proneness to obsession makes exercising psychic flow control an integral part of my life to a degree that's hard to get across to someone who doesn't have such a problem, but is immediately recognizable to those who do.
Which is why what I've given up for Lent (and maybe forever, other than on special occasions) is lyrical music. I have no way of estimating the damage done by having allowed, say, Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and John McCrea of CAKE (to pick two examples of many) to get inside my head and mix my own thoughts and feelings up with theirs; but upon stepping back to evaluate what their songs tell me about them in conjunction with my own proclivities, I've concluded that it's probably pretty significant. The fact that they're blessed with some talent doesn't negate the fact that they're deeply cracked in ways that I can't afford to be. Not to say that I can't still listen to and appreciate them, but the experience is something to be handled with greater care than I've heretofore been exercising.
The term "noise pollution" comes easily to mind, but would perhaps be better called signal pollution -- the attaching of inappropriate meaning to stimuli. I keep coming back to this Hayek quote because it keeps being relevant to so many facets of my life. The lesson is that you can't think your own thoughts when someone else's are consuming you, and while listening attentively is a necessary precondition to understanding, I owe whatever independent insights I get to the interstitial silences.
Here is the deeper reason: I'm starting to more fully appreciate the dangers of some of the shit that I listen to on an entirely too casual basis. In spite of my tough talk about despising rock music, I still listen to a lot of stuff that could reasonably be called that, even if it's at the fringes of the fuzzy set. I justify this on the basis that there's something interesting about what a band is doing, musically or lyrically, but of late I've started to appreciate just how hazardous this region of musical space is for someone like me: it uses appealing musical bait to smuggle the hooks of somebody else's personal mythology into the soft tissues of my brain.
I've always been . . . highly permeable. Things get inside my head, pingpong chaotically around with great force for an indeterminate amount of time, and then come flying out at random times and trajectories. Which is perversely useful in some ways and not something I would change about myself, but has driven me to build up multiple layers of defense mechanisms out of sheer self-preservation -- otherwise I'd be like a person without skin or an immune system. This is a big part of why I can sometimes come off as forbidding, inaccessible, disinterested, critical, or even callous -- I have to be more willfully closed off because I'm naturally more open. The alternative is being a basketcase. My proneness to obsession makes exercising psychic flow control an integral part of my life to a degree that's hard to get across to someone who doesn't have such a problem, but is immediately recognizable to those who do.
Which is why what I've given up for Lent (and maybe forever, other than on special occasions) is lyrical music. I have no way of estimating the damage done by having allowed, say, Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and John McCrea of CAKE (to pick two examples of many) to get inside my head and mix my own thoughts and feelings up with theirs; but upon stepping back to evaluate what their songs tell me about them in conjunction with my own proclivities, I've concluded that it's probably pretty significant. The fact that they're blessed with some talent doesn't negate the fact that they're deeply cracked in ways that I can't afford to be. Not to say that I can't still listen to and appreciate them, but the experience is something to be handled with greater care than I've heretofore been exercising.
The term "noise pollution" comes easily to mind, but would perhaps be better called signal pollution -- the attaching of inappropriate meaning to stimuli. I keep coming back to this Hayek quote because it keeps being relevant to so many facets of my life. The lesson is that you can't think your own thoughts when someone else's are consuming you, and while listening attentively is a necessary precondition to understanding, I owe whatever independent insights I get to the interstitial silences.