Ramble #7: Mood music

Am I a happy person, or a content one or a serene one? Do I have an expansive and heartful feeling about humanity, or a general feeling of the sadness or neuroticism of existence? Yes and no. It all depends on what piece of music – usually but not necessarily classical – I’ve just listened to. Music does that, maybe not to you, but to me. I consider Chopin’s Étude Op. 25 No. 7 to be the most “psychological” piece of music in existence. It speaks of life, but a darker life the complexity of which is poetic itself. Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 3 gently consigns humanity to an end of noble but stark failure. But Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F?: Life is spice, energy, throwing raspberry lightning and hitting the target across the universe.

But back to a music-less self. I vaguely remember, in a Bradford Angier wilderness book I read forty-five years ago, a picturesque pioneer-type guy discounting the importance of feelings: It doesn’t matter what emotion we’re having, as we’re always in some mood or another, he said. I’d say, in contrast, that we’re generally, in our normal life, in a floatable protean mood or moodless atmosphere which needn’t be identified as it is vaporously obscure (which allows music to displace it). It’s when a mood lingers long, or has historically grown to be fixated in us, that it becomes a worthy subject of research and therapy.

As examples: the person who claims to dislike humanity as a whole, or the person whose omniscient conviction is that “everyone is stupid as shit.” There is every reason to assume that these individuals are not experiencing, in their brain, the pure chemistry of dislike or disgusted contempt, but are rather responding to a complex fusion of many sensations such as childhood hurt, fear, need, rejection, failure and anger, and for the purpose of self-protection are opting to homestead only that one ingredient of the whole picture. These are in most cases the people with personality disorders. Demolished in one way or another in early childhood, they can never again be open to their deepest pain and therefore never to reality straight. They must see the world, the self, the cosmos, through protective lenses.

My man who thinks everyone is stupid – Will he enjoy these classics I’ve named? I really doubt it. I think they would offend his sensibilities, which scoff at beauty, gentleness, a complexity of vulnerability and strength.