Sentiments

An expression in words of the deepest of our sentiments would be impossible; our sentiments flow from the gut and rarely do they give rise to accurate descriptive language. Hence, we honor the poets who describe for us the ebb and flow of our spirits. But music describes our spiritual innards with greater experiential precision. The minor strains match more exactly the sadness or angst we feel than the words with which we describe them. The sounds, the music are feelings also, sensual experiences like the chemicals within our bodies. Then too, the more nebulous nature of music allows it to adapt itself, malleable, to the particularities of our feeling. A description of mood can hit or miss the mark, but a powerful melody sweeps emotion along with it, melding with it, until the feelings within the breast reflect the tool, the music, which has sounded its depths. Equivalent to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we cannot know both the language of our emotion in its musical expression and the pure emotion itself; the contact between the two forces a metamorphosis.

Many emotions are simply longings, ‘yearning for the infinite’. The eager hands of the poor and rich alike grasp at transcendence, and it slips, ever more quickly, through their desperate fingers.

Are we condemned to a brave new world of such tepid quality? And what could redeem our hopes of a deep world except for the sacred and the inspirational. History has been, among other things, the process of unveiling men’s eyes from the various misconceptions piled up to obstruct their weak vision. However, when all the obstacles are cast aside, the remnant is power. The answer to the riddles lies with Thrasymachus. Once all pretensions have been laid aside, there is only power. However, thus power for good as well as evil. The lust to rule emerges, undisguised, from its lair, but rising up to challenge it, the sacrifice of a Lamb.

“But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all,

Because He gave his innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him,

And on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud,

‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.”