The Horror of Hallways

"New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn't even live in a house. She lived in a building - the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with raspmouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he'd been dazed by the building the first week. He'd wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he'd look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he'd be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building - nowhere."

- Flannery O'Connor, The Geranium.

A Spirit of Nowhere

 

Towering rows of beige siding melts

In the haze of a plastic twilight

To recede past sight and blend with the horizon,

While miles of painted on concrete drips

Into a forever dilating

Maze of streets and thoroughfares

So vast they eclipse the sight and knowledge

Of human affairs or planning committees.

And here is the boy who clamours and shakes

To disembodied voices in the night,

Pacing endlessly through the confines of

An imperceptible part of nowhere.

Music and Contemplation 2: The Metaphysics of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

The purpose of my previous article on music and contemplation was to bring out the metaphysical meaning of traditional music and its link with contemplation, but since I lack the patience to really flesh out my ideas the post did come across rather brief and unfocused, so here I just want to elaborate on the symbolism of music in a more concentrated way.

My main point was that religious chant and Indian classical music both point to the same truth that there is an immutable and primal God, and that there is a world of multiplicity that stands in relation to Him. This is probably the most basic outline of reality that can be drawn, and pre-modern contemplative music represents this outline in audible form. We can visually manifest this basic outline in the form of the Cross and all its variants, wherein the vertical portion of the Cross stands for God and the horizontal for manifestation (the melody). The melody of chant surrounding its harmonic centre is not a chaotic motion, the world did not emanate in a random fashion, and this is manifested by the use of modes in music, therefore, to break the mode is to break the order of creation. This latter point is made more explicit when we consider the esoteric meaning of the modes: their correspondences with the planets and elements. These correspondences and their place in traditional cosmology (I would like to more specifically comment on the meaning of the modes but I lack the knowledge) bring more depth to scales than if we viewed them merely as tools to make the music sound pleasing. Again, we can clearly see this in the Indian tradition, as different ragas are set to be performed at different times of the day and in different seasons, the music is in tune with the world...