Simple physics

David Hykes is one of the world's masters in the art of harmonic or overtone singing. He has trained his voice in such a way that his chanting breaks the spectrum of sound apart into its component colors, much as a prism explodes white light into rainbows.


The sound is very very strange and it scares me, because it's a sound that really doesn't exist. It should be contained, one tone inside the other, like Russian dolls, but somehow through a trick of the human voice the individual sounds have popped out. To call the sounds eerie is an understatement. Not whistling; not humming; a little like a theramin, and yet not; and most definitely, not of this world.

Overtones are everywhere: most singers produce them once in a while, so that you  suddenly hear a silky trilling an octave higher that seems to burnish the phrase. Just as you focus on it, it melts away. I once heard them on a bus. The hummy roar of the engine kept producing a much higher, parallel sound, eeming up into the stratosphere in that same eerie way.


Did we invent music, or only discover it? I think it's the latter. There are laws of music, just as there are laws of physics. Our Western scale has seven notes, corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow. (Middle-Eastern scales have quarter- and half-steps that we can't manage: I tried to play a computerized piano on this setting and my, did it sound strange, all flattened. I couldn't get a song out of it at all.)


Humans seem hard-wired to interpret musical sounds in certain ways: we often hear music in a minor key as "sad". It's hard not to immediately recognize celebratory music, military marches or music expressing passionate love.

Anyway, this brings me around to why this music scares me. I can't locate in my mind another sound like this: it's not beautiful in the normal sense, and when it hits that extreme shattered-crystal high, it's almost ear-splitting. It has a consciousness that is separate from the vocalizing that is producing it. It's saying, look, here is the physics of music, and isn't it strange? Do you want to hear any more?


I am fascinated, yet want to turn away, to stop listening. From what I have heard, when someone is chanting in a big resonant space, the overtones dwell way out somewhere in a little spinning vortex of their own. There's a sort of blank indifference to the notes. Simple physics. Why does this disturb me? Because I now believe that this is the true nature of God.

God is indifferent, doesn't love or care, just goes on producing life, masses of it. If there is to be love, we must produce it, must care for each other. There is no freestanding love, no Love, except perhaps as a principle. Where all this life came from, why it came, is a deep mystery that will never be solved by the likes of us. Why we were allowed to come this far is a mystery too, for we hold within our hands the power to destroy the entire thing.


There was a time, a very long time, when I believed in a benevolence, a personal God that loved each of us individually, had in fact loved us into being. I can't sustain it any more: I had a massive, shattering experience, an experience in fact in which I believed I actually stood before God.  And God was not Love. God just "was".


I stood before a dazzling indifference.

That ended it, ended my Christianity and all that went with it. This music is disturbing because there is no emotion in it whatsoever. It's like a machine. It's like something turned inside-out that shouldn't be. We don't want to know that the Universe is indifferent. We want to be loved. We don't want to know that we are responsible for the whole damned thing.


It's not even music, it's just a sound. Simple physics.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Make me an instrument

It has come home to me once again that life can be overwhelmingly difficult, even crushing. I see, looking back, that I have a certain tendency to be, uh, er, critical. Or negative. Or not celebratory enough. I need to correct this, but I don't know if I will.

I know several situations in which people have suffered an almost incomprehensible grief, in particular a mother whose small daughter died on Christmas Eve two years ago, her snow-covered sled hit by a truck turning a blind corner. My granddaughter was her best friend, and she still talks about her, misses her terribly.

Jesus, God, are you there? I did used to believe, quite fervently, but since I left the church, I don't know. I don't believe there is a God who gets us out of trouble. No Big Guy in the Sky, no lucky rabbit's foot. Faith is not a lottery, and God doesn't give us the things we ask for just because he's nice like Santa, or loves us, or thinks we deserve special favor. In fact, there may be nothing there that helps us, independent of other people and their goodness, or the strength implanted deep down in our own hearts.

Is that, then, what we call God? I don't know. I look out my window today, and I see cedars tossed angrily, shivering as if traumatized. Then they are still again. I need to go out in it so I can order flowers for my daughter's mother-in-law, who has just had successful heart surgery and is recovering by leaps and bounds. (God - ?) I need to look for Christmas presents for my four dear ones, my little grandkids, without whom I - well, let's not finish that thought. And I haven't even started, can't get started because I haven't the heart.

I can't get going. We have this dim understanding, maybe. Or else we don't need it, I don't know. I can't leave life alone, I pick it apart. It's no use, of course. The good is the good, but there is a dangerous estrangement in my own family that I fear will blow us apart at some point. It has happened before, in that other family I grew up in, and I know it is never repaired.

If I let this particular weight press all the life out of me, it would be difficult to continue at all. I know I am blessed, tremendously blessed, compared to others - but how can we compare, when everyone's life is so complex? No one knows what is going on in the mind of another. This is called existential loneliness, and it is built into the species. But I am convinced some people feel it far more than others.

I was looking for an image a few nights ago when my daughter updated me on the mother who lost her child at Christmas. Since then, she has suffered several wrenching twists. Even though I officially don't believe in prayer because God let me down so badly, I lit a candle in my computer room and turned out the lights. The effect was eerie, a glowing screen and a guttering candle. I wanted something to focus on, googled up the name of the little girl who died, and came up with multiple images of a Catholic saint. Small children wore crowns made of holly and candles and walked in solemn processions down the aisles of huge churches.

Somehow this led to St. Francis and his famous prayer, "Make me an instrument of thy peace. . . "

St. Francis, batty as a loon, may have been on to something. Today he'd be put on antipsychotics and resocialized, though he might still end up under a bridge. Still his prayer persists, that is, if he wrote it at all. Truth is so slippery, so humanly influenced. We make things the way we want, or need, or desperately desire them to be. Truth gets lost, we get lost, and we grab. Still, we grab.

John Ono: One

This is one of those experiences that is impossible to describe. Just a manifestation of my desire to connect with a meaningful God? You decide.

After much anticipation, I finally went and saw Nowhere Boy, the movie (drama, not documentary) about John Lennon's youth and his troubled relationship with his Aunt Mimi (who raised him) and his mother Julia, an unstable but charming woman who gave him up due to complicated circumstances. At the same time, the musical ferment that gave rise to the Beatles begins to bubble and seethe. John starts a crude, amateurish "skiffle" group (Liverpudlian folk/rock), of which he is definitely the leader, though his guitar skills are poor, and his classmates from art school are worse.
Then he meets a baby-faced 15-year-old named - well, do I need to tell you? Paul holds the guitar left-handed, and plays rings around everyone else. Jealous, John at first turns him away, but soon starts to work on his skills with him.

The movie was slow to start, and the actor who played John (not a name I'd heard of) was not very convincing at first, as he seemed sort of passive. But as the story unfolded, you bought him more and more. When he picked up a guitar, a fierceness came over him, and by the end I was thinking, that's John Lennon.

Of course we know what will happen. John's wayward Mum Julia dies at the end, hit by a car, just as she is making peace with the family. Paul has just lost his mother to cancer, so now they are brothers in nearly every sense.

The movie was powerful, and I was quite moved to see Yoko Ono listed as a consultant in the credits, which kept it honest. It was reviewed as a "kitchen-sink drama a la Coronation Street", and it did have elements of that. But Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi was spot-on perfect in establishing sympathy for an unsympathetic character. She deserves an Oscar for her courage and skill.

But the weird thing happened at the end. During the credits I started to cry unexpectedly, then I was really sobbing. Fortunately, nearly everyone had left. Then I felt this - I will try to describe it. A "presence" behind a sort of screen or very thin veil. It was slightly to the left, about halfway between me and the front of the theatre, and angled a little bit, slightly diagonal. Something like very thin gauze, or a translucent veil. I heard a voice without words that conveyed something very powerful. In essence it said, how can you not believe in me when I am right in front of you? You have stopped believing in a God, and yes, that God may not be in a church, but he's right here, Margaret, right here (indicating my chest) in your heart.

I was stunned and doubtful and electrified and wondered what it really meant, but I was not going to turn it away. It wasn't the first time I've had experiences that I can only describe as psychic, but I wondered what in the world this "voice" (undoubtedly his) would ever want with a nothing like me. The presence was so large it filled the whole theatre and extended past the walls. I can't really describe what it was like. Any words seem wrong or inadequate. I finally left and went to the ladies' room (fortunately empty) and just sobbed and sobbed, wondering if this was somehow connected to my brother Arthur's death in 1980, only two months before John Lennon was shot and killed.

I never expected this, didn't want or need or call for a lesson in theology or the true nature of God or whether or not we survive our bodies. In fact, I'd just about given it up. I was beginning to think we just die, get put under the ground, and that's it, it's all over. I was starting to really believe there's nothing there, nothing that loves or cares about us as individuals. For a former practicing Christian, this sort of spiritual abyss was agony, but I could not fix or change it. This presence, familiar yet strange, didn't really explain all that, but just manifested and asked me: I am right here, so how can you not believe?

I can try to worry this down to nothing, or intellectualize, or throw it out. I've had a bit of time to process it. I will accept it as valid, whatever it means. I have been told, apparently, that we DO survive our bodies and that that individual energy still exists very powerfully. As with all these things, I was afraid that If I told anyone they'd just scoff and say, why was it someone so famous? What makes you think - ? But why not? I'm receptive, and after that heartbreaking movie I was wide open, all defenses down.

Anyway, so many people want or desire or ask for psychic experiences and think they'd be really wonderful, when in fact they can be a bit of an ordeal, in that you question your sanity or at least ask yourself if it was merely a projection of your own desires or your imagination. So I share it with you, just as it was.