I’ve been reading a little bit on the philosophy of nonexistence, which appears to have a surprising number of adherents. The universe is made of but one substance and all beings, and the compositions which fill our lives do not qualify as divsible entities. Consciousness itself has no measurable substance, unless we count the evolutionary expansion of the frontal lobes and the evolution of the bicameral mind. And here is where I start to lose the thread of thought. It seems people think our actions and thoughts aoccur out of our control, falling instead into a sort of river of collective behavior that unites all species. I’ve read such things about ants but never the human race or all species under heaven. I have always thought that reactions to noise and sound can be remarkably consistent across species. I have not read any serious philosophy in a long time, though. The inevitable thicket of 19-letter words, of convoluted -isms and -astications, is enough to make me question the generosity of the writers.
Speaking of overly generous writing I officially gave up on that fucking book that someone wrote, the book project to which I gave a bunch of money during its Kickstarter drive. I read as far as I had to to be sure he spelled my name right and got my web site name correct. Beyond that he is on his own for the remaining 175,000 words. Thinking about what else I did read all I can think is… what a horrible idea for a book.
There is a New York Lottery commercial I’ve heard several times now. In that commercial someone asks the question: What is the only mammal that can’t jump? The correct answer, according to the questioner in this commercial, is the elephant. I was thinking that the whale can’t jump but I guess it depends how you define jumping. Killer whales can jump out of the water, Shamu style, as can larger whales… I just don’t think the question articulates that the two forms of jumping should be considered synonymous.
This is the kind of bullshit I think about on too little sleep. I woke up early today in advance of tomorrow’s daylight savings time and the loss of an hour.
I spent about an hour at the piano this afternoon after wandering around Sunnyside for a brief spell. I got a few pictures over there, but nothing compared to the haul from Thursday, when I discovered a huge swath of Maspeth that I had never seen before. 69th Street seems to be the main drag for this area, but I also spotted a street which is probably about a tenth of a mile long and has no buildings with addresses on its brief span. I guess that’s something new and interesting. It would be cool to be the only person who lives on a street but this little strip of road had no residents. it was cool to find that and a number of other things that were new to me. I got a beautiful shot of a high school girl walking home from school. You could write a short story about that picture.
Playing piano for an hour made me feel less anxiety. I remember the shrink at Bellevue, playing hardball with asking me seemingly tough questions (I didn’t have trouble with them but she seemed to think I should have been cowering and crying). Near the end of our meeting i told her I was a classical pianist. Her face lit up, and she suddenly went all soft on me. It was kind of annoying but she asked some questions. in response to one of them I said that I play piano not just because I love the music (I do) or respect the geniuses at work (I do) but because I like how it makes me feel. It completes my body. I remembered the single most profound moment in my years of training, when the instructer at Oberlin sounded like he was high, telling me “You are at one with the instrument. The piano is an extension of your body.” And you know, he was right, as far as the physical irreality of fusion allowed him to be.
If there is vomit in my mind or garbage in my mental system I can clear it away with time at the piano. The Bellevue woman’s response was affirmative, she adding that a fundmental tenet of Music Therapy is that playing an instrument is as good for the body as for the soul. I had actually never heard that, and thought Music Therapy was a crock-of-shit/hippy thing. If that is fundamental to the science of Music Therapy than I’m on board with that.
Today I felt like I was performing for Tom, the owner of my apartment building. He was working on renovating an apartment upstairs. He was my audience. I could hear him whistling Mozart when I stopped playing.
