The Music of the Mind

I spent the morning cleaning my apartment, especially the balcony where birds have been conveniently using it as their outhouse. The physical work was much welcome after the whole week of work in front of a computer screen. My man-cave needs a bit of maintenance after having survived multiple roof leakages which ruined some of my books. Will have to slowly engage the right people to fix them.

I admire people who are able to do all their household maintenance on their own. Handling drills and wrenches is not really my forte and not exactly on my list of priorities. Neither is cooking--but, this is one area which I think I might explore further as I grow older. 

Not that I am very interested in the culinary arts--it's just that I find that I have an intuitive understanding how different flavours and ingredients blend together. They are like musical notes--some combination of notes blend together to form a chord. As I grow older, I am beginning to 'hear' the harmonies of these flavours clearly.  

All the senses--sight, sound, smell, taste and touch impinges on the mind in the same way. They all have different tonal shades, which the artist use as his medium of expression. When we produce a work of art, we are expressing a combination of thoughts and feelings in space and time.

We experience life as we know it through our senses. I enjoy movies as a blend of images and sound, which are woven together by a storyline or plot that serves as a structure for composition. Some say that all stories are variations of a few basic themes--the Hero's Journey is one of them. But to me the story is the least important part of a movie--it's the masterful use of sound and images that I'm interested in. Which is why I admire Blade Runner so much and many other works by the director Ridley Scott. 

Every word has colour and tone. A writer chooses from a palette of words to best express his ideas and feelings. There's rhythm, there's harmony and there are themes and counterpoint. When we are in tune with the writing of the author, we resonate. And in the act of resonance, new melodies and spun off in the mind of the reader. We call that 'thought-provoking'. 

Thoughts are melodies. They arise because the background harmonies demand them. A melody sits on top of a chord progression like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower.  Thoughts arise as inevitably as the melodic line expressed by a saxaphone player in a jam session. There's a constant progression of chords happening in the mind through the movement of karma. 

When the melody of thoughts arises, action follows like how we instinctively dance to music. To meditate is to listen to the music of the mind. And that is the wellspring of all art.