love, of all things (and music and landscapes)

self-indulgence ahead! It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between normal observations on life and the icky stuff of confessional prose. Toeing that line once again is this post on loving music and landscapes, effectively several paragraphs of metaphysical cotton candy.

Anyway, this began because a friend of mine said she found landscapes and music much easier to love than people, possibly because one can never completely possess either of them.

1. My first reaction was to think about what it means to love music/landscapes. My relationship with music I'm pretty clear on, the idea of loving a landscape had never occurred to me. And now, writing this, I wonder instead about this business of possessing another person. I think she actually used the word "own" but that word has strong overtones and I think is best left to the domains of consumerism and pets. I'd like to think that possession is an outdated concept pre-dating even our cavepeople days when you, the male cave dweller, kept your mate safely stowed away from other predatory males. So perhaps we're to some degree programmed to feel possessive about our mates, and maybe possession is an emotion that helps keep humans pair-bonded. (obviously pair-bonding either conferred survival benefit or was a secondary effect of some other habit that kept our hides attached to our bodies. No time for this dull topic here.) Humans are just such squirmy things that 'possession' in love is hard for me to conceptualize. Is there subservience involved? Accountability? How much control is inherent in possession? Disturbing territory.

But maybe that's just me.

2.How do you deeply love a landscape? By which I mean a living landscape, not a painting. What I like about them is that, counterintuitively, it’s not perspective that changes how you take it in—you can walk around it all you want, but that won’t make you fall in or out of love with what you see. It’s somehow a greater composite that immediately grabs your attention. But, to me, the moments of visual arrest pale in comparison to the most powerful moments of solitary engagement. Feeling the wind on one's face while standing on a sand dune. Or sitting on a rock and dangling one's feet in clear, shallow water. I guess I wonder how it can be love; to me a landscape is too ephemeral an experience to be a candidate for love. Can you love a landscape and not love a place? I suppose I'm not convinced that this experience is more than pleasure.

3. Music to me is rarely about emotion. Or, rather, I resent that music is quite often about emotion. When it is, listening becomes a form of torture, and the associations can end up so over-powering that the music itself becomes a secondary component of the listening experience. Except for Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa, which in my opinion is as pure as emotion gets. (and why I almost never listen to it.)

I guess what I’m saying is there’s a point where deriving pleasure in music for music’s sake is overrun by the scenes/memories/possibilities that lyrics and chord progressions trigger, and I find it hard to lose myself in music the way that you can almost lose yourself in fiction. And this is why I love John Cage. I love that he tried to be about music in its least emotionally clogged form. Music to create delight. Every musician/composer shouldn’t be Cage, but Cage at least created one end of a spectrum on which we can consciously choose to slide as we gauge our emotional investment in music.

[side note: the biggest problem I have with music is that it’ll trigger some pleasurable reaction and I’ll forget to wonder whether it's anything I actually like. And then some day I’ll listen again, realize it was terrible, and get upset at myself for being slow to notice. It’s hard work to consciously listen, but it’s like eating canned soup rather than homemade. Still good, but ultimately eh.]

[I’ve also been eating a lot of canned (albeit organic) soups lately. So spinstery! Ick.]

More on the part of loving a landscape once I've got it figured out. It's not intuitive to me.