Homesick Blues (the art of longing)
What is it that music can do for us that no other art form can do? Articulation of certain feelings (writers can do that), reliving a moment to reflect on it (film-makers do that), connecting the visual universe with the inner one (painters do that).
What music can uniquely do is tied directly to the essence of the sonic landscape itself. Music connects us to feelings, it sonically translates feelings. Though the artist seldom knows what emotion he is tapping into himself, the music itself finds the right notes.
Music dives into a part of ourselves that we have not yet gone into. It reveals to us things that we are not yet cognitively able to handle. An experience with music creates new pathways to know peace, regardless of what we know in the rational sense.
This kind of knowing is non or trans-rational, beyond not against reason.
Music is so luring and powerful because there is something unknown yet incredibly familiar about it. Deep calls to deep. Our longings are certainly hard to translate but are deeply experienced. Music helps us experience these deep-seated longings.
[Which is why Plato was so concerned music could be too powerful in the wrong hands.]
Longing is essential to the human experience, however uncomfortable. It gives us the overwhelming feeling that we are not in our permanent state, that something about this world is fleeting. Longing is a painful but simultaneously needful experience.
It is similar to a “good cry.” No one particularly wants to have a cry, but when it happens it feels very good. The dopamine release in our body confirms this. For a moment we transcend temporary things for ultimate things. We know something good is happening.
Like a funeral (again, no one wants to go to a funeral), it is awkward and sad. Yet there is something healing, good, and even necessary in the service and community. People are drawn together in unusually close ways. God works there.
Music is like that, it is like the healing agent releaed in a good cry or experienced during a funeral. No one wants to go there, but once they do, they are glad they did. Once out of our routine, we realize just how special this gift of longing really is.
This reset that happens during a spell of longing, though uncomfortable at first and usually avoided, does something to our sense of time. Where before it, time seemed so scarse (we were sure we had none to give), and after, time moves much slower.
Suddenly there is more than enough and we don’t know what to do with it all.
Longing literally slows down time. As we peel our gaze away from the fury of things on our to-do list, and really look into the heavens (really!), we are convinced, again and again, that life has so much meaning - beyond the things we produce from day to day.
We are much more than our jobs, more than administrators of programs. We are human “beings.” Longing reminds us of our being-ness; this grounded-ness is something far greater than our ability to produce. It is our essence, our human-ness.
When we get back into that, into ourselves, we discover the ache of our longing is leading us somewhere. It is not there simply to bring discomfort, it is there to remind us in the discomfort that most comforts are only temporary anyway. Distractions.
It’s ok, be homesick!
