Metamorphosis & Music
THE COLLECTIVE MOVEMENT OF CHANGE
There’s an irresistible urge to return to what I know 1,2,3,4….A,B,C,D…. Oh, say can you see…Once upon a time….In the beginning God….
We have a tradition of revisiting the starts, the firsts: moments, breaths, sights, sounds, places, times. We measure our present by righteously cross-examining the past. As if the worn-to-the-bone saying: if you don’t study history, you’re doomed to repeat it, has cancelled out war and greed. Inevitably, we revisit the past; life is cyclical.
Time is not.
But it does me little use to say - This time will be different. Well then, where I go from here?
I’m prone to use the terms evolution, metamorphosis, or the more colloquial expression - shake things up.
This is not a destructive action but a setting in motion intention.
For years, I’ve had a nagging curiosity about how to continue my motion of change. No one answer and no one person will solve this inner struggle for me. However, on a collective scale there is a notion that time does change all of us. The evolution of humanity, the metamorphosis of our ideas into actions, and the shake up of our everyday lives fraught with success and tragedy.
My motion compliments the comings, goings, and futures of time. It intrigues me to think of creating a new now. A concept from Richard Muller’s book, Now, a treatise of how black holes create new time with new nows.
Imagine, if an object in space can create a new source of time, maybe we could create a new way to move through our lives.
We can be like the physicist, whose curiosity and a search for knowledge, allows them to lay aside outdated theories for the sake and pleasure of finding things out (Feynman).
In last month’s post, I wrote about the theory of the tick, its representation of the animal world, and the necessity of waiting. I want to expand on Cimatti’s idea of Unbecoming Human and animality (as a way to save myself) and focus on his views on human language. Our use of language not only differentiates us from the animal world but also alienates us from it. We see ourselves and actions with I and you, yes and no, and we have stripped ourselves from the knowledge of animality. Self-awareness has its price.
Try and speak about animals in respect to their animal world, and the conversation inevitably loops back to humankind and how they relate within our world. I did this myself in the prior paragraph!
But from this endless loop of words dragging us further away from Nature, Cimatti’s work reminded me we have our natural rhythms - heart rhythms, circadian rhythms. We are the embodiment of music. We create melodies and rhythms from our inner natures that reverberate out to the natural world we inhabit.
The evolutionary process of “the becoming-music of language” is not a return to animality but a transformation into “the becoming-animal of the human” (Cimatti 203). I like to envision “the becoming-music” as an intensifying southern wind swooping down to awaken the treetops and our collective voices.
This “becoming-music of music always again breaks the closed circle of the refrain, making it fluid and mobile” (Cimatti 203). This is the intrinsic metamorphosis of life; our way of being depends on structure with fluid and mobile interruptions. So, why not create a song?
When I put my ear to the ground, I hear the unsung melodies I have yet to imagine. Time to shake things up.
References
*article dedicated to my friend and wonderful musician and artist K.R.
Cimatti, Felice. Unbecoming Human: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze (F. Gironi Trans.) Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Feynman, Richard. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Blackstone Audio, 2013.
Muller, Richard. Now, Random House Audio, 2016.