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012 - Sherlock Holmes - music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all
There is a warm hum in his fingertips as he draws the bow across the strings, not of course in any physical way but in quiet, in secret as he stands with hands folded behind his back, gazing out the window on the lazy, fat snowflakes falling in order to just for a short while leave clean the leavings of the street. The sordid and the unsavoury along with the inane and the mundane are washed away and a single bright, sustained note rings out across the whole of it. London is beautiful in the snow, after a fashion. It is musical. Something sparse -- Sherlock composes.
He does not write, merely thinks, lets the memory of the vibration fill up all the little hollows in his skull, tingle in his fingertips, his teeth; he's all abuzz with music, which is the only kind thing the world has willingly given him. It comes almost helplessly, without complaint, a force of the universe. Something is set to vibration, friction of horsehair, aided by rosin, or perhaps by wind against some tremulous thing, a reed, skin on brass, air on flesh hidden amongst the intricate machinery of the human throat; the source hardly matters. The process does. Something is set to vibrating. It smashes against the molecules of the air, which shift one another, waves, vibrations, to impose themselves on the delicate construction of the ear, human or otherwise, or to be perceived by nothing sentient at all: either way, it is played out, and all things, all things are irrevocably changed. It is not magic; the shift is imperceptible -- and yet, somewhere, there lies a record of all music that has ever been made, intentionally or unintentionally, heard or unheard, symphonies and operas or lonely people over the cooking of their solitary meal, workmen and savants standing on equal footing, all irrevocable. All irretrievable; that part doesn't matter.
Still. Sherlock watches the snowflakes stir, rising and falling on invisible currents, like Brownian motion stirs the tiny flakes of tea leaves left in his mug, and music is in that too, something with strings, some arpeggiated flutter, the beating of a rabbit heart. So: the vibrations, which remain, stowed away in some Babelian library which consists of no more than air, no more than empty space, hit eventually upon the ear. Lightning strikes, electrochemical pulses firing hundreds of times per second, and in some physical way something is changed. There is the essential point. The human condition is to be mutable, inconstant; information changes and the mind changes with it, and music is information, sound is information, the cells which carry the impulses are information, all among the milieu that contains the music; life is intermingled with music. Some process is induced. Chemicals are released. Other pulses follow on tangled pathways. The sound becomes embodied. It swells in the chest. It plays the brain like the violin is played, and Sherlock's fingers tingle, and the snowflakes continue to fall. Still he composes.
It is important -- it had seemed so important once -- that in music there is rigidity, structure, a mathematical architecture to be used and transformed and made sense of but nonetheless inevitably underlying the truth of the thing, that in music there is logic, there must be logic, and that in and of itself was pleasurable. Not exclusively, though. He remembers, with the sudden shock of a forceful recollection which would more preferably be avoided, sitting in his room with his eyes shut, a boy, just a child, and the catch in his throat at the swell of strings and brass, at the realisation that even that followed a formula, made sense, could be picked apart down to its constituent pieces with hardly any outside intervention. Even the breathing of the flautist and the shifting of the cellist in his chair, though extraneous, indicated some part of a larger whole in a way that life didn't, people didn't, his experience of all other things didn't. Music was a sanctuary. Music, mercifully, was quiet.
Sherlock lets out a breath, whole note, right on meter. Some quantum of tension dissipates from his spine. The song means something. Touches on something. Something he had hoped, perhaps still hopes, might in some way, on some level, be something like universal in a way words aren't. His words are so often rebuffed; his music, rarely. Discord in music is the counterpoint; in language, a necessity. Music is honest even when harmonious. Words, rarely. Perhaps as a child, when he had first taken up the violin, he had hoped to formulate a theory, to find some underlying truth in the shape of music, in the space it takes up and the places it sets the brain sparking, not just his brain but any other brain, and in doing so determine a method of communication, of relaying the truth of himself with more effectiveness than words, which are so easily misconstrued, ever could. Now he thinks differently. Perhaps he has had to learn to think differently. Now he understands that without those discordant notes which so repel people, real people, from him, he would be nothing at all. His melodies, his triumphs, his shining moments of something almost like understanding would be swallowed up in so many others, and mean nothing at all. He would be just like the rest of them: devoid of certainty. Devoid of rigidity. Devoid of precision, of mathematics, of structure. Empty entirely of music.
He does not write, merely thinks, lets the memory of the vibration fill up all the little hollows in his skull, tingle in his fingertips, his teeth; he's all abuzz with music, which is the only kind thing the world has willingly given him. It comes almost helplessly, without complaint, a force of the universe. Something is set to vibration, friction of horsehair, aided by rosin, or perhaps by wind against some tremulous thing, a reed, skin on brass, air on flesh hidden amongst the intricate machinery of the human throat; the source hardly matters. The process does. Something is set to vibrating. It smashes against the molecules of the air, which shift one another, waves, vibrations, to impose themselves on the delicate construction of the ear, human or otherwise, or to be perceived by nothing sentient at all: either way, it is played out, and all things, all things are irrevocably changed. It is not magic; the shift is imperceptible -- and yet, somewhere, there lies a record of all music that has ever been made, intentionally or unintentionally, heard or unheard, symphonies and operas or lonely people over the cooking of their solitary meal, workmen and savants standing on equal footing, all irrevocable. All irretrievable; that part doesn't matter.
Still. Sherlock watches the snowflakes stir, rising and falling on invisible currents, like Brownian motion stirs the tiny flakes of tea leaves left in his mug, and music is in that too, something with strings, some arpeggiated flutter, the beating of a rabbit heart. So: the vibrations, which remain, stowed away in some Babelian library which consists of no more than air, no more than empty space, hit eventually upon the ear. Lightning strikes, electrochemical pulses firing hundreds of times per second, and in some physical way something is changed. There is the essential point. The human condition is to be mutable, inconstant; information changes and the mind changes with it, and music is information, sound is information, the cells which carry the impulses are information, all among the milieu that contains the music; life is intermingled with music. Some process is induced. Chemicals are released. Other pulses follow on tangled pathways. The sound becomes embodied. It swells in the chest. It plays the brain like the violin is played, and Sherlock's fingers tingle, and the snowflakes continue to fall. Still he composes.
It is important -- it had seemed so important once -- that in music there is rigidity, structure, a mathematical architecture to be used and transformed and made sense of but nonetheless inevitably underlying the truth of the thing, that in music there is logic, there must be logic, and that in and of itself was pleasurable. Not exclusively, though. He remembers, with the sudden shock of a forceful recollection which would more preferably be avoided, sitting in his room with his eyes shut, a boy, just a child, and the catch in his throat at the swell of strings and brass, at the realisation that even that followed a formula, made sense, could be picked apart down to its constituent pieces with hardly any outside intervention. Even the breathing of the flautist and the shifting of the cellist in his chair, though extraneous, indicated some part of a larger whole in a way that life didn't, people didn't, his experience of all other things didn't. Music was a sanctuary. Music, mercifully, was quiet.
Sherlock lets out a breath, whole note, right on meter. Some quantum of tension dissipates from his spine. The song means something. Touches on something. Something he had hoped, perhaps still hopes, might in some way, on some level, be something like universal in a way words aren't. His words are so often rebuffed; his music, rarely. Discord in music is the counterpoint; in language, a necessity. Music is honest even when harmonious. Words, rarely. Perhaps as a child, when he had first taken up the violin, he had hoped to formulate a theory, to find some underlying truth in the shape of music, in the space it takes up and the places it sets the brain sparking, not just his brain but any other brain, and in doing so determine a method of communication, of relaying the truth of himself with more effectiveness than words, which are so easily misconstrued, ever could. Now he thinks differently. Perhaps he has had to learn to think differently. Now he understands that without those discordant notes which so repel people, real people, from him, he would be nothing at all. His melodies, his triumphs, his shining moments of something almost like understanding would be swallowed up in so many others, and mean nothing at all. He would be just like the rest of them: devoid of certainty. Devoid of rigidity. Devoid of precision, of mathematics, of structure. Empty entirely of music.