Less Is More In The Here And Now

Sometimes the swirl of thoughts in my head becomes too much, and I am left in stasis by their movement. Isn’t that a conundrum, a contradiction? The doctors say I’m really low in serotonin, chemically low in joy, chemically high in stress, prone to days of darkness, weeks even. Not much fun, huh? Leaves you prone to things and wrongful accusations of being a curmudgeon. But maybe we’re all guilty of being blessed but still selfishly feeling we’re being oppressed. By ourselves? But we could be worse, or we could be rubberneckin?’ Not really my style to be honest but sometimes you have to count your blessings.

In the calm eye of the swirl of my thoughts is where I count them, and on that islet, that eyelet, all is well. All is well simply because the music comes through in waves, through a narrow opening, it becomes joy like that in Kavanagh’s “Advent;” “We have tested and tasted too much, lover. Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.” From a wallet too full, comes no hunger, and my music was always a music of hunger. When there’s unlimited supply — like EMI — then there’s a dearth of anything that even approaches soulful, whatever soulful means. Is it an energy, like anger? Then the same plastic paddy from North London had something to say on that too, an energy derived from an abundance of cortisol, and a hunger for joy. Take the medicine and feel the calmness. It’s underwhelming is it not?

Land of hunger indeed, but I’ll spare you Bonoesque meanderings on the Famine etc. You can rubberneck about it later on wiki. Back to that compressed joy ready to unfold. It rolls out in sound always. It floats, sways, grinds and halts in fluid motion or in stacatto rhythms. It shunts back and then lurches forward, one step back and two steps into the future. The music never hints at anything or anyone that produced it, it just is. It never needs to come from an unlimited supply, it can come from nothing, from a dollar out of fifteen cents, or no sense at all. Maybe that’s it, nonsense, this nonsense.

Maybe the music I hear is dwarfed by a goliath with an unlimited supply, it may stand meek surrounded by lawyers, guns and money, but when it elevates, when it lifts off, when it soars into the future, it bursts out through that narrow opening where wonder is kept, and it blooms, it balloons, it explodes its colors in my head and the storm clears and the eye of it becomes all of it, the aye of it even. The music never stops, it never can and never will. Like Weller said, “see the tyrants panic, see their crumbling empires fall, then tell ‘em we don’t fight for fools, ‘cos love is in our hearts,” and in the swirl of our heads, and in the hunger and in the narrow channel where joy comes in slowly and leaves fast and where the future sleeps like Shelley’s lions in slumber, only to rise “in unvanquishable number.” The future is here, it’s time to wake up.

Orr

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