That Perfect Music... and Flight...

Sometimes that's all there is.  Floating in my mind.  Enveloping me in my car.  Pouring through these membranes between speakers set in cushions on my ears.  Filling me with something.  I can't see images without associating songs with them.  Can't see faces I love without tunes filling in the missing pieces.  Everything that matters is always tied up in music to me.  Perhaps that's why it makes me cry to watch my little girl dance with so much emotion. 

I read recently that God speaks through music.  "You know what music is?  God's little reminder that there's something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, every where, even the stars."  (Robin Williams)  And while I'm on the topic of God, I had a realization the other day about a phrase I must have heard about a million times throughout my childhood, but it never really struck me until now.  I made note of it in my phone during the middle of a random day this week when the thought passed through my mind.  And the hallways of my mind are echoing with this notion in my Mom's voice:  God is love.  Such a simple answer.  Maybe that's why I'm always so struck by love songs (the good kind... the subtly good but deeply real ones). 

Music is the place where people pour themselves.  And we can't help but swim in it.  The most passionate parts of us are music.  I get chills hearing the right music.  My OCD grinds its teeth and clenches something inside me when I hear the perfect song to hold the hand of the exact feeling I'm cloaked in... and then I find myself listening to it on repeat for days on end.  It's like the song is around every corner.  Whether it's actually playing or not.

I thought late last night about writing about a particular song that's got my attention as of late, but I was too close to dreamland to get up and type.  It's one I've been listening to a lot after first hearing it while watching figure skating on the Olympics.  It's a Coldplay song with gentle piano rhythms behind haunting vocals.  And it's about a flock of birds taking flight.  Hovering above.  "It's how you think of love," it says.  And it reminded me of a print I made in art school that is part of an autobiographical series I made into a handmade and hand-printed book called Stages (both the performance kind and the time-passing kind).  This particular print looks back and encapsulates how I felt just before I fell from grace and became lost in my young adulthood.  A shifting into a lonely place.  The image in the print is of this flock of birds taking flight, coming right at the viewer, out of a New Orleans balcony window.  It's a serigraph, with deep reddish undertones.  But amid the lively flock emerging is a dead bird, bound and hanging by a rope in the very heart of the image.  But the hung bird I printed in transparent iridescent purplish ink on top of the rest of the photographic image, so it's faint.  Glimmering quietly there, shadow-like.  You can only see that something is dead in the very heart of that emerging flock if you look really closely.  If someone wants to see what's actually there.  It's easy to miss if you don't look long enough.  But it's there.  That print, with the free, soaring flock marred by the nearly invisible dead bird just hanging there, feels like that song.  A sadness.  It hangs.  But also sings.  Nothing is ever black and white, is it?  And every beautiful thing has tears inside of it, doesn't it?  What else in the world can capture a feeling like that besides art?  And what does it better than music?  Maybe only art and music combined, even if only in my head.  But I don't think it's only in my head.  Music is entirely too universal for that.  Thank God for music.  Or is that just redundant?