Randall Patrick

Emile Cioran:

"As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one".



What this encompasses [for me] is the manner in which people try to envelop the world in words, in meaning...and then find out when the world comes to envelop them [in, say, a circumstantial landslide], words are shown to be excruciatingly futile.

That, in fact, is why art exists. Music, in particular. It takes you into a relationship with human existence that is as close as you will ever come to "grasping" it? As Cioran noted in an interview, when you listen to music you blossom inside an emotional and psychological and aesthetic frame of mind in which everything seems to be as it should be...as it could only be; as though what you are feeling is what is necessary to feel. And then the music stops and you are "out in the world" again....groping to encompass it somehow in "meaning".

And find there is none. None that will replicate what you felt so unambiguously inside the music.

RP

kaelcarp

Sometimes I think our minds are unable to handle the reality they observe, and art exists to ease that tension. It seems as thought we've gotten ahead of ourselves, outpaced our own evolution. We come up with brilliant ideas but not the wisdom of how to incorporate those ideas into the existing framework of our lives.

Iceblink Luck

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I think Zappa said so.

Also, a picture is worth 1000 words.

Where I am troubled, is when you say music takes you closer to a state where you "grasp" human existence. What does this mean?