Trajectory

We were talking about making music, versus playing notes.  J was commenting that she observed the shape of the music by watching the players' body language:  it was like they were on a journey.  E said, "That's very perceptive," because one of the things she is always conscious of is that music is notes passing through time, and it is her job and delight to follow and guide that journey.

Later I attended a concert where she came to the microphone and talked about the piece the group was about to play.  "This music has a trajectory" she said, "you can't just sit where you are," arms held out, encircling a rotund shape.

I envy her certitude.  She knows her craft, and she can find that trajectory and follow it, while the rest of us follow her in turn.  We find that trajectory through her interpretive journey.  We watch and listen and move along with her.  It's thrilling in a way that other journeys are not:  I find myself holding my breath...will she make it?  where is she going now?  wow, this is amazing, I can't believe I'm here!

In fact, having a brilliant musician share that trajectory is one of the joys of life. But there is a certain sorrow too:  it's over too soon, and the guide is gone. Also, following an expert guide has its own hazards.  While the experience is perfect, it is also mediated, not completely experienced. Part of a journey is plotting the course, and we feel lazy or cheated if we follow someone else's footsteps.  There are templates, guidebooks, maps and reviews, but ultimately the journey must be one's own discovery or it's meaningless.

And here is where I bog down. I love following the brilliant artists.   Musical, visual, literary, scientific...you name it, there are some amazing minds and talents out there, and I want to experience their insights, to follow their journeys. I am not a genius (or rather, as Elizabeth Gilbert said on TED, I may just have a rather lame one).  And, isn't there a certain ego in this need to plot one's own course, not to mention stress? Is it really worth it?  Read the lives of explorers: even if they are sure, their followers usually are not, and there's that waterfall over the precipice, that dragon, that formless chaos, just waiting for people who leave the safe places and get too close.

 Life is mutable, life is change through space and time.  Life is music, in a sense, the melody passing through time, changing, moving....And it's not so easy to find the trajectory of a life. So much of life is a reaction.  It doesn't seem to have a meaning or a movement.  It's more like the Philip Glass score I saw in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis:  play freely for 40 minutes.  pause for 1 minute.  play freely for 25 minutes (Merce Cunningham Exhibit, May 2017.) It's random and ugly and...not music. The very freedom, illusory though the scripting shows it to be, means the trajectory cannot be understood, even in retrospect.  I pity the dancers who try to give visible form to that chaos as it is moving through time.  And yet, that's what we are doing, trying to follow the trajectory of our lives.

All my experiences continue to point me down that path.  The journey is continuing, and I'm still not making sense of it.  While right now I'm looking at it in terms of music, I continue to turn to literature and philosophy and poetry.  When I was 13, I read The Chosen, and I was deeply moved by it, by the elements of the coming of age, the relationships with the fathers, the emotional underpinning that ultimately controlled the overt intellect.  Male oriented, steeped in intellectual Judaism, it yet seemed to be the story of all kids trying to find a place.  Potok starts the book with this lengthy quote:

“When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him.
In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.” –Karl A. Menninger

So, the journey is a struggle, one that cannot be understood from the outside, and one that cannot be controlled from the inside.  Or can it be?  I'm reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation, and I've just reached the point where the philosophy of non-violence is being transformed by the Buddha.  "The world, whose very nature is to change, is constantly determined to become something else...It is at the mercy of change, it is only happy when caught up in the process of change, but this love of change contains a measure of fear, and this fear is itself suffering"  (pg 278.)

I have taken change as my lifestyle, but that very statement implies that I am in control, that I see the trajectory.  And I don't.  Is it possible that I'm following this path in order to learn just how ego-driven I am?  Is the path I need to follow the 8-fold one?  Can I get there as a nomad, planning and scheduling and budgeting my way through the year? Or do I need to observe these self-centered ephemeral thoughts and let them go? Do I even want to?

I don't think so. For every thought about weight and health and wealth, there is the soft touch of warm fur, the smooth silk of  cool water moving along warm skin, the astringent deep warmth of coffee in the mouth. For every planned excursion, there is the delightful oddball discovery, like the Little Free Libraries dotting the neighborhood landscapes.  For every great work in the museum or every amazing plant in the arboretum, there is an artful graffito or a century plant in a humble garden, growing higher than the telephone pole.  And I would not experience any of these if I did not also take my egocentric self on these planned and plotted journeys, if I did not tell myself these stories.

So...trajectory.  the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time (Wikipedia)...the curve that a body (such as a planet or comet in its orbit or a rocket) describes in space (Merriam Webster online dictionary)....the path described by an object moving in air or space under the influence of such forces as thrust, wind resistance, and gravity, esp the curved path of a projectile or the course of a disease (freedictionary) an intelligent network connecting publishers to retailers, libraries, schools, and new distribution channels around the world (trajectory.com)

It's all about movement through space and time.  And do I really need to plot that movement or analyze that change?  Or shall I go back to that spreadsheet (recording those expenses) or that calendar (inputting those events)?  Yes, I think I should move along this trajectory and tick off the box on my mental ToDo list that says "think for a bit, and write what you thought."