Saturday 20 October 2007

Pic of the day: View from my living room window, one of these days.

Midlife song

I think I was sleeping in, because the clock radio is very nearly the only radio I listen to these days. I then heard this incredibly beautiful song... well, beautiful to me! Tastes vary, as I have written about before and even One year ago to the day. The kind of music we like probably says a lot about us, or at least most of us. I believe it reflects the overall state of our long-term mind, which may well be encoded in the actual brain in the form of synapses and the activity of different parts of the brain. It is possible to act counter to this long-term mind, and it is probably even necessary if we want to change. But by default, the music we listen to is who we are, right now. A portrait of our mind. That is kind of scary, but that's not my point today.

The song was by Henning Kvitnes, a Norwegian artist who I believe is known for ballads and country music. I am deeply skeptical of country music, as I have explained in the past, but this song sounded genuinely good. (So it is probably not country. I am not a music expert, I am an expert on automisanthropology: The study of why I, of all people, am up to no good. This has given me a thorough insight in the human mind, but I sometimes lack the precise terms to explain it, partly because different people use the same words differently.)

The melody was reasonably catchy, but it worked together with the lyrics to enhance the beauty. The lyrics started out as an ordinary love song, but after a few lines had changed to a very poetic description of the midlife change, as I like to call it. What is often known as the midlife crisis, although not all cultures see it as a crisis. The changes however are very real and biological in nature. It is the greatest mass death of brain cells since puberty, and now as then it is the least used cells that are killed off, giving a cleaner inner landscape. However, there is also one general change: The power of the amygdala is reduced, the center of primitive fear. I am certainly not free of fear myself, but I think the relentless loosening of my religion is partly caused by these brain changes. But that is enough to write a book about. You can enjoy the song (if you understand Norwegian) with or without religion.

I was unable to find the song on MSN music or iTunes, probably because it is very new. Or it could be because if people listen to things like this frequently, they will probably cease being customers at those places. It is a simple song about autumn storms and beautiful autumn days, strongly implied to actually be about the human life in its mature years. He does not contrast the storms and the beauty, and neither do I. They are two sides of the same coin, at most. I think they are more like two sides of dice, really: You can sometimes see both of them at the same time.

The song is in Norwegian, sadly for the world. The title is "Hvem tror", literally "Who believes", but the religious implication is not followed up. It refers to the chorus, which says "Who do you believe that I believe that I am?" (Or "Who do you think that I think that I am", we don't use "think" in that sense in Norwegian, or rather only when we want to be overly cautious.) It is the kind of question that I could have asked, is it not? The extra layer, the "once removed" from the simple observation, the layer of reflection, the loop of consciousness. But most of the song is indeed direct, simple, straightforward. A declaration that the autumn is here, the summer is over, but autumn has its own beauty.

"Can no longer be the one I was
I must become the one I am
now that autumn has come
and is shaking every leaf
on my trees."

The song is... not quite unpretentious, but it excuses its true nature, tries to write it off as a love song with a couple vague references to some lover or spouse. It certainly does not claim to be spiritual. But perhaps exactly because of its down to earth nature, the deeper message sinks in deeply. Life is not an endless spring that somehow probably will come to an unfortunate end, which we should try to forget. No, life is a process and the process is me. I change and it cannot be avoided that I change. It is imperative that I "become the one I am", that I accept reality.

And I may be unusual in this, but to me accepting reality is the true spirituality. It is not for nothing that my NaNoWriMo novel this year is about people who have traded the ability to lie - even to themselves - for a power to perform miracles, a power that begins as barely a trace but grows over time until in their last years they become something far more than a mere human. It is a parable of something I have seen with my own eyes and which is thoroughly documented in the history of human spirituality. People who are relentlessly honest, in the end they transcend ordinary life and get the power to set others free, as if they were diplomats sent by the eternal "I AM".

I use to tell you that "all things that have form are subject to change" (and eventually decay). It would seem that the Buddha said this before me, but I am not a Buddhist. Rather, it is a simple fact, albeit one that hurts so much to accept that our entire civilization is holding its ears and screaming to drown out that quiet voice telling them the truth. I fully and deeply understand that state of panic. It still exists inside me, and I use to say that my last words will probably be "please don't let me die". But the truth is still true no matter how I feel about it. And when I am strong enough, I stretch a little further toward it. And this song helps.