It's embarrassing how much of that song I just know.
Anyway, I went on an adventure over the weekend, and by adventure I mean "to Grandma's house" and by that I mean, "I had no internet." So there you are. I love my grandmother dearly, yes, but she is tragically behind the times. Although she does get like 5000 channels, so that's something, I guess.
Anyway, I wrote a little, but mostly I'm re-reading Bea's story again. It's been a while since I looked at it, and time lends you a really good perspective. I'm noticing things, seeing things I want to change, and OH GOD MY WRITING STYLE. It needs work.
Of course, I'd love it to be beautiful and perfect and gorgeous, I mean, that goes without saying. But the flip side to that is I've never done this before. And so I'm sort of taking the zen approach to it: it will be perfectly imperfect. I must tell myself it's perfect - hit a point where that is my mindset - and at the same time accept that there will always be something else, something more that I know I could have done, or added, or changed. I'm not at that point yet, so it's not like this is how I'm going to justify the overall shittiness I've created, but I think I'll know when. At some point it's going to be as good as I am capable of producing at this point in my life/writing career, or maybe even a little better than that, and that's going to have to be okay for me. I'm not going to be Steinbeck my first time out. I don't even think Steinbeck was Steinbeck the first time around.
Anyway, my emo whining about writing aside, here's another journal entry! This one is about yoga and music for dying people. And also Good Omens. And classic rock.
"The two lectures this week were both really interesting, if for different reasons. The first lecture, on the mind/body connection and the benefits of meditation, really hit a chord (haha! A pun, get it? Music thanatology, chords, oh how hilarious. I crack myself up) with me. I have always loved meditation, especially in conjunction with yoga or other activites.
In a way, horseback riding has always been a form of meditation for me, albeit possibly and overly-technical one. It links the peace of my mind – and really, when I have my leg over a horse it’s the only time my mind really does relax and focus on one thing – to the awareness of both my body and how I’m using it, and my horse’s body and how she’s responding to me. I can feel every muscle, it seems like, every tendon and how I’m using it, and although my heart rate goes up with the exercise, the stress just seems to melt away.
That said, it’s peanuts to how I feel after a session of hot yoga. When I’m on a horse, there’s always something analyzing – “cut a corner there, need more right leg, she’s cycling on her left shoulder, Jesus I wish she’d lay off the bit for a minute” - but when I’m doing yoga, it’s just me and my body. I know its flaws, I know how it wants to move and how I can manipulate it otherwise. The breathing is incredible, and at the end of each session my breaths are deep and relaxed. The meditation at the end is truly incredible – there’s no adjective to describe it. The closest you might get is “sleep but not” or “active dreaming”. The body rests and the mind follows suit, and there’s not a thought in the world that can stir the waters. It’s beautiful, and I’m absolutely floored that it’s not more pervasive in healthcare. Nothing counters stress and illness like a meditation session; it can’t cure your pneumonia but damned if it can’t help you release the tension and the stress in your chest, and focus on your breaths, impaired or not.
Of course, meditation is a sin according to some book in the Bible, so that probably explains a lot of why it’s taken so long to get a foothold in this country.
Music thanatology, on the other hand, that could go around like a flu in a daycare if it were more widespread. I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone that doesn’t enjoy music, and gains relaxation from occasionally just kicking back with the stereo and their own thoughts.
Even now, the soothing and dulcet tones of AC/DC act as a balm to my weary soul.
Now, harps are the obvious choice, I think, for thanatolgy – angels play harps, supposedly, although I think if you really wanted to imagine angels playing in any kind of Celestial Supergroup it would more accurately be a jazz band. If they do play harps – and here I’m assuming the existence of angels, because why not – it’s not much of a choir. You have your voices, and you have your harps. Where’s the percussion? Where’s the brass? Where’s the piano? Are you telling me Hell got all the decent instruments and Heaven ended up with harps? Where is the guitar?
I sincerely hope that if I’m dying someday and someone comes in and starts wailing on a harp, they at least have the decency to learn the harp versions of some Rolling Stones songs in advance. I mean, good Lord, I love music. I mean, really. I’ve had religious experiences listening to music.
And not a single time has that been in response to a damn harp. They’re pretentious.
There’s a book out there where the Apocalypse is approaching – the book is set in the ‘80s, so it’s a scant 6000 years since the whole world began, anyway – and an angel and a demon are mourning the death of the planet, and their own returns to their respective sides. The angel asserts that it can’t be that bad for him, because of course Heaven will win. It isn’t until the demon points out that Heaven’s only composers are Elgar and Liszt that the horror of a heavenly victory dawns on the angel.
And they’re the side with the harps. The demon, however, is mollified in his horror at his certain eternal suffering in the case of an Infernal victory by the fact that at least they’ll have every other musician.
Not to say that harps aren’t great. They aren’t, but that’s not the point.
The point – which I seem to have wandered a pretty far piece from – is that music can be comforting to the dying but, and I think this is the really important bit, music that was never comforting to them before is not going to become so just because they’re dying. They’ve done studies, which I’m not going to look up. But they’re out there. The most important thing is that the beat has to be soothing, and it has to be multitonal.
And I’ve got news for all the harpies out there (Oh, God, I’m hilarious): the harp doesn’t have a monopoly on that in this day and age.
So bring on the Stones. Blast the Kiss. Let me not go gentle into that good night – I want to go with guitars screaming, a drum set being veritably destroyed, and Freddy Mercury crying out in beautiful exultation.
Hallelujah, Galileo, Figaro. Magnifico."
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