He who hesitates...

"I think that a price is paid for absolutely everything in life. That we’re sitting here, you and I, means that I’m not sitting in a sunken sauna and you’re not having a gin and tonic. Everything we do must mean not doing something or other."

When it's not publishing my politely scathing book reviews, The Literateur really is fab. I've just read editor Kit Toda's interview with Sir Christopher Ricks.

Ricks is wise. Few people fit the word better. He knows what he thinks - because he's really thought about it. He once gave a talk at my school, and I've don't think I've ever encountered such an eloquent advocate for the importance of how we say things. I remember being dazzled and charmed by his apparently off-the-cuff, but probably well-rehearsed, comparative analysis of the phrases "look before you leap" (it just wouldn't work if it were "don't leap until you've looked") and "he who hesitates is lost" (the dithering sighs of those aitches).

While I was at Oxford he gave nine lectures as Professor of Poetry. Despite renewed good intentions each term, I missed every one. With hindsight I can't imagine what could have taken priority. Certainly not a gin and tonic.

Spells

People hear music in all kinds of different ways. Some people experience music as colours; others just see grey water pouring out of the speakers. Some never listen to lyrics, they just fall under a spell. Some eat it whole. Some just take a bite. Some of us like to get on our backs and roll around in it like a dog.

Tom Waits, 2009

In prehistoric times music ... was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Lately I've been spending more and more of my day 'doing' music. Singing it, playing it, writing it. Making music feels like something real; like work. Your voice gets tired, your fingers get blistered, you end up with pages covered in scribbles. With luck, you're exhilarated.

By contrast, listening to music, especially on your own, can be an almost ghostly experience. We're so used to processing the world visually that it's hard to fully accept this stuff, these sound waves emerging from a speaker, really really exists. It's there, and it's everything and everywhere; then it's nowhere.*

Music is the closest thing we know to magic. Not a new thought, but one worth repeating.

*This sense of music as hallucination is compounded if I'm listening to it with my cat, who blithely ignores it. You might think that a loud, pitched noise apparently coming from nowhere would make an animal uneasy, but he's long accepted it as one of the oddities of living with humans. From his non-reaction I occasionally think I really might be the only one hearing it.