Written by:
Dragoș Rusu / The Attic
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A sense of pureness
It may be pointless to start my narration on the topic of the end of the beginning with a peddling thought, which eventually will give me the ability to see through a stonewall. I won’t mention a word about the thought itself, ‘cause otherwise it wouldn’t make it pointless anymore.
But I will start my letter to the unknown terrestrial and extraterrestrial visitor with a quote from one of Sun Ra’s beautiful and enlightening poems - ‘The Sound Image…’ published in 1972, which I still find essential by all means.
That is what the music is, the universal language
The bridge-communication sound.
There is no other way to speak to everyone in language each can
Feel and understand except through the music.
How can you speak to other worlds except through the music, the music lets them know, where you are at and what you are.
If you are pure, the music’s pure.
The music is your testing ground, it is your choice that tells the tale,
When all else fails.
Pure music is what you must face.
If you limit, if you reject, if you do not consider
If you are selfish-earthly bound,
Pure music is your nemesis.
A couple of years ago I worked for a few months as a bartender/waiter in a café on a Greek island. Amongst the few daily visitors, there were two Greek brothers around 40, respectively 50 years old. I would say twins because they were looking like clones, though there was an age difference between them that could be noticed only after a few physical encounters with each other. On a random sunny Sunday morning, I was having coffee with one of the brothers, talking easy topics like money vices, politics, power and who knows what else. At some point he started a tale about a typical character - let’s call him Saint Peter - who appointed God, whom he was begging passionately to make him rich. God thought about Peter’s request and decided to give him a part of the Earth. He told Peter - ‘go ahead, this Earth is all yours, run and conquer it!’ But the sweet and cruel vice of greediness made Peter swallow a gudgeon and started to run franticly, in all possible directions, in order to conquer the properties. His feelings of power were growing step by step, as he was running and conquering new dimensions. As he couldn’t stop, he kept running until he died of exhaustion.
How can you relate this to music. You think you know some music, you think you learnt and keep learning some music, but you actually don’t know so much more than the rest of the people in your group, because the music really is endless. You keep running all your life for music, devote your most precious hours on music and on your last day of Earth as human being you discover - obviously unsurprised - that all the music that you know, feel and listen, relates to all the music in the world just as much as the most insignificant ant relates to the biggest jumbo. But what if there are not ten, but five ants on that big jumbo? Would that make a difference? A small and immaterial difference. What if there are ten millions of ants? Perhaps that can make a difference. After all, what is a difference? Where is the line that you can’t cross? Who decides where is that line? In what measure do you, as an individual, have a voice, in the endless cosmos?
In order to save ourselves, we must fight all our prejudices, vices and fears, and think with a global mind. Share. We must share everything with everyone to survive and to escape the poisoned mind and common belief of the individuality of the human being. We must fight the typical cliché of thoughts presuming that all humans are special. That all humans count. That each and every single individual on this planet is alike important in the divine scheme of the universe. But actually, the only single fact that matters and counts in Universe is our actions, not ourselves. And our actions are not who we are; they have their own meaning, impact, structure and role, independently. When we don’t act, we don’t change a single thing in universe. When we don’t act upon our knowledge, we don’t mean a single fleeting thing in the great chaos of the world. It’s like a dream. When we don’t act, we become a dream in our dreams and in our life, which is a dream. We ‘dream the dream that the dreamers dream’. When we don’t act, we are guilty for discontinuing the natural course of evolution in the universe. When we don’t act, we don’t exist, we are only ghosts of our times.
Communication is the key. Sharing is the key. Whatever we keep for ourselves will not help us grow any longer, just as whatever brought you here, will not take you any further. Since you just can’t possibly have all the music from the entire world and you’ll spend your whole life running for it, like Saint Peter, why not act and share what you already have, know and are, instead of being slowly consumed by the terrifying and eventually boring feeling of insatiability? The great wisdom that’s already present out there will guide you through the dark forests of the unknown. The painful process of discovering the most beautiful music in the world.
The Attic Magazine’s first year was rough but great. As this seems to be the start of the end of the beginning, here’s a few things you must read and also music that you need to hear, collected in 2015. Welcome in the Attic.
