Music and Life

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey; with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end: success or whatever it is- or maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.”

This is Just Killing Me.

This little excerpt I’m sure I read before is gnawing at me. It is a good chew, a necessary function of thought, the slow grinding of guts and gears; the spark of synaptical leaps. It is stuck in my skull, like the simple sentence written on a torn piece of paper I found in the computer lab yesterday,
“I remember Kayla Combs.”
It sang me to sleep and sang me awake. And these leaves of Whitman’s, veined with color and common as dirt repeat and fold at the back of my eyes. When I read it aloud for my parents, my dad grumbled and left the room. I will never sing, “I remember Kayla Combs” for him. He would never understand.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.