#maybe the real arcane was the divorce we made along the way

[sovamurka]

Me while watching Arcane s1: *chanting* DIVORCE, DIVORCE, DIVORCE (timebomb)

Me while watching Arcane s2: *chanting* DIVORCE, DIVORCE, DIVORCE (caitvi)

[spectrumed]

1. piano

The brain is a musical instrument. How it sounds all depends on who is playing it. The keys, the strings, the tubes, the circuits, none of them make noise on their own. Some may argue (some very aggressively) that every instrument has one exact way that it should be played. That there is one correct way to play the piano, and then there’s several incorrect (deviant!) ways to play the piano. But a classically trained pianist will not play the piano in quite the same way as a self-taught jazz pianist will play the piano. Sure, the latter does employ some stylings unique to them. They have an idiosyncratic way of playing that makes their sound highly notable, possibly even sought after. While the former, the classically trained musician, they’ve been taught to minimise many of those quirky individual traits that could, potentially, distract from the classical compositions that they will be playing. In jazz, music is carried by unique characters and a strong sense of individualism. In classical, music is carried by tradition, norm, and history.

It should not be understood that the classically trained musician plays without soul or passion. While we, in the western world, have become more and more infatuated with the idea of the self-made artist, the amateur who makes their way to success and stardom solely through will, and quite often a manic compulsion to create, there is no wrong way to play an instrument. However you make it work, whatever sounds you are able to produce, you are playing that instrument. You are channeling your inner essence into the music you are performing, no matter what genre you belong to. No-one plays their instrument the exact same way, for certain, but everyone is playing with what they’ve got.

How do you think? You’re used to being asked “what do you think?” But how do you think? Do you see pictures in your head? Do you experience an inner monologue? Are you riddled with anxiety? Have you ever hallucinated? Do you think that you think good, or do you think that you think bad? If we return to our metaphor of the brain as a musical instrument, what sort of music do you think you’d play? Sure, there’s the classical world, and the jazz world, but of course, that’s hardly the music most people will listen to nowadays. Do you think in pop songs? Or do you think in big heavy metal epics? Or maybe what you are is a maniac for dance music. You may find like-minded friends who like the same kind of music as you do. I think that there is a correlation between what music we like and how we perceive the world. Does listening to a certain song send you back? Does a certain tune evoke memories that you may have thought were long since gone? I know that there are some folks out there who say that they do not care much for music, and while I don’t doubt that they absolutely do feel that way, I can personally not imagine where I’d be without my trusty set of headphones and my phone loaded up with a wide library of music I like. It seems to me that music is primal. Almost as if only by understanding music, can one come to understand consciousness. To nab a song title from Jethro Tull (the band, not the agriculturalist,) life is a long song.

But I do admit that I come from a biased perspective. Music means much to me. I’m no musician, but I think that partly stems from a desire to not see “how the sausage is made.” I’d like to be able to listen to a composition without feeling compelled to analyse it, or to study it. I’d rather eat the sausage without having to wonder what bits of the animals this meat came from. Is that the taste of a spleen or a testicle? There are plenty of other things in life to dissect and tear apart just to examine. Perhaps what I wish is to maintain an arcane approach to music. Perhaps I am too enamoured by the idea of the musician as a mystic able to tap into an elevated state of being, some spiritual realm divorced from our own. That look on the guitarist’s face when they successfully manages to convey just the right emotional tone perfectly with that solo. The frisson you feel when the song reaches its climax. That thing we call the sublime. To explain it, well, it simply feels like you are making something splendid mundane. It seems to rob it of its power. Or… Well, maybe that’s not it all. Maybe all I want is just a moment or two when I can relax and avoid thinking about things. For a moment, I’d just like to forget that I’m a person.

The world is so loud. Really, I can guarantee you that if you didn’t have those natural mental filters that we all have, you’d go insane. Every little sound. Every little bit of stimuli. It would all overwhelm you. It would burrow deep into your consciousness, and it would refuse to leave. Ever tried to fall asleep while hearing the dripping water from a leaky tap? Drip, drip, drip. Know how impossible that feels? Well, imagine if you had that feeling always, imagine if all noise felt that visceral and in-your-face. Lucky you’ve got those filters. Turns out, not everyone has them. I don’t. It fucking sucks.

Music is lovely, because music is organised. It has structure. You can listen to a song, remember it, and then follow along as you’re listening to it a second time. Music follows a pattern. There is a logic to patterns. But the everyday noises that surround us do not follow a pattern. Let me tell you, birds are infuriating animals. Sure, their individual little songs can be nice to listen to, but when all the birds of the forest come together, they don’t perform as an orchestra. No, they’re all just doing their own solo piece, completely oblivious to the sounds going on around them. I’m thinking that nature could have done well with a conductor. Someone competent to create order. To make it all just that bit more peaceful. I don’t have those filters others take for granted. I can’t ignore sounds. And that makes the world feel so loud.

It is neat to imagine the human brain as a musical instrument. You can imagine that seasoned player, that old session stalwart who’s played on all the most famous pop hits throughout the decades, and you want to imagine them playing with grace and finesse and showcasing all the amazing sounds that the instrument can produce. But the brain isn’t really some marvel of biological engineering. It’s not intelligently designed. It’s actually just a piece of meat hiding underneath layers of bone, skin, and hair. It’s a complex bit of meat, admittedly. It’s hard to understand exactly how the brain does work. But if you were to open up a person’s cranium, rather than feeling awe, you’d most likely feel grossed out. This thing that we’re supposed to think of as a miraculous product of millennia of evolutionary progress, it looks… Well, it looks awfully pinkish, and wrinkly, and frankly unpleasant.

We’re all mortal beings, made from squishy flesh and blood, scraped together from all that was available at the time. Sure, we may dream and fantasise about one day achieving those heights we aspire towards, to become that perfect superman, whose cognitive abilities put them on par with the mythological titans of the past. But really, we’re all just trying to do our best with what we’ve got. You may not be able to play the finest of Mozart’s many symphonies, the instrument that you’ve been given just simply isn’t up to snuff. Even if all you can play is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, that shouldn’t weigh on your value as a human being. And besides, that’s still Mozart you’re playing.

I will undoubtedly get back to discussing music in later instalments of this blog. It is truly a major part of my world, and without the joys I associate with it, I would be in a far worse place. But I think that, ultimately, what I wish to arrive at, is the fact that our sensory perceptions have a significant impact on how we piece together our sense of self. While it may be an unnerving thought to consider, what would happen to our understanding of ourselves if we one day were to lose one of our major senses? I am sure that many people could go without their sense of smell. Humans have long since abandoned smell as a dominant sense. To a dog, on the other hand, to lose its sense of smell would be devastating. It would lose part of what it means to be a dog. For humans, we enjoy the scent of freshly baked bread, the whiff of somebody’s perfume, or the bouquet of some pricey bottle of wine. But that’s nothing to what dogs get out of their sense of smell. To a dog, its sense of smell is its world. Is a dog even a dog if it can’t sniff around? Do you think dogs ever take their sense of smell for granted?

I do not think that humans are what we eat, but I suspect that we may be what we perceive. Our consciousness does not exist independently of the world that surrounds it, but rather, it is formed by the outside stimuli it receives on a constant basis. The fury of noises, lights, smells, all kinds of impressions, it shapes you. It is what our memories are built on. I am not at all certain that there exists anything more to the mind beyond that. I doubt that we’ve got some immutable soul hidden underneath it all. Humans are the collection of thoughts and ideas that we’ve attached ourselves to throughout our lives, and naturally, if you’re neurodivergent, that process is going to happen differently to most. At times those differences will be large enough that it can create real conflicts with those others around you. Effectively, to be neurodivergent is to suffer constantly from culture shocks. To me, it is natural to loathe the cacophony of birds in the summer. Their screams feel like piercing needles embedding themselves into my skin. But I try telling that to others, and I’ve yet to find anybody who agrees with me.

So, am I just wrong? Am I mistaken? Am I a freak? Why can’t I just be like everybody else? Why must I be such a buzzkill? I can’t even enjoy birdsong, I really must be a pain to be around. How did it come about that I just can’t be normal? Normal. I want to be normal. It is and it will likely always be grossly underrated to just be normal. Normal people don’t know how good they have it. They’re just too normal to be able to perceive it. When you’ve never been without it, you don’t know what it is to miss it. Normalcy. Having a normal brain. Having others see you as a normal person. Only if you didn’t have it, would you know how great it is. Do you sometimes wonder if dogs know how much they’d miss their sense of smell if they ever were to lose it?

Then again, there is no such thing as normal, is there? If you were to take the world’s most average person, then that person would be abnormal. To be a person is to be unique. We’re all special snowflakes. Aren’t we?

You may not play your instrument in a conventional manner, but who’s to say what manner counts as conventional? It’s all just so arbitrary. Who’s to say you can’t play an acoustic guitar as a drum? Who’s to say you can’t treat your piano as a percussion instrument? Smack your cello with a flute, if you’d like. Isn’t it just delightful when you see a unique performer who is able to play their instrument in a way you could never before have conceived it being played? The novelty of it all. The absolute joy of being exposed to something different. Of seeing something that can barely be believed. You love things that are unusual, and you think people who are different should delight in being different. Surely, it is better than being normal and boring?

But is it all that bad to be boring? And you may love what’s different, but when it comes down to it, despite your positive inclination, you still perceive it as being the other. It is not you. It is not mainstream, it is underground. Secluded. Deviant. Those who truly do struggle to fit in with society, to be just like everybody else, they are constantly faced with these little reminders that they just don’t belong. They are humans (at least they think they are humans,) but they’re not like other humans they know. For as much as they get told that they should embrace their quirky nature as simply being who they are, it is hard to know what it is like to be not normal, when all you’ve ever been is normal. Sure, for a performance or two, it’s fun. It’s fun to get the attention, to be seen as having something others don’t have. But then, at the end of the day, all you want is to be able to fall asleep, without the birdsong outside your window keeping you awake.