on time (and why beethoven seven is exactly like time (in a nutshell at least))

this little electronic part of the world used to be jam-packed with my musings and ramblings on various issues.  thoughts on music, the law, little anecdotes...it was all here for your viewing pleasure.  and because i'm addicted to instant gratification, for my collecting fb-likes-and-page-views bliss.

however, as you may have noticed, i deleted everything from the last two years.  it's because i'm the opposite of a hoarder.  i actually wish i'd hoard a little bit more because i often throw away or delete things that later i wish i had - pictures, clothes, phone numbers, stuffed animals with sentimental value.  you name it, i throw it away.  in rash gestures of self-cleansing and closure, i can't hang on to anything for very long.  

in the last few months i really started to question why this is my jam, and i think the answer comes down to my perception of time.  i spend a lot of time thinking about time, and timing, and time wasted, and time well spent, and how to beat the man who made time, and whether or not it's true that the man who made time actually made a lot of it and an endless list of other temporal questions.

time, as far as i am able to discern, only exists in the most fleeting and short lived of moments.  the past obviously does not exist because it is already extinct.  the future does not exist because it's yet to be.  and the present is only tiny little milli-moments because as soon as you've moved from one teeny moment of existence it has already become the past.  so, in the end, we are left only with these lightning-speed pockets of life that are the 'present' and that evaporate just as quickly as they're born in the first place.

this of course isn't my unique creation... let's be real.  i spend all my time thinking about music and posting shit on facebook, i don't have time to come up with intellectual thought!  i love to read books about journeys...Brida, and Why is God Laughing?, and most recently some completely loveable parable-esque works by Francois Lelord about an inquisite and compassionate psychiatrist called Hector.  Hector has searched for not only happiness and love, but also for time.  i picked up this fleeting-moment-get-it-while-it's-hot conception of time in Hector and the Search for Lost Time over the holidays.

everyone's view towards time is different.  you see people racing to the next finish line in an endless journey of finish lines, and people who can't see the finish line from the track to begin with.  people who love thinking about the past, and people who can't sit still when swimming in all these old moments.  as you may have guessed, i'm in that last category.  i can't help but get stuck in the thoughts that without movement and life, the old moments don't really have value.  so i can learn from the old moments to make my present ones run a little better, but i can't just meander through the dead space that is the past.  somehow it seems like a waste of these fleeting moments i have that are my present.

in Hector's search for lost time, he finds himself in Japan surrounded by centenarians who teach him something about time.  perhaps i'm just a sucker for anything about music, but this quote just will not exit through the same door it came in through (a superstition for those unfamiliar with it!):

'Life isn't like a bottle you can fill,' said the centenarian with the bow tie, 'but more like a piece of music, with some less successful or boring moments, and others which are more intense.  Music is a very good way of thinking about time.  A note only moves you because you remember the one before, and you're waiting for the next...Each one only means something wrapped in a bit of the past and the future'.

music is ephemeral.  as soon as the notes are played they're over just as fast.  but, of course, my love (aka i'm obsessed with it and think everyone else should also be obsessed with it)  for the second movement of Beethoven's seventh just wouldn't be the same if all the notes weren't present.  it's every moment that comes and goes that keeps me longing for the next second of sonic waves.  but once that second movement is over, then comes the scherzo, and if i keep sitting around and listening to the second movement, i'll never get anything done.  i'll never hear the finale, i'll never feel the release that i need to feel after all the steady prodding through a minor jungle of landmines (in my opinion it is soooo beautiful and rich, but also quite heavy and just begs to have something a teensy bit brighter to follow it).  so i have to let go of that second movement, even though i desire it sometimes in this out-of-my-control sort of way, and carry on into the next present moment.

i'd love to hoard that second movement a bit more, but if i do, i lose sight of how many more extraordinary moments there are (i.e. how can i appreciate the arcade fire, dvorak and nicki minaj if i'm just listening to beethoven ALL EFFING DAY LONG?!  answer: i can't).  so, onwards and upwards: i'll probably carry on being an anti-hoarder, regretful sometimes, but existing in this present made of moments fully in motion, educated a little bit by the moments that came before and always hedging forward to the things yet to come.