Bridge

Rainbows.

A rainbow is a bridge between here and somewhere else, but somewhere you can't get to in the normal way.

In Norse mythology it was Bifrost, the bridge between Asgard and Midgard (the land of the Gods and what we call Earth).

Or you could say the rainbow is a phenomenon to do with water droplets and light.

All of them could be true, and each is as beautiful to me as the others. But we're not looking for beauty here, we want to find out what is true (at last).

Even though truth is beautiful in the end.

Even though Lao-Tsu said "Truth is not Beauty. Beauty is not truth."

I think he might have meant that there is more to the truth than we might like. But he might sometimes have agreed that everything is beautiful, as well.

All you need to see anything, beautiful, true, or whatever you would like to see, is some eyes (even one, or a mind's eye). But they have to be open.

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Trivia Quiz: can you tell us the link between a) Rainbows and b) Kentucky Fried Chicken?

Send in your solutions or guesses by e-mail or leave them in the blog-comments!
Answer tomorrow.

Magnetism

It is said that the human nose contains a trace amount of magnetite (in its ethmoid bone) - magnetite, the most magnetic of all the minerals on earth.

Magnetite has also been found in bacteria, in bees, and in pigeons, among others.

The substance is involved in magnetoception or magnetoreception, the ability to find direction in a magnetic field. That means that just as pigeons and their friends can find their way around without a compass, so can humans. This is still a controversial issue in biology. Perhaps the biologists are still finding their way on that one. Who nose. Yes, as if by a magnet, I was drawn irresistibly to say that.

Resistance is useless, the aliens will say when they invade. So better not try any resisting! Remember, they said it won't work!

There are a very few things that are literally irresistible. But of the rest, there are many many bad things that can be resisted (like my 'jokes' above) but which it seems convenient not to, just as there are many many good things that we will keep resisting until our last breath, or after it if possible.

Think of all the last breaths that have ever been breathed. Aren't we breathing them now, in some form? If there is air to breathe, we will breathe it. We need it, and the need finds the air, by gasp or by sigh.

We need happiness. And we will find it if it is here, even in the tiniest quantity - just like the air we need to live.

It is just as necessary for life. Without it, we are not completely alive yet.

Happiness means every part of everything working in harmony, the way it was designed to.

Our attraction to happiness is fundamental. It is irresistible.

Why then do we resist so hard?

When we have the built-in sense to find the answers, why do people hang around wasting time doing other things? Most people know the direction to go, but either don't believe their sense or know only too well what it is saying and resist with all their power.

Why?

Who nose.

Because it's easy (like my 'joke'). But it's not easy, is it?

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OK let's think of something a bit more lively now.

What is a smile? Why do we have tickling? *Tickle Tickle*!

Hee hee.

Formative

"Brian began playing piano at age 8, creating pieces for his mother, who played classical piano at home and also played violin for a community opera company. At age 10 he recalls listening endlessly to side two of the Beetles ‘Abbey Road’ and a recording of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto."

I think they mean Beathoven.

Visual Clues

I heard a Beethoven piano sonata today. It was the early one in E Flat - don't ask me what opus number it is...it's somewhere around the fifth sonata.

Early Beethoven is as deceptive as all other music, but to me it seems a litle bit more noticeable, because you look at the music, and it looks like well-developed Haydn or something like that. It looks fairly ordinary in many ways. The page has not melted like it has in other sonatas, for example A Flat major, Op. 110, or B Flat Major, Op. 106.

But there is a leap between the fairly normal appearance and what the notes are indicating - the sounds the notes mean and the meaning of those sounds.

This early sonata looks pretty ordinary if you just look at a page or two out of it. It's all very classical, with no great shocks. That is, if you play it like it looks - and remember, in printed music every note looks the same. There is one type of "sound" for the whole piece, and this is problematic in pre-romantic music because by and large the notation does not vary. It's not like Alkan or Feldman, say, composers who make notation so clear and use it to define the structure of a piece and show what is happening to the material, because in this earlier music mostly the rhythm doesn't change too dramatically (except sometimes with the better composers). So if you are looking at a piece like this then it all looks much the same, and might easily end up being played as if it is all the same.

The key points in this early Beethoven sonata are the moments when the notation does change - when Beethoven moves the material so far that he changes its visual appearance in a very clear way. Those moments point out to us that the same thing is happening in the other, more rhythmically unchanging parts. It is all very deep, directed change: Beethoven means to communicate profound ideas through his art. But when we don't see a visual clue that reminds us there is something extraordinary happening, we might easily assume it is simply ordinary.

The point is that when all music looks more or less the same, one must think instead of how the sounds were intended to move us and each other. Then it becomes clear that none of the sounds can be the same.