Thursday September 23, 2021

A while ago, I was driving along between appointments, listening to classical music on CBC  -- not long enough, unfortunately, to hear the source of a symphonic piece. The sounds of the orchestra filled the car, filled my head, filled my mind. 

            And for a few glorious moments, I heard music a different way. 

            I didn’t hear it so much as see it. I saw the sounds as colours, swirling and dancing. The brasses were, of course, brassy. Woodwinds were shades of green; drums, deep brown. The strings ranged from deep purple cellos to sapphire-blue violins. The solo violin soared into a laser beam of pure white. 

            Granted, that’s not how I normally hear music. But why not? 

            Why do we limit music to the single sense of hearing? 

            Why, similarly, is visual art viewed only through our eyes? 

            Skilled chefs know that culinary art must smell good, taste good, and look good. Sculpture almost demands touch. We long to slide our fingertips over the polished stone  – even when signs warn us not to.

            Hearing a book read aloud adds dimensions to silent reading. My mother’s, voice reading Treasure Island to me, made the story came alive. 

Black print on white paper

            My working life has been spent with the printed word – black-and-white marks on paper. No colour involved. Indeed, black print is literally the absence of colour; black absorbs rather than reflects any colour. 

            Yet all authors worth their salt (a taste analogy) know that text becomes more memorable if it evokes more than just the reader’s optic nerves. 

            Jose Marti, the Cuban poet best known for the verses that became the song Guantanamera, once said, “My poems are green; my poems are flaming red.” 

            Poems set to music naturally link two senses. Although we often let the music overshadow the words -- we think of Cole Porter and Joni Mitchell as composers, not poets.

            But why stop there? 

            At my community’s annual ArtWalk, one year, I chatted with an artist who painted music. “Every note has a colour,” she said. “My canvas is what I hear.”

            Do words have individual colours too? Do some words taste better than other words as they trip off our tongues? 

Little boxes

            I wonder if humanity’s original sin might be our obsession with labelling and categorizing our experiences. We create little boxes to put things into. Music goes into one box, sculpture into another, words into still another. 

            Thus we prohibit them from overlapping, interacting. They’re safe. We know which is which. We never need a sense of wonder, surprise, astonishment. 

            The same with religion. We put God in a box, safely isolated from worldly experiences. (Unless there’s a crisis, when we expect God to leap out hiding and do something.) We put our scriptures in a box, confident that we know exactly what they mean. They’re safe too.

            But all of that labelling and boxing, it seems to me, denies what we know intuitively -- 

that everything is everything. Or, put another way, that nothing stands alone. 

            One of my church’s faith statements begins, “We are not alone; we live in God’s world….”

            God’s world includes all our senses. Not just one at a time.

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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.

            To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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YOUR TURN

To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub… I told you about some of my dreams; you told me about some of yours. 

Like me, Tom Watson has had “numerous dreams about being late to conduct church worship, or just ready to go into the pulpit but realizing that I had no pants on, or the congregation not knowing the tune to the hymn. Latent fear about not being prepared, I guess.

For about six years, Ralph Milton organized what he called “Aha!” sessions, where preachers from a variety of denominations worked together to prepare sermons for the coming year. Ralph recalled, “When the discussion turned to dreams, which it often did, the most common was the performance anxiety dream which I started calling the ‘Naked in the pulpit’ dream.”

John Shaffer (who was, I think, part of one of those Aha@ sessions) wrote, “There was one time in my life when I kept a diary by my bed to record dreams.  You are correct. If the dream is not recorded immediately, it is usually gone forever. It was an interesting exercise, but I didn't do anything with it.”

Faye McLoughlin: Some dreams stay with you for years and can resurface at the weirdest times, leaving you wondering about their importance or message.

Isabel Gibson: The Queen visited my dream(s) last night but was dressed a bit casually, I felt.” Isabel added, “I like this week's paraphrase.”

The interpretation of dreams, though, that’s a different matter. 

            Steve Roney told me,  “Don’t listen to the psychologists about dreams. Most of what we think we know here is from Freud. Freudianism has no scientific basis. He just made stuff up.

            “You [also] cite the idea that all the characters in a dream are aspects of ourselves. That is from Jung perhaps more than Freud, but again, Jung has no scientific basis. You could say the same of the characters in Shakespeare — that they are all aspects of Shakespeare. True, but only trivially true; Shakespeare is not trying to explain or understand himself. It makes more sense to see dreams as the working out in symbolic and narrative form of the problems we face during the day.” 

James Russell: “The best I’ve been able to understand about dreams is that their function in nature is unclear.  People are not, of course, the only creatures that experience REM sleep, the key part of the sleep cycle for dreams.  It’s certainly true that the brain goes through various cleaning cycles while we sleep (memories, emotions and images being edited, scrubbed, rearranged and linked).  Perhaps dreams are nothing more than the memory bumps the cleaners make when they shift our mental furniture.

            “However:  The interpretation of dreams is something we do while awake.  And that, I think, is the power of the gestalt approach to dreams that you describe.  Whatever else is true, the contents (memories, emotions, images) of our dreams exist in and belong to the dreamer’s experience.  When we ‘become’ these fragments as from the perspective of the whole and waking self, we may discover new understandings.  Whether the new understandings are ‘true’ is itself a subject of long debate.”

Fran Ota has had personal experience with temple bells, subject of the previous week’s column: “I’ve never heard one make a chunk or thunk or whatever. I’ve heard many temple bells which on contact ring a single and usually deep note. Then the many overtones begin. And temple bells are heard over a long distance. From our home in Japan temple bells from up to 5 km away can be heard. It is a beautiful sound, always, conveying peace and a sense of centre. 

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Psalm paraphrase

In this paraphrase of Psalm 124, I wondered how a member of a struggling “developing nation” might think. 

1          The odds were stacked against us from the beginning.

2          The great corporations strung us a line

            about caring for us, about bringing prosperity.

            But they really meant prosperity for themselves.

            When the profits looked better somewhere else, 

            they abandoned us. They always do.

3          The powerful nations promised us freedom;

            they loaned us billions for a fresh start. 

            now we are enslaved by our debt.

            They will not free us.

4          The arms makers sold us weapons

            to protect ourselves against our neighbors. 

            They also sold weapons to our neighbors, 

            to protect themselves against us. 

5          Now our former friends are a threat.

            We need more, and more, and more.

6          The only one not exploiting us for private gain is God.

7          If we have retained any faith in human nature,

            in justice, in our own identity,

8          it is because of God. 

You can find paraphrases of most of the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary in my book Everyday Psalmsavailable from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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            A brief note about poetry. I send my poems out to a mailing list. The last two times I tried to send to that list, it rejected the message. Flat. So if you’re interested, please check my webpage .https://quixotic.ca/My-Poetry And If you’d like to receive notifications about new poems, write me at jimt@quixotic.ca, or subscribe yourself to the list by sending a blank email (no message) to poetry-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca (If it doesn’t work, please let me know.)

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PROMOTION STUFF

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. Some spam filters have blocked my posts because they’re suspicious of the web links.

            Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca He’s also relatively inexpensive!

            I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also has lots of beautiful photos. Especially of birds.

            Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD’S ARCHIVE

            I have acquired (don’t ask how) the complete archive of the late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures. I’ve put them on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. You’re welcome to browse. No charge. (Although maybe if I charged a fee, more people would find the archive worth visiting.)