Nervous Tics of Time: Song of Evermore
Understanding a musical phrase may also be called understanding a language.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
When the cello sounded, the player blushed… It’s delicious to think of an explicit lyrics sticker appearing on the cover of an instrumental album, one without any vocals. The manic workings of a musician’s bow on the strings is capable of expressions beyond words, from confessions of love, to the rage of the absent gods and goddesses. Through instruments capable of articulating between and beyond the limits of language, how couldn’t a cello or a fiddle make a person blush, or a drum beat send us into a frenzy? Songs are short stories, no matter the nature of the libretto, while a whole world can lie in a resounding silence, no more than two or three beats, but a galaxy lies between those notes passed over in the dark. Time is a game played beautifully by children, but time is wrangled into near palpability through the entanglement of music. There was no choice but for music to arise, since nature is an endless song of the metaphorical multiverse, the subterranean hums of dark things that grow, just as profound as a crack of lightning. In the midst of this beautiful chaos, one can imagine an idle hand at night — highly-skilled from daily workings — twitching at the prospect of stillness, searching for something to imbue the nervous tic through, a way to articulate the time, to remember as much as forget, to play.
Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.
— Goethe
The sea sinks into the earth, as surely as the earth sinks into the sea. Fire rises from a bolt of lightning, only to subside and fall into smoke, giving rise to exhaustion. Stars collapse in silence, unseen, only to be perceived by us, countless ages later, according to the fixed speed of light. All this while, the music plays on. The first explosive beat of this Song of songs began with a BANG!, through a handful of elemental particles, the voices of lithium and hydrogen singing out the lightest of notes, helium, a falsetto for the Ages. Sound was still latent, awaiting atmospheres to call a suitable venue, an Earth its opera house of intertwined Comedies and Tragedies, without interludes. Mountains like Everest mark the highest of hard notes, while lightless trenches of the Pacific challenge the deepest and most haunting of songs, mellifluous and droning. Whales sing in subaqueous-voices capable of reaching audiences an ocean apart, while the rhythm-section of the nervous tic of the tectonic plates are always grinding away, like a hell-bound Titan John Bonham. The musical architecture of the hard world is never fixed, but appears so to living things who are only present for a movement or two, the lucky ones, for a paradigm shift of architectonic proportions.
Oh Dance In The Dark Of Night
Sing To The Morning Light
The Apples Turn To Brown And Black
The Tyrant’s Face Is Red
Oh The War Is Common Cry
— Led Zeppelin, Battle of Evermore
The chorus of human history points to a secret law, one that is forever hidden in the notes, the very notes that keep that secret. Books of all kinds could be considered the Song’s secrets tucked away for safe keeping, little song books, those melodic fragments played by us, a broken piece of the eternal. Leaves dance in the wind as surely as mountains move, both tics subject to time, but the kind of time that is NOW!…and far beyond later. Worms wriggle on~to the sounds of the earth, while hands never shake their tics. The Song begs us to play, tortures us and brings bliss through the need to express what’s already there, through a pen or a bow, gestures and fists. That nervous tic tells us to find a way to play. We dance to the stringed crickets and we sing through the rich silence of memory. As for ourselves, we are nothing but attributes of the Song, no more, no less, Evermore.
Hayden Moore