Chris Banyas
Editor-in-Chief
Remember that you must die.
In Seattle, I paused at a busy intersection to better navigate the city, and I saw a man, more of a boy really, lying on his back atop a cement construct. He was pale, scruffy, filthy, and from the way his arms, pock marked and weathered, slumped slowly backwards, drifted down toward the Earth, it was clear he was at that moment existing on another plane than that which I then stood.
I saw a boy passing out from some self-induced toxin and a thousand people walked by as if this were commonplace.
Regardless of belief, faith, religion, or anything else, one maxim rings true to every living thing: life is finite, and that which is at one time alive, will soon be dead. What is now extant soon will be extinct, in the individual sense of existence.
Going through life obsessed with one’s eventual and inevitable annihilation is no way to live. Pharmaceutical companies have for years made fortunes by providing drugs to help the human individual focus less on this eventuality and more on wringing the most out of the cloth of life.
I’ve helped line their pockets, and it is something I’ll never regret.
In light of this modern revolution in mental health care, it is mind blowing to me to perceive the new waves of technology and their effect upon the minds of the populace.
Animals in nature are said to live in the eternal present – that is to say they are incapable of thinking beyond the eternal survival instinct, each moment in time being the most important. This is why there is no rhino poetry, no penguin philosophers and also why the Earth entire is not ruled by colonies of ants.
There is a phenomenon that may be witnessed by entering any coffee shop, standing at the entrance, and watching all those who sit, heads leaning down to behold the wondrous smart phone placed upon the table before them. A sort of devolution ad nauseam is displayed when eventually the index finger is placed upon the phone and dragged downward. Whatever program was holding the individuals attention is thus refreshed, and life continues.
The eternal present has returned, with each swipe of the phone, with each drag of the finger upon the screen.
I saw a child dying in the street, amongst a thousand people who were once themselves children, and no one cared.
Ludwig van once said “music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
I do not profess to know what happens when one ceases to exist, but as we have already discussed, I know that one day I will die.
Around the time I saw the boy falling back to Earth, I heard the sounds of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 in A major, Op. 92, the second movement. The allegretto.
Allegretto: a movement or piece to be played fairly briskly.
I found within the time signatures of this piece of music the answers to every and any question that might be raised as to the meaning of life, and any ramification to any answer proposed.
The swells and ebbs and flows, the rises and falls contain, in my opinion, every life that has ever caught flame and burned at any level of brightness upon our planet. Contained within the more than seven minutes of the movement are every triumph of mankind, every crime committed by man against his fellow man, and every moment spent gazing skyward in pensive reflection, and by extension the mind space of that boy resting atop the cement in the street, along with those swiping their phones in the coffee shops.
How apt a description of human existence: to be played out fairly quickly.
While not in reference to the seventh symphony, Alex’s description of Ludwig van’s music is one of the most accurate.
“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my guilliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss my brothers.”
The church of Beethoven has offered a judgement free support system for hundreds of years, you have but to listen.
You have but to stop and listen.
In the words of Dr. Eldon Tyrell, “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly.”
