Listening to Music

 I like listening to music.  Nothing can beat either listening to a good song in the car or walking down the street with a good song in one's earbuds.  However, there is one paradoxical thing that struck me about this habit of mine which seemed a topic on which to blog, or to write an essay, or to essay, if “essay” can be used as a verb.

The thing is this, I can't just be satisfied with the act of listening in itself.  When I listen, I either fantasize that I am the singer of the song performing for an audience, or that I am listening to the music with someone else and that they think the music is cool and we are thus in some sort of communion.  And these urges, if that is what you can call them,  are never ever fulfilled.  

So I pose some questions.  One: Why do I keep hoping for something that can never happen?  Two:  what exactly is it that I want when I listen to music?  Three:  Should I stop listening to music?  I will deal with each question in turn.

It is getting late in life for me to hope for something that can never happen.  I should give it up.  But it is easier said than done.  Bad as people are, as as sinful as they are, I need their company.  They say that solitary confinement is torture.  It explains why people are addicted to social networks on their phones.

I listen to music because...  I listen to music because...  I can't say exactly.   Because... I am not a musician.  I can't keep a tune.  I couldn't tune a guitar because the tones all sounded the same to me.  I become jealous and feel diminished in the presence of people who are musicians.  I have held on to my adolescent delusion that listening to the right music can make me superior to others.  And so I would suppose from this elucidation of facts about my unmusciality, it would seem that I have a desire to shape my identity when I listen to music...  (What it must have been like to live in a time before recorded music.   It would never have occurred to a self-concious individual at that time to make music a way of raising his self-esteem.  Music must have served a different purpose.  Perhaps this person, not having recorded music, would have been more proud of being able to know a song.)

Maybe I should put myself in the state of that person of yore who never had recorded music to listen to and get back to being in a more basic state; a state of being not so influenced by technology.  I can't say that smart phones have made me a better person.  In a lot of ways smart phones encourage my worst tendencies.  They certainly don't help me concentrate on music in a proper way.  I turn from one musical sensation to another like a glutton at a buffet table.  I always try to foist my musical tastes on others who I should know are not going to care.  I even try to sing in public without knowing the first thing about singing.

But music like religion satisfies a human yearning.  If I stopped listening to it, I would have to replace it with something which my other interests, like reading or poetry or politics, couldn't never satisfy in the same way.

I am just going to have to listen to music in a proper way.  I will have to appreciate that music is the thing in itself and that it doesn't lead to anything else, except maybe God...  There it is...