The Beat
“You are stepping” says the kick drum
And the feet concur, weight falling to sound the eardrums
in lockstep, to bounce the head at the annointed time.
“You are singing” says the song
And the throat rises to meet it, tone of the breath
silently seeking its place.
“You are playing,” the music tells you,
and the humours course, fueling a body
puzzled by its own stillness.
Who sails this ship? The wind —
the only captain it has ever known.
…
What dances when the body is still?
and what is its dance — what verb does it practice in darkness?
“Imagine” does not scan to this racing pulse —
only “do, do, do…”
Knowing the time, making the time, and hearing the time
converge on each ripe moment
In a transparent flash: see in this lightning strike
that all hearing is doing, and all doing is knowing.
The Beat, II
Our sense of beloinging in the world is strongest at moments that blur the boundary between the bounded, controllable self and the boundless, uncontrollable beyond/world/other. We are always perched at the edge, nearer than we know. Reflexive prediction of the world follows the same neural logic as movement of the body1, so when the world falls into line, it is as if we control it.
…but total control, or total predictability, is the absence of a world to belong to. How can we encounter Other, feel a union with it, without it losing its exteriority?
It’s when our action and predictions form a totally consistent part of an unpredictable whole — as though we are only a small part of the mind composing a perfect prediction or action. It is seeing, understanding, and predicting/controlling the one-dimensional key to a high dimensional pattern that we could never encompass.
This is the BEAT — a single dimension, a totally predictable, fully recreatable part of a whole that is larger than we can imagine in its depth of detail. And this is group music making — though contribution may not be audible action, but only a silent, pulsing expectation.