The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21)
I have been thinking recently about listening practices, not of how we listen (e.g. Deep Listening), but rather of how often we listen to the same things. Some people listen to music obsessively and some infrequently, but it seems that nearly all of us who listen to music share a compulsion to hear again. How many of us can say that every time we have the desire to listen to music we seek out music that we have never heard before? I think very few, if any can claim to have such novel taste. Why are we compelled to hear the same song a hundred times when there is so much music unheard?
Music can be shocking. The first time I listened to Lightning Bolt's Ride the Skies, I was driving. I remember where I was going, who I was with, and something of what I felt. I listened to the album almost daily for weeks. Now, four years later, I listen to the album once every several months. I still love it, but the experience is different. It is no longer new. Love of music is like erotic love, insofar as when it is spontaneously and deeply passionate, it has already overreached its object. When visceral aesthetic appreciation is profound (“love at first sight”), you can thenceforth recollect the experience. Repetition is inadequate because of the idealizing work of memory. If you can already recollect your love, its realization becomes insufficient because of -- pardon the prosaic expression -- diminishing returns.
Was my love of Lightning Bolt's music doomed from the very moment of its inception? I think so. Such is the nature of loss, that whatever you have you cannot maintain. If it were possible to deny yourself the recollection of the experience of listening to a song, then each time you listened to the song would be a true repetition of the first, a beautiful and profound experience. But such amnesia is impossible; it is the very profundity of the experience that marks our memory -- that becomes a “traumatic” resistance to forgetfulness -- that also makes its repetition at once urgent and unattainable. In other words, there would be no desire to repeat if the experience were not affecting, but the recollection of the affecting experience makes its actual repetition redundant, eventually mundane.
I wonder whether this tragedy is avoidable. Twice in the last two weeks I heard a song that arrested me, unusual because it normally happens so infrequently. Unfortunately, I squandered these opportunities for experimentation, the first time out of recklessness, the second out of a need to write a review of the album. However, just recently I heard a song that struck me not as powerfully, but as noteworthy nonetheless, and I refrained from listening to it every day (or several times a day). I had resisted a compulsion, I thought, and thereby might learn whether I had preserved the experience of beautiful novelty. I still find the song beautiful, but the profundity of experience is no longer present. Did I extinguish the possibility of repetition by not indulging, or was the initial experience of listening not profound enough?
So it has to be: aesthetic experiences vary in their intensity, and the more intense, the greater the compulsion to repeat them. Also, the more intense, the clearer is the recollection of the initial experience. Hence, the futility of repetition. It is in reflection about this problem of memory that I have come to the conclusion that everything is just as it should be. Of course, with love, this problem is a maddening one (and even begs the question, “What is love?” or “Is love possible?”), but with listening, it's more easily accepted. Music that has impressed (upon) you will do so less over time. When it no longer demands attention, you seek to repeat the experience but with different music.
A new problem then: Will music itself ever mean as much to me as it did when I listened to Lightning Bolt, or will I become increasingly less affected over time? It might not pain us to admit that the same song we loved last month does not thrill us so much now, but what about the admission that music does not thrill us so much as it did last year? The formative experience of listening to Lightning Bolt is now accessible in recollection. Is it also repeatable? That is, will my search for more music produce another experience of such magnitude? I doubt it will. The compulsion to listen to new music is the pursuit of repetition of the “first love,” which will necessarily overshadow future loves because of its primacy in memory and its intensity.
At this point, I might ask a humorous question: Is it better to remain listening to Lightning Bolt although the passion is gone or to search for new music, knowing that it will inevitably be less transcendent an experience? Although I might be sad at the thought that the best musical experience of my life is in the past, I will continue to repeat it -- or more properly, to occasion the recollection of it -- as long as I have the appetite.
