Life Should have a Soundtrack Godammit

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Did you ever have the feeling that something you're experiencing is missing the soundtrack? I guess nowadays we would say audio file, but the idea is the same. Imagine watching a movie with dialogue but no music. Lawrence of Arabia would be about a blue-eyed, tunic-wearing, train-blower-upper rather than the sweeping David vs. Goliath epic that it is. Movie directors add music to give an emotional tone to the story they're telling. The muscial score imparts an emotional unity to the different scenes and helps in bringing it to its end. Even without music, good actors and a good director can provoke emotion, as in theater, but not with the same intensity. I really don't know what it is about music that makes it able to evoke emotions so easily and unify the input of our senses. At times I think about my life, the past and present and everything I've done and I would love to feel the wholeness or unity of it just as one feels the arrangement of notes in a symphony.

This reminds me of a story by Borges (I don't recall the title) in which the narrator speaks metaphorically of all the steps that one has taken in his life, here and there, up and down, and when we look back on it all we see only a confusion of tracks. He says that although we are unable to perceive order in this chaos of events and decisions, from a divine point of view the arrangement of all these steps makes up an intelligeible whole. All the steps are interrelated and impart a unified intelligible sense. Well, maybe God (the big music director in the sky) gets the drift but I don't! I want to feel it! I can reflect on this totality in terms of the goals I have set for myself and see that those goals have been accomplished, but its not the same, its not sufficient.

I think this sensation has a lot to do with what Kundera talks about in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The main character, Tomas, experiences his being as incredibly light. Everything he does, all the decisions he's made in his life, are the result of his freedom. Among the innumerable ways that his life could have played out, he made a series of decisions that made it play out just as it has. What led him to make these decisions was not something eternal, transcendent, fixed, canonical, or heavy, but rather something based only on the whim of his will. Thus he feels his life as insignificant, as light, as not tied down to anything that could give it the sensation of heaviness. This is how I feel. Although I've had much pleasure, achievement, friends, etc in my life until now, I cannot, like Tomas, avoid the sensation of its lightness. It is this that is unbearable.

In some way I'm looking for heaviness. Many find something like it in religion. I think of my grandmother. For her, her whole life has meaning and sense because it all fits snugly within the confines of the Catholic faith. Everything she's done runs noiselessly along the doctrinal tracks of the cristian Weltanschaaung. For some reason this makes me think of sleeping under the wonderful heaviness of two or three homemade quilts. Sleeping without anything covering you at all is very uncomfortable, at least for me. But where is one to find these quilts? Just pick a religion and say you believe? I know I'm too skeptical or sophisticated for that. Maybe turn myself into a Nietzschean übermensch? Easier said than done. What I'm hoping is that love will do the trick, really falling truly and deeply in love, like the angel in Wings of Desire that falls finally from his heavenly perch into the messy but blissful heaviness of the Earth below.
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