While the music lasts
Sometimes I love a piece of music, and it’s magical. There are songs out there that reach past my cynicism and make me feel something new. It’s surprising, exciting and joyful; it feels a lot like falling for a girl. I wonder what my friends will think, and worry that I won’t be able to stand the rest of the discography.
But the same notes played in the same order can’t move us forever. We’re left with an indelible mark, and it feels amazing while it happens, but it can’t keep going. Think of a battery: a powerful charge is created from the reaction of two chemicals, but in the process they are transmuted irrecoverably into something stable and staid.
So we read liner notes and interviews, we find rare b-sides and bootlegged acoustic shows, and we study every facet from all angles. Our appreciation of its beauty and genius grows, but we can never recapture that initial magic. It’s still a part of us, and we love it, but in place of what we once felt is the bittersweet, seductive echo of nostalgia.
Imagine a physicist who makes a trip to see the aurora borealis, and is so enraptured that she dedicates years to finding out exactly how and why such an incredible phenomenon can exist. There’s a gracious beauty to the mathematics, but it’s cold and entirely cerebral. Eventually she’ll crave the feeling of being changed by something new.
But humans aren’t albums. We’re not static compositions; we change every day. The person we fell in love might one day be unrecognisable. And whatever part of them we fell in love with may no longer be there. Is it any wonder we’re so curious about the former lives of our lovers? The only way to predict who they’ll be years down the track is to look at where they’ve come from, and who they are now.
Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but I think that there’s an essential part of each of us that stays the same. I think of it as a seed which is watered and fed by new experiences, and can be uprooted and planted in entirely different soils. But, no matter what, whatever grows from it still follows the same intricite, chaotically complex pattern.
If you come to love that pattern in someone, their essential nature, then you can wake up every day next to them and fall in love all over again. What makes love truly terrifying, is that we never know if we’ve fallen in love with the seed or a branch. At least not while the music lasts.
