Sound & Fury

REBECCA LOUDON'S DESCRIPTION of the amateur musician, and of her youth as such a being, is so alive: a dragon of contradiction, a burning process that refines and purifies to an essence that many escape and a rare few withstand. (Before you leave Rebecca's Radish King, please read "Is It Real?" You'll laugh.)

I wouldn't have known this feeling, being lackadaisical about instrument training and more inclined to sit and absorb or dance hotly in front of sound... I wouldn't have this glimpse of the musician were it not for Jeff Bahr whose blog, Whimsy Speaks, speaks with surety about alot of people and things worth noting. I'm still wondering why he calls it "whimsy." Jeff says in passing that his doctorate thesis was on software testing and this makes me wonder about another connection that pops up in the poetry world: poets who are affiliated with programming or software. I can't name names but I've seen this connection often.

What is with this affinity for numbers? What did Spinoza say anyway? It all boils down to the digit (Ann's parboiled synopsis). It's the most definitive thing going: the number. Even though it can be swayed :the self fulfilling prophecy. But aside from the empirical, and apart from the computer, and away from deterministic views, numbers are the creative frame for music, for architecture (frozen music), painting (ars poetica), conversation, poetry. Numbers, inches, integers, beats - they're the sticks of every creative pursuit. Who was it? Lyall Watson - yes - in his Supernature, naming the progenitor of language: "Om" and then reducing that to zero "0" and now we come right back to programming - "0" and "1" -

But I want to step back a second to the quest for answers, another way to describe poetry, and ask you to think about the flood of sensual joy that rushes through you when you have come to the completion of a body of thought which answers, which defines a catch of emotion, which creates a sum of the senses with all the flavor and finality of multiplication tables. That is satisfaction, that is why we love numbers. And yet and yet, here I am reading Lorca who said: life must have its mystery.