Epiphany in the Library

As per usual, I had a mind blowing (but not quite in the same sense as Sati), body tingling epiphany after I turned in my final paper. I think I can answer the two main questions of this class (What's the use of stories that aren't even real? Why do we study them?) because I finally got what Dr. Sexson has been saying all along.
Thank goodness for blogs.

Here's the first: moving up and in a circular pattern at the same time is not the vicious, all consuming circle, but a transcendent SPIRAL. Both movements are necessary for the changed beginning.

Second: After turning in my term paper, I ate dinner with my boyfriend for a few hours before heading back to the library. While we dined on spinach and Sunny D, he talked about learning the bass and his recent investigations into music theory through the help of wikipedia. We discussed our plans for the summer. Both of us have wanted to try making music for a long time, but as I've only played a few instruments before at a mediocre level and he hasn't yet had an opportunity to learn one, we're starting at the very bottom. But that's ok. All we have left to go is up, right?

He's is an obsessive music listener, and over the past few weeks I have watched him become an obsessive bass player and now internet researcher. He's told me that he's starting to hear music differently since he's been learning more about how it's made. And when he thinks about how he wants to make music, he's better able to hear the inner workings of the piece.

His excitement is a little infectious. I was sitting at the library today trying to grade papers when I also began to hear differently: I was truly listening to music that I've heard so many times before that I go on antpilot when it comes up on my ipod shuffle. As I did my own internet research, I started to listen to music as if I were hearing it for the first time.

As I began to listen to the machinations of music, I heard it in a way that was more beautiful: I started to hear like I read. I had moved up, closer to the beginning and the end. By learning how the thing itself works, I was learning how to become more naive.

That's when I realized that the beginning is the end because by learning the machinations of the thing itself, art and life, you return to a changed state of naivety. You experience it for the first time in a new way, shaped by your experience in the descent into the real world. As a child, every experience is fresh and unique. You are in a constant state of wide-eyed wonder. But the more time you spend in this world, the more you lose your original identity and go on antpilot. You become more object-like unless you can understand the paradoxical secret: that in order to conquer time, you must lose track of time while losing yourself in stories--stories that extend and save the identity of the person hidden under the animal mask of the ANTpilot. Stories allows us to access the real hidden under the layers of semblance. Because I'm beginning the journey to understand the machinations, I can ascend back to the beginning and hear the music as though it were the first time. It's the same sort of wonder as the naive listener, but this time it's an achieved naivety. It comes full circle, turns out.

Mind blown.