But why do we need catharsis? It is because we live in the human landscape. We live in an economy built on addiction. Personal meaning is reduced to solving the next craving. Finding the next fix. Angst, angst, angst!
We can’t not dance our pants are on fire!
We must shake our booty, splattering all that angst around like water off a dirty dog’s fur. Splatter everyone around us with Big Dopamine so that maybe, for a couple of minutes after we can enjoy a bit of Little Dopamine in peace.
Little Dopamine? What’s that? I seem to have lost my taste for its qualiadelic pleasures. Hmmmm. Well, let’s talk a little about the subtle force that is really behind dancing – that is, non-addictive, natural rhythm. Then maybe you’ll understand Little Dopamine.
Rhythm is central to life, coming to us from within (our very heartbeat, etc.) and without (the patterns of tides, the polyrhythms of crickets etc.). Here’s something to think about though: all the rhythms in nature, big or small, are fine and, actually, gentle. A crashing wave may be loud, but if we put our ear close to the smallest rill, as it flows over some pebbles, it is just as loud; and the real appeal in a wave is not the crash so much as its diminishment, reaching UP, Up, up into a sandy beach, and back again into the swallowing tide.
So, the rhythms of nature are subtle. Beautiful one moment and sublime the next as the grow and decay.
Crickets on a quiet Summer night create what at first hearing is just a wall of sound, but with a little focused listening they compose a symphony of mixed rhythms every bit as complex as the intersecting ripples on a pond, or even an ocean!
In the human landscape, musical rhythms have been subtle too, whether in the complex melodic and harmonic changes hidden behind the relatively simple time signatures of classical music, or cricket-like rhythmic changes in a drum circle over which a simple chant or song might mark some sad or joyous occasion. Again, focused listening releases the magic.
But the rhythms of daily life are too often stressed. Work and play are out of rhythm. We are no longer hunters and gatherers, or even farmers. We are awash in the rough rhythms of earning and spending, grasping and losing, desiring and wanting to be desired. We might as well be some mindless clothes in the washing machine.
So, it has become apparent to me that our awareness of rhythm is being drowned out in music just like our appreciation of Little Dopamine has been overwhelmed by the Big Dopamine of consumerism.
Our need to explode in dance, to cathartically shake off the stress and angst of so much human-oriented indoctrination, has, of necessity, dulled our sense for subtle rhythm to where can can only appreciate it when it is In Your Face! We have been groomed not to listen but to feel.
Qualiadelically, it makes sense. Like all sound and texture, rhythm actually has no material existence in and of itself. It is not in the drum, or in the hand that beats it; it is in the mind, in the interpretation of vibrations. It is qualiadelic. But when we don’t listen, we relapse into instinct, and this has allowed the marketers can control us.
As music “addicts,” our interpretation has been hijacked by a music industry which, like every other industry, has enticed us with products to feed the trauma of the human landscape. There used to be a time when people with power gave some thought to educating and uplifting “the masses” instead of just making money off of them.
There are, fortunately, many people – most, perhaps, who can perceive the sublime in music, just as they can appreciate the picturesque in art, or the classical in architecture. And this is a good place for us to to start our qualiadelic journey.
Let us begin recognizing the difference between the sublime which, for all its subtlety, still reflects the human landscape in its unfortunate decay, and the beautiful, which takes us beyond the human landscape, and back to ecosystems, and to growth. Let’s get back to where we should be, where Little Dopamine is the norm, and Big Dopamine still exists but it is not addictive because it comes and goes with the rhythm of the seasons.