RockOm

By Michael Garfield
Originally posted to coloradomusicboard.com
Reprinted with permission

For whatever reasons, our culture has decided that we are not all musicians. Instead, a few trained (or not-so trained) specialists are expected to get up on stage so we can live vicariously through them. There are musicians, and there are spectators. But I don't think the distinction is so clear cut; we're all participants in something larger called a "concert" that requires both artist and audience in the same way that fertilization requires both male and female.

To designate the female as the only creative member of that dyad is just as insane as saying that only the dudes on stage are creative... and yet this is exactly what we do. Beneath it all is a significant cultural pathology, an issue of misunderstood self-other boundaries writ large. In order to explain this, let me take a detour through a bit of my history in personal development...

In the fall of 2005, I attended a seminar on Integral Life Practice – a sort of practice-of-combining-practices that regards everything from weightlifting and Tai Chi to Gestalt therapy and Vipassana meditation as tools in a kit for people to exercise every dimension of their being. After all, there are a lot of ways to grow in "self, culture, and nature," innumerable different lines of development, and should one care to cultivate them, each has its appropriate program of possible activities, both ancient and postmodern.

Needless to say, I learned a lot that weekend about the various ways to be more intentional about my life, about how to organize my self-development activities so that they support each other, and of course how the ultimate end of all of this isn't bragging rights but a greater capacity to usher forth more truth, beauty, and goodness in the world.

But out of all of the practices and meta-practices I learned that weekend, only a few really stuck with me, percolated through my mind and become fundamental aspects of how I understand and relate to the world. One of these was the so-called "3-2-1 Process," a way to uncover and deal with troublesome material in one's psychological shadow (the part of yourself you aren't willing to admit and so can only see in "the world out there," in other people and things). The 3-2-1 Process is almost a theatre exercise:

- First, you notice an intense emotional reaction to something;
- Then, you describe it in as much detail as you can (the "3" of third-person analysis);
- Then, you imagine yourself in conversation with that thing, asking it what it might have to teach you, and whatever other questions you have for it (the "2" of second-person relationship);
- Then, you speak AS that thing, recognizing it as a facet of who you are and not some absolute other (the "1" of first-person identity).

Multiple Perspectives

This can be done with pleasant or unpleasant emotional reactions; you might unwind your fear of some monster in a recurring nightmare, or find within yourself the beauty of someone you envy and admire. It takes practice – and vigilance – but is one of the quickest ways I know to turn anger or fear or hatred into understanding and love.

What more, as it became clear to me in the years since, this same structure is recapitulated not just in moments of intentional shadow work but also in the entire saga of human development. We begin identifying with nothing at all, not even aware of a self. Slowly we become more aware of the world, and begin to engage it relationally. It is through these relationships that we eventually learn how the world is us and we are the world.

And here's where the music comes in.

As a performing singer-songwriter, I can identify this trajectory in the way I understand what is going on while I'm on stage. The 3, 2, and 1 of the process are three different kinds of relationships I have with the audience, three different states of being.

When I first started playing music at open mics, I would be looking out at the audience and noticing things about them ("That is obviously a wig," "Holy shit, look at that hottie," "What a bunch of drunks"), but not really doing anything useful with that information. More than helping me, it was often a distraction from what I was TRYING to do, which is "just play" – but of course, I wasn't just playing, I was PLAYING AT, trying to FORGET about the audience and pretend I'm alone in the room, playing to an insentient empty space. Even today, this sometimes happens when I'm especially nervous.

At some point, after getting used to being the center of attention (and that this is not always by their choice – especially with bar crowds, where it's pretty unlikely anyone is actually there specifically to hear me), I realized that there's a certain amount of trust and reciprocity involved in the musician-audience dynamic and I have to meet the crowd halfway in order to really entertain them. It's a relationship, and relationships require mutuality. That means if I want them to listen to me, I have to listen to them. I have to be able to read the crowd like the face of a single person – sometimes the crowd is sleepy and belligerent and trying to watch TV, and sometimes she's totally rapt and playing with her hair and trying to get you ask her to come home with you. Each person in the crowd is like a little voice in the head of that one person, and so in conversation, I can PLAY TO certain voices and draw the attention of the entire crowd by sparking something in only a few of them. (People, after all, are social-mirroring animals. If you see someone else enjoying themselves, you're more likely to join suit. And in that way it really is almost like playing to one person, like trying to persuade someone by finding out what matters to them and planting hooks in it.)

This is a more engaged, more personal, warmer way of playing. If I'm talking on the mic in "3 mode," I'm usually talking to myself. If I'm on the mic in "2 mode," I'm asking questions, looking people in the eyes, cracking jokes, keeping the energy between me and the audience lively and dynamic.

From time to time, however, even this melts away into something much deeper, something in which "2 mode" seems like the desperate manipulative bid that it often is. Because sometimes, I BECOME the audience – or, more accurately, I stop playing the music and the music just happens, and in the flow of things (if I were to stop and try to describe what is happening) the concert is revealed for what it really is: artist and audience as two facets of one event, one creative moment happening all together, one thing in its wholeness. NOT playing AT a crowd, and not playing TO a crowd, but just PLAYING.

This kind of thing, this "1 mode," doesn't happen when I am playing a song for the first time, when it's still awkward and unfamiliar in my hands and throat. And it doesn't happen when I'm trying to impress somebody in the audience – that's me not owning up to something, projecting it "out there," and trying to work some kind of voodoo to control it at a distance. (Try cutting off your hand, throwing it across the room, and willing it to pick up the phone. Good luck.) It happened first in front of friends, with old songs I knew...well, "like the back of my hand." And with practice, learning more about myself as a performer, learning more about the technical minutia that can so easily distract (microphones, monitors, tuning), learning the patterns of crowds in different venues, it happens more frequently these days.

I've found that keeping my eyes open while playing makes a big difference; otherwise I might never be able to engage and relate to the audience, much less transcend that relationship. Certainly, thinking about it helps. I enjoy making it explicit in my own mind that this is a moment of mutuality and co-creation, that I'm shaping their experience while they're shaping mine, so we exist within each other like the dots on a yin yang. Just sitting there listening (or not listening), the audience is in this sense as much a part of the music as I am, because they are the content of my experience – and what better definition of self do we really have? ("You are what you eat.")

Talking about it helps if I'm in the right crowd, one willing to be drawn into deeper awareness of themselves and their environments. Otherwise, it's more likely to alienate the audience than entrain them. I typically keep it to myself at bars.

Perhaps the most useful practice is to exercise simple, general mindfulness both on- and off-stage. The more aware we are, the more likely we are to notice that there isn't really anyone BEING aware, so much as there is an awareNESS that frequently gets lazy and divides into "self" and "other"...or artist and audience.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

RockOm contributor, artist, community member and friend, Michael Garfield interviewed groundbreaking author and philosopher Ken Wilber in early 2008. In this excerpt, the two discuss the evolving "role of music."

Michael Garfield: Well, one of the things that I've been talking about with my friends is something that's kind of central to a lot of people's world right now: the changing role of music in our culture. That there's this technological revolution that we're going through now, it's a revolution of communication, and so the role of communication is expanding - like it tends to, in the middle of a technological revolution.

Ken Wilber: Right.

MG: And just as someone who's given a lot of thought to what the consequences of new modes of communication and discourse are going to mean, in the 21st Century, how do you see the role of music expanding or changing in the next ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years?

KW: Yeah. Well it depends on how you look at music, in terms of its actual functionality, its actual contours, its actual definition. We sort of begin with pointing out that music is an artifact. So it's something that is created, meaningfully, by human sentient beings. And it has a component of it that can be looked at as just purely expressive, which is something in a sense that an artist can theoretically just do alone, but then it also has a communitive aspect. Something that is meant to be conveyed to another sentient being. And that then opens the artifact to being interpreted at the altitude that it's created at.

[Ken's uses the word "altitude" to mean a particular station along the continuum of psychological development. The more developed you are, the higher your altitude.]

And this then leaves music's self-expressive and communicative capacity coming from a particular altitude. And different types of music, or even within types of music, individuals and different artists in specific types of music can pretty much span almost an entire spectrum. And so what we're looking at is a range of signifiers [signals] that are both self-expressive and communicative. And particularly in the communicative mode, it's a system or pattern of signifiers that's going to go through a particular medium, and the medium itself can be an important part of the message, but it goes through a particular medium and then is decoded as a signified [the signal's meaning] in a human or a group of human beings.

And so that essentially means several things, in terms of the role of music, what music is doing, and so on. And one is that you can look at the actual content of music, its actual altitude, and whether it's evoking a sort of second or third chakra rock and roll beat -

[The chakras of the body's subtle energy system are roughly equivalent to the stages of human psychological development - chakras two and three are correlated with the emergence of the ego and personal power.]

- or whether it's more cerebral, and Bach-classical music sort of sixth or seventh chakra [the nexuses of intuitive insight and divine union, respectively]. And you can look at it in terms of that kind of altitude evoking, and that refers essentially to the structure of music, and the structural altitude that music fits into as a signifier - and, again, whether it's aiming at lower chakras or intermediate chakras or higher chakras - but you can also look at music as its capacity to evoke states of consciousness. And this is probably one of the most important aspects of music as a spiritual transmission. Because music at any level can start out as a third-person artifact, and then can actually end up as a first-person identification. A person can actually end up feeling one with the art in a nondual flow state [in which the boundary between self and other is completely dissolved]. And if not a flow state, then as a pure witness, a contemplation of the art as being so beautiful or so arresting or so provoking that one is thrust into a causal witness state.

[The witnessing state is a state of pure awareness, unidentified with any of the objects of consciousness - the featureless self of this state is "causal" in the sense that all things arise within its spaciousness, and so there can be no prior origin.]

And if that deepens or intensifies, it will go from that third- or second-person into a first-person identification, and one gets into a flow state, one loses one's self in the art. The art evokes and pulls forth a capacity for causal or nondual Spirit. And this can happen at, again, virtually any altitude, just as states, peak experiences can occur at any altitude. But looking at the state transition itself is one of the really important aspects of looking at art, because at whatever level a society is at, art is one of its primary means of transmitting causal and nondual Spirit.

And you had some questions about environment and in the modern world, as artists are the primary spiritual speakers - one way to put it - and in a sense, that's true. So what we're looking at are two different scales of what art does. One is the altitude that the signifiers of art are flying at, and that's a developmental altitude, it's an altitude of complexity, an altitude that is put into the artwork by the consciousness of its maker, by the artist, and will then tend to evoke the same level - in viewers or readers or listeners - the same level of signifieds as the level of signifier. And so in the modern, in the coming world, art does two things - one, it has a world of higher signifiers open to it, it has a world of integral or second-tier, in some cases, third-tier altitude open that it can resonate from.

["Second-tier" refers to the altitudes at which all previous altitudes are recognized as essential elements of one's own being, and less-developed individuals are treated compassionately and appropriately according to their own development. "Third-tier" refers to the altitudes beyond second-tier at which the self/other boundary begins to unravel - not merely as a temporary peak experience, but as a permanent feature of one's identity.]

And whether it's in music, or painting, or literature, it can transmit that second-tier evocation, that integral transmission. And then another is its capacity for states, and in this capacity, as in the past, art has a possibility of evoking state experiences in the viewer, listener, or reader. And these can be subtle states, of just emotional intensity, but it can be spiritual states of causal contemplation and nondual flow. And it was nondual flow, for example, that Schopenhauer had in mind when he talked about art transmitting spiritual awareness, where subject and object become one in the viewer, and that's a nondual flow state. So, sort of two parts - and that's just an analytical, third-person answer to the question.

There's also first-person answers to the question, which are just more aesthetic responses to what aesthetics is. But that's kind of an overview, a third-person view, of where art is and that it's opening up on a frontier now of a second-tier transmission as well as being able to transmit and evoke states of consciousness. And those are essentially similar in the past, except that they are going to be interpreted. If somebody comes out of a nondual flow state, and somebody happens to be at turquoise -

[Ken uses a color-coding scheme to refer to specific altitudes. "Turquoise" refers to a mature and stable realization of so-called "integral" or "second-tier" consciousness. See the chart from Integral Spirituality (hi-res image viewable here).]

- and the art itself was composed by a turquoise mind, then if you asked the person, the listener/hearer/viewer to explain the artwork, they will explain it from an integral vantage point. They'll explain it from an turquoise vantage point, in terms of just the effect it has on them. And whether that's music, and it just somehow "makes me feel whole," and whether it's literature, and there's a consistent writing from a second-tier perspective that's taken and conveyed and evoked in the narrative itself, or whether any sort of art in its communicative form now has signifiers that are available at second-tier. And this is basically, this is a fairly novel breakthrough. And certain great artists of the past have had a chance to push into second-tier cognitively and relate that aesthetically, but we're coming to a point now where there are a large number of everyday individuals that are at that - they're advanced everyday individuals, but it's somewhere upwards of five percent of the population, so that adds a mix to art that was not present before.

And the last thing I'll say about is, when it comes to art recognized by art critics, we have basically just about run the course of postmodern art, and that's art that has green-altitude signifiers [conveying an awareness of the social construction of the ego and systematically "deconstructing" it by illuminating its reliance on cultural context] and is heavily invested with normative judgments [declarations of right and wrong]. So art basically has been politicized, which is not really its function, but that's what green postmodern artists and critics have done with it. But we have about run that course, and so what's new is signifiers coming from integral. Signifiers coming from post-postmodern. And whether that's just in music composed by individuals at second-tier, kind of a certain resonance that comes across in that, or whether its actual narrative forms that convey these second-tier perspectives either explicitly by talking about integrative material or implicitly by coming from that altitude - however the form that they are, it has the capacity to use signifiers, and it is going to start using signifiers, that are post-postmodern. And that's going to be kind of huge. We're waiting to see how it breaks out, waiting to see what form it takes, waiting to see what narrative form it takes and particularly what visual arts do in the face of integral.

So that's all right on the horizon, and that's why it's a very exciting time in the art world, we're watching the death of a huge movement and the birth of what will be a huge movement, and we're right on that cusp.

Read Michael's entire article and interview here.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

by Michael Garfield

Visit Michael at...

MySpace

Michael Garfield is a regular blog contributor here at RockOm.net (see here, here and here) but he's also an accomplished musician, painter and artist. In 2006, he released Get Used to Being Everything, his first legitimate home-studio album, recorded in a haunted house in Lawrence, Kansas. The title is a double entendre: both a reminder to engage one's spiritual practice and admit one's divine identity, and an allusion to the album's arduous process of solo production (itself a kind of spiritual practice).

Featured Track:
"...And The World Rushes In"

"Almost everything in this track was sampled environmental 'noise' I either spliced into a rhythm track or fed into a synthesizer to use as keyboard voices: books, bells, windchimes, soda fountains, bottles, boxes of random junk... It was one of my first electronic compositions, and I was blissed out at finally being able to run around with my new laptop's microphone to sample all of the 'accidental music' I was hearing around me. I owe my inspiration to nondual philosophers like Alan Watts, who taught me how quickly listening removes the boundary between self and other. Open your ears... and the world rushes in." (Michael G.)

Click to Play

NOTE: All of Michael's albums are available for free download (with recommended donation) on Michael's MySpace page.

More on Michael Garfield:
- "Offering Hands" & Live Painting Timelapse (YouTube)

Tantra and My "Desert Island" Playlist
by Michael Garfield

"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin

Contemporary culture swims in lists. It has only gotten more intense since the advent of the internet; now we have blogs of blogs, the Billboard Top 40, the TV Guide Channel, tables of contents, dictionaries, phone books, baby name books, syllabi and mailing lists, an endless well of mail-order catalogs, the archived permutations of every internet "favorites" survey of every middle schooler as it has morphed from week to week, directories upon directories until the end of the world. Lists of lists. So much information, so little time. Our way of wrangling the overwhelming fecundity of it all into a digestible package.

The king of all lists for many of my friends is the infamous "desert island" playlist - the ten or so albums that, were we able to power our stereo with coconuts, we would hope would wash up next to our sorry shipwrecked asses on some remote archipelago. For years, I honed this list to reflect my refining tastes in music, winnowing away the chaff in a never-ending crusade to find ten recordings that would never grow old, no matter how many times I listened to them or how I changed as a person. Needless to say, this is a fool's crusade. Maybe two of those ten have stayed the same for the last five years. The Beatles' Revolver is probably the only one that will endure forever - maybe only because it got to me first.

At some point, I got a little fed up with how much time I felt compelled to spend limiting my appreciation of the musical world. After all, I am not on a desert island! Even if I was, the odds are approximately zero that I would wake up coughing on the beach still clutching my prized possessions. This rhetorical exercise reveals little more than how I like to waste my intellectual resources, idling on trivia.

It is no coincidence that around this same time, I was learning about the Eastern mystical tradition of tantra. Now for many of you, it probably goes without saying that tantra - as a lineage and not just an adolescent rumor - was never really about sex; tantra is about finding the divinity in everything. As a philosophy and practice, it appeared in reaction to those ascetic religions that demanded self-denial and even self-mutilation in the name of enlightenment (like starving one's self in order to redirect energy into higher states - or holding a single posture for years, until the body becomes malformed, as a way of cultivating concentration). The gruesome idea against which tantra revolts is that the divine, and our truest selves, are not of this world - that the goal is to escape the cycle of suffering by backing out. That the body is evil. That desires are evil. That this life is a window into something better, something that can be attained with only the most self-abnegating practice.

From this idea, tantra swept in compassionately and announced, "Look, you idiots. If enlightenment can really be found everywhere, then it can be found here: in food, in sex, in death, in business, in all of these things you so naïvely consider 'unholy.'" And so those things became explicit methods for tantric practitioners - opportunities to break the culturally-inherited stereotypes of what is "sacred" or "profane," to find beauty and holiness in the things we have been conditioned to disdain or fear or lust after. It is a radically iconoclastic tradition - because we need to smash all of our idols if we are to experience the world as it is, directly, instead of through the distorted lenses of our easy myths. It is about honoring your experience, every experience, as deeply as possible, from a place of reverence for every sacred instant, deciding for yourself whether something is worthy of your adoration. Charles Muir speaks of tantra as "about how you connect with the love that dwells in your heart, and how you put that love out into the world...about how you interact with people in your office, people driving down the freeway, your children." David Deida says that the essence of tantra is to "Treat every moment as your lover."

We can drop terms like "God" or "divine" if we find they stand in the way of our direct experience of these things. If everything is God, why do we even need the word? It's a loaded term, anyway, these days; so let's use secular temninology and simply talk about finding the beauty and mystery and wonder in all things. Remembering the old proverb, "Beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder," we know that these qualities don't lie waiting to be discovered "out there" - they are something we bring to our lives.

The color "red" has no existence outside our minds; the actual experience of "red" - with all of the richness of its emotion and connotation and depth - is something that we personally constellate around a meaningless sensory datum. In exactly the same way, the beauty of a thing we believe to be a quality of that thing is actually a quality of us, a direct result of whatever beauty we are able to allow it. We are whatever beauty (or ugliness) we see in the world.

The more I came to understand this, the more I had to seriously reconsider how I was approaching my desert island playlist. This list, and others, were saying something about me as a person, obviously - not just "what I am interested in" (and thus, who I would be likely to get along with), but on a deep level, "who I am." Where I find beauty is a map of my ability to be beautiful. Where I find ugliness is an indicator of the parts of myself that remain closed to the potential beauty of the world, and thus, the parts of myself that remain ugly.

So I'm listening to a band I don't like. I'm criticizing them - how the singer is untrained, how the drummer is off time, how somebody else wrote this song and how ridiculous it is that they can't be creative enough to do it themselves. This is my experience, and I'm rejecting it. I can't fool myself anymore; this music and my interpretations of it are both parts of who I am - because who I am is a collection of experiences - and if I refuse this experience, I am refusing a part of myself. I am refusing the opportunity that is granted me in this instant to embrace beauty. And as soon as I recognize this, I realize how much energy I was unconsciously devoting to disliking this band.

If I am a music critic and I spend most of my time finding things about a piece of music I don't particularly care for, I am leaving a snail's trail of disdain, building a life out of energies that might have been given over to living in awe of the incredible creativity of our culture and world. I weave my identity out of my memories - so my ultimate responsibility is to be aware of the memories I am making, the pattern I am weaving, the person I am deciding to be.

It's not about being indiscriminate, but about making discriminations within a broader context of appreciation. I still have preferences, but I like to also find the place from which any piece of music can be enjoyed - and it all can be enjoyed, obviously, because people already do. Someone cared enough to write it, practice it, perform it. If it's in a store or on the radio or in a venue, then someone cared enough to purchase it.

The more I can find the beauty in a song that would never, ever make it onto my list, the less fixated I am on the laughably tiny slice of the world I allow myself to appreciate from force of habit. The less of my mind I spend marveling at how tremendously bad someone's new radio single is, how bizarre and probably demented the people who enjoy it must be, the more I am able to soak in the fun of it - or whatever the intent might be, the qualities that brought it into being in the first place - and the easier it is for me to find solidarity with the people naturally inclined to feel the same way. I find it much more nourishing to come at artwork from this perspective - what is called a "both/and" rather than an "either/or" mentality.

A friend of mine recently caught me railing on a particular artist and said, "Try to say two things you like about this person's work before you start taking them apart." It's a remarkably revealing practice. Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating being "nice" just for the sake of it, just because it's the "right thing to do," or because "mean people suck." I am not going to pass judgment on you if you decide to spend your time and energies explaining to people who like a piece of music why they shouldn't. I do, however, hope that you notice when you are doing this and, at the very least, can agree with the emotional and energetic investment you're making. Is talking trash really how you want to spend your time? Doesn't it feel better to be appreciative? Wouldn't you rather be putting the world together than breaking it into pieces? There's plenty of that going on already.

Nor am I advocating any kind of compromise - this isn't about forcing yourself to like terrible music. To the contrary, the real compromise is in usual predisposition for appreciating only some of the endless bounty we are offered. We imagine that we have only so much love to go around, and solder shut our own cages. To discover the beauty in absolutely everything is the most radically uncompromising position we can adopt, because we can no longer hide in our preferences. We can no longer pretend that we are so easily defined. We challenge ourselves to love no matter what.

Taking a second look at my desert island playlist, I wonder: How disappointed would I really be, to be marooned without my favorite music? Drawing a bigger circle, how disappointed am I to be marooned in this human life, without constant access to the object of my affection? Or rather, to have forgotten that beauty is something I carry with me wherever I go, regardless of what I have managed to clutch to my desperate breast through the waves and storm?

Instead of endlessly redrawing the boundaries of what I will permit myself to love, I am going to expand my silly little hypothesis of who I am to include love for whatever the world presents me. I have been shipwrecked - and, washed up on my island, I discover that my playlist of favorites is the song of the wind through the trees, the crashing of the waves, the crying gulls, the whispers of the shifting sand. Everything. You say radio sucks? I say, love the one you're with. You can change the station, but you can't get rid of yourself.

My mission is no longer to create the perfect playlist, the most delicately crafted artifact of my personal limitations. My mission is to take that list and stretch it over the whole damn world - to recognize the good and true and beautiful in every faulty, partial, opaque piece of music ever made. Yes, every song falls short from perfectly realizing the universal beauty I know exists. And yes, every song is one gleaming facet of an infinite gem I am slowly working to unearth.

No more "guilty pleasures." I am done trying to excuse myself in the company of the elite for the shape of my affection. There is nothing shameful about love, whatever form it takes. If someone else disapproves of my joy, I forgive them - because I chain myself to my preferences, too! I still wonder about people who dig songs I don't dig. I still have my favorite stations, my favorite bands, my favorite songs. I still like to make lists, to name the wonders I have discovered...and what a luxury, the making of lists! It's beautiful, isn't it?

Goodnight, moon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

...in Love and Music
by Michael Garfield

Recently, I've been reading a lot about two things that seem unrelated: one is the clash over copyrights between labels, musicians, and listeners; the other is polyamory.

I've been researching the polyamory because after a few years of studying spirituality - and being in a wonderful, loving, incredibly difficult relationship - I had mixed feelings about sharing all of my love with a single person. On the one hand, discipline and depth. On the other hand, the liberation of not having to refuse other opportunities for genuine connection. Polyamory isn't about sleeping with whomever you want; it's about having mature, mutual loving relationships in a number of different forms, recognizing how unlikely it is that a single individual is going to fulfill all of your needs.

When we were more embedded in our communities and surrounded by the love of a giant extended family, we weren't making such incredible demands on our romantic partners. Now, in an era of emotional estrangement, we have this lunatic idea that we're supposed to get all of our love from, and give all of our love to, our "one and only." This is mixed up with monotheism and vestiges of our evolutionary history in ways too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that for many people, polyamorous relationships satisfy a multifaceted sense of intimacy that would be impossible with one person. They can also demand at least as much maturity and grace as monogamous relationships, in which the secure illusions of possessing the other person and of having one true lover are allowed to blossom - and bruise - unhindered.

The other topic is something I've been navigating because of my own identity as a songwriter trying to make a career in the midst of radical upheaval in the music business. I'm constantly poised to find a new synthesis, one that allows me to make a living at this while still honoring my conviction that the music I write should be freely available to anyone who would care to listen.

The usual dualistic debates strike me as ludicrous and naïve; it's not so cut and dry that we can say music should or should not be free. One of the rules of a network economy is that value is driven by ubiquity. The only remaining scarcity, in a world where the costs of information and production are swiftly approaching zero, is attention. Thus, the more people who know (or rely on) your product or service, the more it is worth - regardless of how much it costs to make. If nobody has heard of your music, a hundred-thousand dollar studio project is worth nothing. If you're a huge star, people scramble over each other for your bedroom demos.

This is why emerging artists are often so eager to give away their recordings (thus generating an audience), while so many established artists have been fighting p2p digital distribution as if it were a plague. We need to embrace a new understanding of economic value that I'm not sure our culture is willing to accept: after all, most people would agree that the majority of well-known music out there is worth a lot less, in an artistic sense, than the craft of relative unknowns.

(We can think of this as kinetic versus potential energy. At their best, A&R reps are cultural catalysts, doing for the realm of ideas what oil hunters do for the realm of industrial power supply. Likewise, record labels and oil magnates have a lot in common: both have lost sight of their empowering ideals and started to choke the flow of resources.)

Back to the matter at hand. These two issues - polyamory and copyright law - are operating on totally different scales, in different arenas of our lives. Or are they? After all, I've seen bumper stickers professing that "Music = Love." On some deep level, both of these are symptoms of a deep struggle that we as individuals and as a society are having with the concept of ownership.

Consequently, I find romance a very useful metaphor for the music scene: When major labels are saying, "You can't just release your album for free online!," I think what they mean is, "I thought I was special to you, and now you're sleeping with someone else!" The label is dependent on the exclusive relationship it has with its artists. As in many supposedly monogamous relationships, however, the deal is a double standard - the contract itself favors the interests of one partner over the interests of the other. Since one of them has something that the other cannot (or believes they cannot) provide for themselves, truly mutual negotiation is an illusion.

But of course, before you can love another person or really be loved, you must first love yourself. Without question, the most successful relationships are those in which both partners are involved out of choice, rather than necessity. The most satisfying partnerships are between people who enter them from a place of autonomy, as a gift, unafraid of standing on their own.

In the worst kind of relationship, your partner is sweet to you when you do as she likes, and makes your life a living hell when you don't. In the best kind of relationship, you are internally motivated to care for her out of your gratitude. In the best kind of relationship, musicians would be more than happy to sign a contract with a major label, because the label recognizes that happy artists make better music.

I wonder what this all will mean in the era toward which we seem to be headed: one in which audiences will have unlimited access to streaming music, but no real ownership of copyright to speak of. It'll sound like this: "You can have me whenever you like, but you will never own me."

I imagine the mature response would be: "That's okay; you're more enjoyable when I allow you to live as you desire, rather than under exacting specifications."

What is so precious about possessing a thing that we would rather pay dearly to own it than to have unobstructed use of it for free? Especially when dictated ownership, as has been demonstrated again and again through history, tends to squeeze the life out of land, the joy out of material goods, the exuberance out of a lover, and the soul out of music?

Music is more fun when the musicians are able to follow their muse, rather than the demands of some clueless middleman, enforced by contract and manipulation. I think we have lost faith that there is such a thing as gratitude for a job well done - that there are plenty with the willingness and the means to support good art.

Most traditional cultures take good care of their artists, who are often revered as healers and behave accordingly. It was patronage that enabled the renaissance. So it will be again.

Music and love are both like water; there is a sense in which they both "want" to flow free. We build dams and harness their energy - but destroy the local ecosystem in the process. What most of the music business can't seem to grasp is how to let a river to bend its natural course and call it irrigation. The passive abundance of the network economy is simply beyond the industrial assembly of music as big business knows it today.

Nonetheless, there are signs of change: as record sales plummet, licensing profits are higher than ever. The energy of commerce is following public attention in a much more fluid, natural way. Allow the artists to do what they will, and audiences to pay for what rings their bells.

When I imagine the future of artist-label relationship, the first company that comes to mind is Magnatune, out of Berkeley, California. Flying the motto, "We are not evil," Magnatune signs nonexclusive distribution agreements with its artists - and allows customers to pay what they think the music is worth, rather than arbitrarily assigning a market price. The result is that they have two charts: the best-selling music, and the music that has sold for the most money. For people who trust the voice of the crowd, the most valuable music is sifted into visibility - motivating artists to craft something evocative and enduring. What more, Magnatune offers three free copies of each download to all of its buyers:

"While other record labels are busy suing their customers for introducing their friends to great music... At Magnatune, we want you to copy our music for your friends."

Meanwhile, the label gains the trust of its customers and artists alike with the integrity of its value structure and the permissibility of its practices.

Leave it to Berkeley to prove free love as a business model! Magnatune's artist agreement basically says, "You are free to work with other distribution agencies if you wish, but you will be required to cancel our agreement if you sign an exclusive contract with any of them." In other words, "I don't mind you dating other people, but as soon as you start dating someone who does have a problem with, we're through." It's called being a responsible open lover, and it marks a sea change in how we conduct our business and romance.

The new role of the label is to do what it was always meant to do: sort through music for its audiences, get the right vibrations into the right ears, take a cut for the service, and do its job transparently enough that there is no suspicion on any side. It's easier than ever to make a professional recording without going into debt, or signing an "agreement" with someone whose interests conflict your own and who you can never completely trust. Labels can no longer legitimately position themselves as a necessity.

We're seeing something now akin to the emergence of the woman in the workforce: suddenly it's her decision to get married, rather than a requirement, because she can take care of herself. Of course teamwork is still easier, and marriage as an institution persists (even in polyamorous relationships). Likewise, the label will endure because it allows the artists to focus on what they do best - but there's no fooling anybody anymore. The future of love and music is choice and trust - stable agency and empowering communion. Action in consonance with passion, instead of fear.

What we have now, institutionalized in both our love and music, is an unhealthy focus on personal gain and securing turf. No one is exempt; musicians are just as much to blame for pretending to own their music as the labels are. (The most honest artists admit that the world wrote those songs through them, and so they cannot authentically lay claim to any of their work.)

But slowly, surely, we are learning about the benefit of complementarity, how to help, how to share (you get what you give). Sooner or later, music and love will both be restored to the throne, in their rightful place as sacred services to the community. Ask not what your culture can do for you...

Yoga instructor Seane Corn has said this about her own labor of love, teaching yoga to the impoverished:

“I’ve found that service is addictive. I’ve never been more confident. I’ve never felt better about myself, never been less interested in my wounds, my own drama, in my own small-minded crisis... Being in service, being an activist and looking at the world, has allowed me to live in absolute gratitude for every aspect of my life. That’s been the greatest gift I’ve ever experienced.”

Imagine the day when this is the attitude musicians and record labels bring to their work. When giving is a greater motivation in our intimate relationships than getting. When the love of song and the song of love are both entered with willingness and glee. When everyone recognizes the exceptional talent they have to offer the world, and the world sings back in gratitude.

It starts by loosening our fixation on owning the things we desire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

There are at least three levels of motivation for making a funeral mix. As I have mentioned (in Part I and II), personal comfort - planning-as-insulation from an intensely impartial and unforgiving void - is one. But beyond the narrow constraints of such half-conscious, fear-motivated scrambling - the secular and self-serving penitences of our iPod culture - there are nobler reasons to leave a funeral playlist (or any artifact) that communicates something you are no longer able to say.

A moment of explanation. Back in 2005, I heard Ken Wilber speak in Denver, and he was discussing how we can't determine a person's motivation from their actions alone. This is because as we mature psychologically, our sense of self becomes more complex and extends to more and more of the world we experience; what used to be "it" becomes "me." We start in a swirl of undifferentiated experience and learn through laborious error that there is a difference between "self" and "other." Then we learn that we have a body, but are not exclusively that body; then we learn that we have thoughts, but are not exclusively our thoughts. All of these things are there the whole time, but as our inner world becomes richer, we learn to recognize them as distinct objects of our experience - and, simultaneously, learn that these things that are parts of us are not us, in the sense that "I" remain "I" without them. As a child grows, what she considers "me" (and therefore "mine") grows in an expanding concentric ring, and this passage - from "egocentric" to "ethnocentric" to "worldcentric," or concern for self, then family, then all people - offers an entire spectrum of reasons for her to do any particular thing.

Ken offered, as a mundane example, the use of makeup. Someone can wear lipstick because it makes her feel pretty (egocentric); or because it will please another person or other people, or it's "the right thing to do" (ethnocentric); or because by beautifying herself, she's making the whole world more beautiful and thus acting in service of a universal ideal (worldcentric). And you'll never know by watching someone make kissy faces in the mirror whether she's doing it for one of these reasons, and not another.

(If any of this is unclear, here's more about egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and worldcentrism.)

With that in mind:

If I'm going to make a list of songs to be played at my funeral, I want to do it for the noblest reasons I know. I'm not going to do it merely to sandbag my own fear of mortality, or to relish forcing my will on people in a moment of unique vulnerability. I want to make an offering of music that has helped me deal with mortality and bereavement, in the hope that I can bring some modicum of peace to a world defined by suffering. I want to share the sole remaining thing I will be able to give people after I die: perspective.

After all, losing someone is scary. Even when we can't completely fathom the death of our own bodies, we feel death directly in a small way when the people with whom we identify pass on. "I feel like I lost a piece of myself," we say, and the truth is that we did - even if our limited Western notion of compartmental identity doesn't acknowledge it as such.

The music playing at my funeral, then, is also the music playing at their funeral. And what would you want to hear when you're dying? A dispatch from the other side, alleviating the unbearable mystery? Loving acknowledgment and the permission to feel what you're feeling? A reminder of how this passage is what unifies you with everyone else? Music can offer all of these things in one form or another.

And peace is contagious - so if I have the means to offer it to even a few people, it can ripple outward through their thoughts and deeds and affect everyone else, people I never had the chance to meet. In fact, why wait until I'm dead? Why conserve the gift for a handful of friends and family?

From here on out, I'll use this column to examine the songs I would offer to anyone who survives me. This is the music that accomplishes (in my opinion) the highest potential of music: to connect us so deeply to the world that we are dead before we are dead, that we are unafraid of death (and thus, unafraid of life). Affirmative even in their difficult truths, these songs have given me a solace I haven't found anywhere else. Hopefully, they'll make you feel a little bit more capable of handling the grim reality of my death, and yours.

Previous articles in this series:

PART I: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, I: Playing DJ To The Bereaved
PART II: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, II: Putting Death in a Box

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

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Since I started to write about DJing one's own going away party, the bark has peeled back from the tree to reveal a world much more fascinated with this subject than I knew. My first clue came casually: "Oh, like in High Fidelity!" I saw High Fidelity, and loved it - but that was a few years ago, long enough to totally forget that Rob Gordon, Nick Hornsby's playlist-obsessed protagonist, had already popularized the funeral mixtape game. Then, I discovered that a mysterious British organization, the Bereavement Register, polled U.K. citizens about this very question, as well - to discover that 79 percent of them were already thinking about it. Apparently James Blunt is well-regarded as a deliverer of dirges; he topped the pre-funeral charts (which is funny, because Brits also voted him one of the most annoying things about their country - insert bagpipe analogy here):

01. "Goodbye My Lover" - James Blunt
02. "Angels" - Robbie Williams
03. "I've Had the Time of My Life" - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
04. "Wind Beneath My Wings" - Bette Midler
05. "Pie Jesu" - Requiem
06. "Candle in the Wind" - Elton John
07. "With or Without You" - U2
08. "Tears in Heaven" - Eric Clapton
09. "Every Breath You Take" - The Police
10. "Unchained Melody" - Righteous Brothers

Wow. "Unchained Melody" is only number ten? What an outrage. Actually, I'm pretty aghast at most of these. (Speaking of aghast: Interestingly but trivially, both Hornsby and this poll came from the U.K., a decidedly morbid patch of land.)

People have been playing music for as long as they've been burying their dead, and so I'm sure that people - for as long as we have understood our mortality and could be called people - have been requesting certain songs be played at their graveside. While I can't find any recorded history of the funeral mix, I think it's safe to assume that we started requesting recorded music at our funerals as soon as it was available. Compared to the modesty of flowers and dirt that they used to be, most modern funerals are technological spectacles. We take every opportunity to upgrade even our most ancient ceremonies. We are accomplices to a universal current of crystallizing self-reflexion, embracing every novelty, jumping on every chance to compensate for Death by replicating and disseminating our favorite ideas.

We make a religion of anything that will outlive us. Since there are no carry-ons or checked luggage allowed on that particular flight (the weight limit is zero), we have to cash in at the gates of eternity by ceding eternal life to the living. We hand down the right to endure to someone or something else - our children and our stories, an ideal, or a joke, or a song. We finally find immortality by investing our living and dying breaths in the worship of those things we consider to be beautiful, or good, or true.

To put it another way, we know we end, and so we are obsessed with legacy. And whenever something increases our capacity to leave our legacy - when we invent writing, or the printing press, or genetic engineering, or the internet - we feed it as much as it can eat. Even ourselves.

And so we began investing in fossils, identifying with particular recordings, and not the living music to which they referred - the abstract and elusive, nimble and ephemeral music that characterized being human before the Age of Recording, never the same twice, mischievous and seductive. In a way, we have paved the way for Death by even agreeing to recorded music, by unemploying the spontaneous expression of grief we find only in the music of the bereaved. Postmodern composer John Cage:

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."

If playing recorded music at a funeral does in fact squelch some balance of living response, then we end up not just dead but having managed to pull the funeral down with us, as well. What, then, is the point of coming up with a funeral mix? I think so many people delight at the prospect because making playlists is the fashionable modern way for us to to contain the tremendous, terrifying mystery of the unknown.

A UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman recently concluded that identifying emotions allows people a degree of immunity from them. By even recognizing and naming our anger, sadness, or fear, we move ourselves to a safe and impassive distance. (Of course, the same is true for pleasurable emotions, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched a joke die by dissection.) Not only did they finally find a physiological basis for the benefits of mindfulness meditation - evidence that learning to watch the mind does actually lift people over the thunder and lightning of the limbic system - but they also unwittingly explained why it's so useful for us to write or sing or paint out our troubling experiences.

The emerging model is one of subject-object relations, where describing grief allows us to loosen our identification with it. By speaking about "the" grief, or even "my" grief, we move our pain into the third person - where we have it, rather than it having us. By codifying our lives and deaths, we remove ourselves from them, and no longer suffer total immersion in an unconquerable wash of feeling.

We benefit from funeral playlists because they pin down the most salient metaphors so we can study them, because "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Like good naturalists, we capture our experiences and embalm them behind a glass case, the boundless fury of Nature Red In Tooth And Claw miniaturized and mediated by a guided audio-tour. Our playlists reflect the edges of a giant, hidden shape. They allow us to tame Death by conceiving of it, by relating to it in a way our minds can manage (although, looking through the cage bars into this tiger exhibit, we forget that the tiger is actually still loose in the zoo).

It is precisely because having a funeral playlist somehow kills the living expression of grief - because recorded music offers, in its death, the illusion of persistence and of fathomability - that it is so popular. And the luxury of capturing our whole holographic experience in a single posthumous album is that we can close the books on a truth more grand and intricate than any of us can bear.

But that may also be why, as consoling as they may be, funeral mixes offer no ultimate solace - because keeping Death at arm's length doesn't allow the intimacy of direct experience. Sooner or later, each of us will have to move into Death, instead of away from it, and practicing one won't ready us for the other.

On the other hand, all technology seems capable of supporting both our desperate illusions of security and enabling our unflinching self-transcendence. Could a funeral playlist prepare people for Death, rather than merely offering us distractions and false promises? I certainly think so. In the next installment, I'll discuss the funeral playlist as not just a coping mechanism, but a tool for skillful compassion, and I'll continue to explore the songs on the soundtrack to my funeral.

In the meantime, here's an hors d'ouevre, Stuart Davis' spectacularly irreverent and lucid song, "Practice Dying." If any song can capture the subtlest essence of why to make a funeral playlist, this is it:

Stuart Davis - "Practice Dying"

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
That's just rehearsal, but it's comforting somehow
To practice dying now

Hang out in funeral homes and make an honest bid
Lay in your casket, let them close the lid
Abra cadaver, roll your eyes back in your head
Practice being dead

Don't feel stupid; we're all scared
No one wants to go to hell
There's still time to get prepared
Start out now and finish well

Try painting tunnels on the ceiling in your room
Imagine your birth backwards with a bigger, better womb
Take little trips out of your body now and then
And if the rapture comes, maybe you'll ascend
You know the saying, "Once you learn to ride a bike..."
Well, that's what dying's like

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
It's just rehearsal, 'cause that's all that life allows
So practice dying
Cuz you're almost dead
Practice dying now

Previous articles in this series:
PART I: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, I: Playing DJ To The Bereaved

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

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My roommate recently told me that his friends were playing a game for which everyone had to come up with their funeral mix - the playlist that they'd hypothetically force their friends and family to hear at the funeral. I'm familiar with the concept of a "pre-need" - an in-character euphemism for the pre-mortem arrangements people make with their undertakers - but besides the offhanded and oft-forgotten request ("I want you to play 'Comfortably Numb;'" "I want you to play 'Solsbury Hill'"), I've never heard of anyone ever providing a complete program of material to guide people through their earliest hours of public grief.

I didn't keep with it while they were putting their playlists together, but most of the decisions I heard seemed crude or bizarre - unreflexive or sardonic or lugubrious, insensitive to the likely moods of the bereaved. I was reminded of a fellow I met in college who intended to dose the punch at his going-away party; I remember him laughing on the porch of our dormitory in the face of my objections and the image of his dilated, weeping parents. All the saxophonists I know have a mischievous streak that frequently spills over into the sinister.

But anyway, it got me thinking. This is a sensitive issue! Do I know enough about the relationship of sound to emotional response that I can trust my choices and guide my loved ones through their upheaval? Is it safe to have a whole album playing, instead of the easier single song? Give them something small and sweet, not a protracted journey through my whim, whims, and whimsy. Let them get out of the cemetery and on with their lives as soon as possible. Spoil as few songs as necessary. Sink into the soil and off the playing field of the living at a fair and considerate speed. One breakup song is enough to process the feeling, to attach it to something manageably small. A whole breakup mix is torture, meted wave after wave, while we steal our breaths in the baited silence between tracks in order to survive the next song's regathered dive into convolution.

It could be handled skillfully, giving people a tapering massage out and sliding into a clean break. But the appropriate isn't always so simple to predict, and I do care about not making things harder on everyone than I have to. I don't play un-befitting music in life (it's one of the few ways I choose not to upset people, so many others being out of my control). So why should I risk leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth?

It's the last moment of a thing that people use as a handle, an anchor, in memory. We leave the theater feeling according to the film's end, not its middle - and that's not simply advice for the departing, to make sure that your final moment is the one you want stamped into the quantum hologram forever and ever, that you're sufficiently present and lucid to survive the dissolution of everything you consider yourself and make some reasonable decisions as you sink back through the densities of embodiment and betwixt the legs of some handsome couple. It's also the motive for making up our dead so as to disguise their wounds, their bloodlessness, their odor.

And it's why I have been thinking about this on and off for weeks, and have yet to settle on more than a handful of songs that would go into the soundtrack to my funeral. The certainties include Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th," a gorgeous and wistful solo piano piece, played with a light but determined touch that evokes in me a precious and miniature sentiment, like looking at a dollhouse of my childhood home. As staunch as the vow of a child, and as pure and naïve. It's one of those rare songs that so successfully leaves a person emptier and quieter, listening for an echo of its solemn but smiling strains in the wind and trees as the end credits roll up over the rest of the day.

Another is Peter Gabriel's "I Grieve," which has a funky, almost heroic bridge that soars momentarily above the incredible tenderness of the rest of the song, reaffirming the persistence of life, before floating respectfully back into a dirge.

It was only one hour ago
It was all so different then
There's nothing yet has really sunk in
Looks like it always did
This flesh and bone
It's just the way that you were tied in
Now theres no-one home

Did I dream this belief?
Or did I believe this dream?
Now I can find relief
I grieve...

But maybe I'd switch it out for "Washing of the Water," which is more humble and earnest - and so, strangely, more honest to the yearning that death evokes in me, in spite of it being less specifically and certainly about death and more diffusedly being about passages in general. Less explicit, it's more comforting. Which to me seems more considerate. More of a hymn, taking on a bigger meaning when sung by the whole town.

River, river carry me on
Living river carry me on
River, river carry me on
To the place where I come from

River, oh river, river running deep
Bring me something that will let me get to sleep
In the washing of the water will you take it all away
Bring me something to take this pain away

Another moment of direct contemplation about it, and maybe I'd add Boards of Canada's "Peacock Tail," a kind of sultry swagger covered in ferns, a wordless exposé of self-justifying groundless bounty, swooning in luxurious patience, swaying back and forth, the radiant masculine yin. Just discordant enough to slow down expectancy, but consistent enough to reward. It flushes me with purples and greens and blues, the most appropriately-named instrumental piece I know - the cool colors not of death and decay, but of a mist-enshrouded and seductively distant beckoning forest promise, the living iridescence of an unthreatening fantasy just beyond reach. A lush riven mirage, confident and tender, noble and sly, good music for lovemaking and therapy. Relaxing and major while being untouchable and time-forgotten enough to mean something at a funeral.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I do actually feel like I could provide something heartfelt and meaningful without being cruel about it. Besides, do I really want someone else to pick the music for my funeral? Of course not. Nor, for that matter, do I want someone else picking the music for my wake...so I'll be revisiting this topic with the next entry, when I'll discuss in detail my own happy and sad "I'm Dead" playlists.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

Discuss this article