Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley?
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive?
While preparing for Peace Corps, I selected music that I thought would be best for what I supposed would be a structureless and meditative lifestyle in the African wilderness. Once in my village hut, I learned that listening to spaced-out electronic music only served to isolate me further from my alien surroundings, and so my expensive headphones soon joined my other botched projects (including a book of Yoga poses, various over-priced REI gear, and GRE prep materials) in the suitcase lodged in the rafters above my sleeping mat.
About six months later, a hippie friend of mine sent me some CDs. After dismissing Dylan and the Dead, I decided to recover my CD player and give this album a listen during my next bike trip. Opening to this music took some time – I couldn’t really hear it until the return journey. The sun had set – the meetings ran late, I was offered little food that afternoon, and after 15k on a sandy path, I was only halfway home.
I put on my headlamp and headphones, and everything about the situation was slowly transformed. Instead of indulging my sense of suffering or magnifying the obscurity of my situation, I began to remember that the passing scenery - smoke rising through thatched roofs, chickens returning to roost - was a reality that I’d yet to settle into and fully discover. Yes, the view felt suddenly romanticized - not unlike the passing tour groups on the highway miles beyond, whose witnessing of African poverty through tour bus windows is more often than not, I imagine, accompanied by Enya. But this music as a soundtrack – restrained and intimate - tuned me in to something more real, and had me feeling as though I were truly one strata closer to the conscious frequency of the people I lived with. I slowed down. Soon, instead of powering through the areas where the trees blocked the moonlight, I stopped my bike and walked it. The smell of the dark vegetation entered me.
I stopped in a meadow to drink from my Nalgene. I was about to reassemble myself when I looked to my left and discovered something magical: a ballet of fireflies, their green sparks converging where the trees opened to the floodplain below. It wasn’t a conscious decision, to stop and absorb it. I forgot myself for moment, felt blessed, and finally I removed my headphones.
-John Paul Castiaux
[This write-up is from the old email days, August 21, 2006]