Soundbyte Psychology

Here in a few minutes, I’m going to submit this entry, then I’m going to go write an email saying goodbye to a friend and a fellow musician… forever. I’m generally an amoral person, but live my life by a set of seven rules. It’s really sad that he broke one of them: “If a person asks or tells you to choose between them and someone or something else, you sever from the person doing the asking/telling.” Never support dividers. Their energy will infect you and drive a schism into your heart and you will infect others around you. In the past, the rule has come up only with people who I was fine severing from my life. This one is more difficult. Not only is he amazingly talented, but we’ve led similar lives and have shared experiences I don’t often find with the general populace. But the rule remains… and it’s there for a reason.

Post-note: In the past, others have created drama or made severance drag on longer than needed. As a testament to his character, not only did he respond from the strength of his character, but went above and beyond this. Fare well.

To appreciate a thing, both the “local” and “global” forms of awareness are required (a rare admixture). The local is required to focus on a particular object, or scene, person or environment. This “thing” that is focused in on may be special, may just be some other thing or may just be the required point-of-focus for the moment. In order to appreciate it, however–to judge its value and personal significance–awareness of other times, other objects and other people is required.

Example: I’m a bit annoyed that I have to wait five more days just to find out the artist and title for this song I heard about an hour ago. That actually triggered the fact that I WILL get to know the title, that I’m listening to a radio broadcast across the Internet that aired in the U.K. yesterday, hosted by a woman over forty who would make seventeen year-old girls from forty years ago look ugly… and listening on a computer with more music on it than even existed a hundred years ago and with computing power greater than that of the computer that sent the first humans to the surface of the moon. Just three years ago I couldn’t have skipped around a radio program, and five years ago I couldn’t have listened to it days after it aired, and just fifteen years ago I couldn’t have listened to it unless I could pick up the radio signal from halfway across the globe.

Time. Space. Knowledge of value to base comparisons. A vast global awareness is required simply to appreciate the local awareness and not take it for granted.

I found the track, btw, and it’s free from both artists.
It’s the XI Remix of “On Your Own” by James Yuill:

Free. Another “new” thing that I appreciate.
Love the fact I can share it just as freely.

When listening to Madeleine Albright’s speech at The Forum 2000, I was struck that she placed “freedom” in opposition to “responsibility”. This is a repetition of a mistake I first saw in the writings of Victor Frankl. Both have collapsed the two concepts of “duty” and “responsibility” into a single idea, calling it simply “responsibility”. It is a radical failing at worst, an error in lexicon at best. Collapsing “duty” into “responsibility” removes the possibility of being responsible to yourself. If you are drowning, your responsibility is to save yourself. If you and a car full of people are drowning, then you have a choice to be responsible to yourself or be personally irresponsible and risk your own life for another. No choice is right or wrong, but either choice means being irresponsible to either the individual or to others. Responsibility is not purely social nor individualistic; it’s both.

Freedom exists in the realm of personal responsibility.
Duty exists in the realm of social responsibility.

Therefore it is “duty” that stands opposite to “freedom”. Both of these are forms of “responsibility”.

An object has form within the space around it. The space around and within it is the object’s negative space. Euclid and Archimedes, two of antiquities greatest mathematicians, understood this concept. So, too, did the philosophical sages of India and China. The eye is drawn to the space an object takes up, but the negative space surrounding an object is as important when it comes time to understand it. It is an aesthetic and logical imperative. Without the empty space at the center of a wheel, it cannot connect with an axle in order to fulfill its function. Without the arrow in the FedEx symbol, the subconscious draw to “go with it” is not transmitted. The function of emptiness is connected with the function of the material. To study one without the other is to miss the whole.

The potential–the target–is Infinity. We measure towards this target to the very limits of our precision. We cannot attain the Infinite in life, only increase the area of Infinity that we have measured and understood. The detractor–the doubter–will claim then that this endless pursuit is without meaning if no absolute can be taken as treasure for such efforts. Those who pursue this potential, however, and taste even one measure, are oft found to claim that nothing but this effort has meaning.