American Cosmonaut

You say that you want to find where ecstasy lies in music, and I tell you at once: don't try to describe it, just listen. Play, get lost, forget logic or the need to explain the pleasure that comes when you get carrried away. Ah, but you tell me that you are a philosopher, and you love wisdom not because it makes you crazy but because you have been trained to ask the right questions, the sort of questions that can never have adequate answers. One question leads to another, and after just a few, you are lost. That's the moment to start singing, I tell you -- Let out a piercing wail like the late Nusrat Ali Khan might have done, pushing your hands against the air as if to clear the sky for the ultimate lament, where joy and sadness conflated into one. For the best music is neither giddy nor pretentious, major or minor, pathetic or glib. It inhibits pure pleasure, and forces oneness from those opposites that attract this world into being out of empty, deflecting forces.

These are my two personalities, tossing and turning upon each other: the musician and philosopher -- one wailing, the other analyzing. Neither one is ever able to satisfy the other; they quarrel and resist each other's insights. But the ecstasy inside the art of sound is not so much pure pleasure as an escape from the divisions into an essential oneness with the unspeakable meaning of the world. This celebration may seem like a language, but it is not. Why? Because you can love it and participate in it even if you have no idea what is going on.

- Adapted from Parabola by David Rothenberg