I really have trouble listening to music while I write now. And that’s because, even though I have always love music love, the intensity of the pleasure I get from is stronger now than it has ever been.
Something similar seems to be true for all my senses. They are all duller in some ways than they were twenty years ago. I’m starting to have trouble hearing things and not only am I as nearsighted as ever but I’ve totally lost my near point and have to take my glasses off to see close up. My touch is still pretty good but I’ve started to notice that I can’t pick up quite the level of details on a surface as I once did.
But the intensity of my sensual experience is much greater than before.
The pleasure I get from music is more intense and I think I hear more of it, in that I can grasp all the various parts in a piece of music and their interaction in a way I couldn’t have done before. The pleasure of seeing beautiful things with my eyes now can be so intense I find it overpowering. Sometimes I just stop and look at, say streetscapes and enjoy them in way that I don’t recall feeling years ago. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if sight gives me an almost tactile pleasure in my eyes.
I’m not going to say much about the sense of touch since I’ll be writing about that in the book I’m writing. But the pleasures of touch are greater now than ever as well. A jacuzzi feels better than I think it’s ever been before. When my back is scratched or rubbed, I enjoy more than I did years sgo.
I don’t know what accounts for these changes. I suppose they could be fanciful. How, after all, can you compare how much you enjoy music now as opposed to how much you enjoyed it twenty years ago? But some of the things I’ve mentioned really are not a matter of subjective experience. I used to write while listening to music. I can’t now because I find it distracting. I’ve always liked going for a drive through pretty country just to look and see. But I don’t recall wanting to stop as often as I do now because I’m distracted from driving by the pleasure of a beautiful–or even not so beatiful view. The streets of Mt. Airy are quite lovely, but I don’t going down, say, Upsal Street twenty years ago and feeling pleasure like I do today.
So if this change in my sensual experience is real, what accounts for it. Perhaps it is just that I have the patience to pay more attention to sensory experience than I once did. Perhaps it is my sense that, after being sick last year, I have started to think that time is running out for me and I can’t waste it so I try to take everything in. (But some of these changes I noticed a few years ago before I was sick. Perhaps it is something I’ve written about in another piece I’m going to post in a few days: I actually can perceive more than I did before because I have more contextual knowledge.
Whatever it is, I’m really grateful for expansion of my sensual horizons. If it is actually the result of getting older, then this is the best possible compensation for how much longer it takes for injuries to heal.
My friend, T Nan Dubois, posted this to the Miles List in response to this blog post. It get’s what I’m saying, I think.
“Buckdancer’s Choice
by James L. Dickey
So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
In the invalid’s bed: my mother,
Warbling all day to herself
The thousand variations of one song;
It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.
For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men
Of traveling minstrel shows;
With them also an old woman
Was dying of breathless angina,
Yet still found breath enough
To whistle up in my head
A sight like a one-man=2 0band,
Freed black, with cymbals at heel,
An ex-slave who thrivingly danced
To the ring of his own clashing light
Through the thousand variations of one song
All day to my mother’s prone music,
The invalid’s warbler’s note,
While I crept close to the wall
Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,
Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break
Through stratum after stratum of a tone
Proclaiming what choices there are
For the last dancers of their kind,
For ill women and for all slaves
Of death, and children enchanted at walls
With a brass-beating glow underfoot,
Not dancing but nearly risen
Through barnlike, theatrelike houses
On the wings of the buck and wing.”