TEXTURE #009
Terrain. A score surfaces unasked, in a closed room, at the end of an ordinary day. The body answers inside a minute. Every explanation offered since has been offered afterward.
The needles start in the forearms.
“Frisson was assessed via a combined self-report and physiological (galvanic skin response) measure.”
Mitchell C. Colver and Amani El-Alayli, Getting aesthetic chills from music: The connection between openness to experience and frisson, Psychology of Music, 2016
You had not played it in months.
It surfaces on its own, the way a name surfaces without the face attached, and then the face comes: the low brass under the theme, the strings that do not enter so much as get discovered already playing.
So you go and find it.
The door is closed. The headphones go on and do what they do, which is not amplification. It is subtraction. The house goes quiet in a way the house has never actually been, and what is left is a chamber the size of a skull with an orchestra already inside it.
Nothing else is happening.
That part matters. Not driving. Not cleaning. Not working something out. There is no grief in the room for the music to attach itself to.
Somewhere past the six-minute mark, the needles begin.
They begin in the forearms.
Not a wave. Not a sheet of cold moving across the skin, which is how it usually gets described and is not what happens.
Thousands of them, separate, each landing at its own instant.
And the instants are not random. They land with the score. When the horns move, something on the left forearm moves. When the strings answer, the right arm answers.
Whatever is doing this has the music in front of it. It is reading a bar ahead of you.
They travel up. Both arms together, then the back of the neck, where the sensation thickens and becomes closer to pressure than to prickle. Then the face, all of it at once, the way a face feels after a needling treatment.
Not pain. Not quite sensation.
An alertness of the skin itself.
The nearest thing to put beside it is the itch that comes with pre-workout. The one with no site.
There is nothing to scratch.
Scratching accomplishes nothing, because the itch is not on the skin, it is in the nerve underneath, and the only correct response is to stop trying to end it.
You let it take the arm. You let it take the neck.
The relief is not in the relief.
It is in the surrender.
This happens every time.
Not usually. Not when the mood is right or the room is dark or the day has gone badly. Every time, at the same place, along the same route through the body.
You test it without intending to, which is the only honest way anything gets tested. Three screenshots inside a couple of minutes, the track sitting at a different position in each one. No memory of deciding to do it.
The hand went for the phone while the rest of you was elsewhere.
What you photographed was a progress bar.
Someone asks whether you are a music-first person or a lyric-first person.
You do not have to think about it.
Music-first, and not by a small margin. You can play a song forty times and not know what it says. The words are weather passing over the structure. If the construction is good enough you will eventually go find out what the words are, and if the words turn out to deserve the construction, the whole thing gets larger.
But that is a second visit.
The first visit is always to the architecture. Which is how you end up here, in the scores and the symphonies, where nobody is saying anything at all.
Everything you have built is made of sentences. Years on where a sentence puts its weight, what it may not use, how long it can hold before it is permitted to mean anything.
And the thing with the most direct access to your body does not use a single word.
For a long time you thought what you were hearing was survival.
It is a defensible reading. It holds for most of what does this to you: the music that climbs out of something, that refuses to go quiet, that was written at full commitment inside a room almost nobody entered.
Then the Adagietto.
Strings and harp. No brass anywhere in it. Slow enough that the phrases come close to falling apart and do not. There is no fight in that movement. It is the one said to have gone to a wife instead of a letter, and it is the one people play at funerals, and it is both at once with no contradiction you can locate.
The needles came for that too.
So it is not survival. Or survival is one of the things it can be, on a day when that is what happens to be sitting in you.
Here is the part you have avoided writing down.
The response is not a reading of the music. It is a reading of you.
The score arrives and something answers what you currently need, and you are generally the last to know what that was.
Some days it is the arms, fast, the full route inside ninety seconds. Some days it stops at the neck and stays, and you cannot say what is being held or why that spot.
The unclear ones are worse.
Not painful. Harder. You are in water with no floor and no direction, treading where it thickens, and there is nothing to do but stay in it until it thins.
You never come out the other side with a sentence.
You come out having been somewhere.
I have written about music before. Twice. Both times I gave it a reason.
One got a year and a country splitting down the middle. One got a grave and everything I had buried in it. Both essays are honest. Both are also a maneuver. I could not write about the music, so I wrote about what the music was standing near, and I let proximity pass for contact.
That is the part I would rather not have noticed.
The same move was available here and I could feel it arriving. But the needles came before I knew anything worth building an argument out of.
The body was not informed.
The body has never once been informed.
Sometimes it goes past the needles. The face is already involved by then, so the distance is short.
What arrives is not grief. I want to be careful, because grief is the available reading and the available reading is usually the lazy one.
It is nearer to overflow.
Something has been handed more than it can hold, and the excess has to go somewhere, so it leaves through the eyes. I have cried at scores with nothing wrong in the room, on days I would have described as fine.
I am less sure about those days now.
If the response is a reading of what I need, then the arms and the neck and the eyes over a wordless eleven minutes were reporting on something I had already filed as nothing.
I could reach for the nervous system here and be accurate and say nothing.
I could reach for God, and there is a case, because angelic is the word that keeps arriving and I have not found a better one in years of looking.
Neither one tells me what I needed that night.
Something in me knows the state I am in and will not put it in language. The only instrument I have is language. So the knowledge arrives as needles in the forearms and stays there, legible to the skin and to nothing else I own.
The needles will come again the next time I play it. Forearms, then neck, then face, or only as far as the neck, or somewhere I have not been yet.
Thousands of them, separate, landing on the beat.
Reporting on a condition I will be the last to hear about.
Author’s Note
I set out to describe a sensation and found a habit, and it is not confined to music. Proximity passing for contact is available on any subject. It produces work that is honest and that also declines to touch the thing it is about, and I have no reason to believe music is the only place I have reached for it.
The harder thing arrived late.
If the response reads my condition rather than the score, then some number of days I have called ordinary were not, and I did not know at the time and do not know now which ones.
That is not a discovery I can act on.
It is a standing correction to my own account of how I am doing, issued by a part of me that does not write.
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This is fascinating!