Songs and identity

On a rare afternoon with no urgent homework, I take some leisure time to explore new music online. I come up with Maya Filipic – one of many hidden gems buried in Jamendo’s Creative-Commons music collection. I find I love the first song.

The first time I listen to the song, I’m enraptured. It expresses emotions and experiences that I’ve never felt, or if I’ve felt them, have never vocalized in that way. The song is new and vibrant and inspiring. So I do what’s most reasonable: I listen to it again and again and again.

Once I’ve listened to the song around 20 times, something has changed. In a best-case scenario, the song is still beautiful and poignant – but I know its every turn and every twist; it no longer surprises me, and because of this, loses some of its excitement. In the worst case, something about the song still appeals to me but I keep listening to it mainly out of habit; I’m sick of it. Either way, the song is like an expendable resource – I can only enjoy it so long before it gets “used up” and I have to find something else. This pattern really grates on me. What a pathetic, zero-sum way to live my music-loving life!

At the same time, I’m confused by a pretty simple question: What changed, exactly? What does “getting used to” (and in some cases, “using up” enjoyment in) a song entail? Clearly the song isn’t finite in and of itself; as a non-empirical and subjective entity, it doesn’t have tangible physical limitations and operates on the logic of ideas, not particles. And just as clearly, the combinations of sounds that relay the song haven’t changed at all; they are exactly the same as the first time I heard them. The only way to account for my increasing familiarity with the song is to suppose that I’ve changed.

That’s easy to say. But what does “I’ve changed” mean? It’s more than just a change in my subjective experience, because I want to be experiencing the song as new and surprising and I can’t. Something about my stable self is creating that experience. But the change is subjective and interior to me; it isn’t physical and it isn’t directly observable in the empirical world. Thus the change has something to do with my identity.

More specifically, my identity has been familiarized with the perspective on the world occupied by the song. This means that the song will feel intimately familiar to me and not novel. But this should also have implications for how I look at the rest of the world, shouldn’t it? I won’t necessarily notice this overtly – but in the process of familiarizing with a song, aren’t I also adding to my ways of looking at the world? By this logic, every time I latch onto a new song that I like, I’m anchoring my experience to new perspectives and new corners of reality.

Still, it’s a shame that this process involves “using up” a song in such a way that I stop enjoying it. By familiarizing with a song, I’m increasing my experience base and my ability to look at the emotional world from different angles. But this process kind of requires that I lose the distant admiration of the song that I originally had. It would be nice to have my cake and eat it, too.

People are different from songs. Songs in and of themselves can’t change; they can just be interpreted through different lenses and perspectives. But people are a moving target, subjectively speaking. As I get to know someone, I’m learning more about them and increasing familiarity. If they never change one whit, and if I get to know them very very thoroughly, then it’s possible to tire of someone’s company. But two factors thwart any attempt to really thoroughly get to know someone:

1. People have countless layers of complexity that defy full comprehension. Indeed, the attempt to comprehensively understand someone will probably change your perspective in the process, opening up new interpretations of the object personality.
2. People are constantly growing and shifting in response to experience, and in response to your intersubjective flows. We’re moving targets by nature, and in accordance with Heisenberg, we can’t observe or learn about each other without influencing each other.

I’m testing out a new mind-trick (I love mind tricks) to feel better whenever I have that feeling of regret at getting so close to something that I enjoy its novelty less: All of the grounding for that excitement and appreciation is inside me now. I’ve eaten it up, and it makes up part of the experience base through which I interpret life. If I feel like I’ve lost that excitement and novelty, that’s because I’ve digested the excitement and added it to my identity. That’s something to be happy about.

Snowfall and endings

The snow has taken its sweet time arriving, but now it looks like it is here to stay. Saturday evening saw a dusting that just covered the grasses, and today that’s being reinforced by a more serious onslaught of chubby, stubborn flakes. The sidewalks are treacherously slippery. The flakes themselves are silent and focused, intent on their task of closing out the fall.

This is exam week at Middlebury, but for me it’s much less stressful than last week. That’s my pattern at Middlebury: the final week of classes is a massive stressful crunch, and exam week itself is relatively relaxed. I have three take-home exams due between Wednesday and Friday, so I can’t consider it a vacation. Just the same, I am acutely aware that in about four days, I will be at home relaxing; and in about six days and ten hours, Gabi will arrive in the airport from Cameroon and we will be together. I’m more than ready for the relaxation and closure of December vacation.

I’ve had many good moments this semester. I remember the satisfying “click” that assured me, as I decided to change to a joint Sociology/Psychology major, that I had made the right choice. I remember meeting with my friend Amanda for long thought-walks. I remember first recognizing, and ceding to, the odd and out-of-place yet deeply compelling urge to take time for daily meditation. I remember the many moments in my invigorating African anthropology class when our professer would reveal some corner of his personal reactions to the themes and conflicts we discussed, leaving us deeply touched.

It’s also been a straining and disconcerting semester. I have experienced periodic “existential crises” all fall – concerning my major, concerning my passion for Integral Theory and lack of clarity about how to enter into the Integral community, concerning my post-graduation plans. Sure, graduation is still a year and a half off… but for the first time in my life, I am closer to graduating college than I am to entering college.

Guilty regrets flit through my head: Why haven’t I been involved in more activities up to this point? Where has the time gone? Have I wasted it? I know these thoughts are ridiculous. I have pushed myself, my growth, and my time-availability to the limit during most of my five semesters here so far. Just the same, these regrets bely an underlying fear and panic that I will somehow “under-engage” Middlebury and miss out on opportunities – which in turn belies my intense valuation on taking the most out of Middlebury. I can then take that value and rest comforted in the knowledge that I am making every effort to optimize my growth and engagement here, and that I will continue to do so.

Distance can be respect

I remember talking to my parents about my passion for learning how people think and perceive the world, and applying that to make communication more fluid and improve understanding between conflicting interests. Their laughing response was “Good luck”… impling that this aspiration of mine is too pie-in-the-sky for anyone to consider seriously.

I don’t like sharing personal thoughts and having them laughed down or dismissed. That happened with my mother a lot. It violates my general definition of “intimacy”: having confidence in someone close to you that they will validate and sympathize with the thoughts and feelings you share. I think that kind of violation can only happen when 1) you assume that the person you’re sharing with, will be coming from the same perspective as you, and 2) the person is not psychologically conscious enough to recognize and counterbalance that assumption. And the deeper and more personal the thoughts you share, the more likely that that assumption will be false. It’s like hugging a horse that isn’t aware that it might step on you or cuff your ear if it moves – you can come close to it, but you can get hurt if you do so lacking an awareness of your differences. That sort of caution doesn’t mean you mistrust the horse’s intentions; it means you understand and respect the nature and limits of your shared subjective space. And it’s hard to step back and develop that awareness with a parent – who, after all, taught you what closeness meant in the first place.

I just likened my parents to a horse. I don’t know how I feel about that.

Back to Rutland

It’s nice to be back in Vermont. I was worried about getting lazy or getting roped into my parents’ routine too much, but that is less of an immediate threat than it was two years ago. I am reading, collecting myself, and progressively getting ready to return to Middlebury. Vermont doesn’t change much – I return to it with ever different eyes but the place is basically the same. It’s a good way to track the ways in which I grow, I guess – there is nowhere else that I know so well, that I can use as reflective benchmark of my growth.

Our cat Sophie is thinner, eating less, losing some hair. She is as affectionate as ever and still loud, cuddly and energetic, but liver disease is slowly taking its toll on her. Donna sustains her with subcutaneous fluids every other day and nightly pills. Rudi is limping and having trouble standing up sometimes; his back left leg looks slightly withered and shakes when he stands still. Donna thinks he has lyme disease and my father insists that it’s nothing, a sad suggestion that he’s unwilling to admit the possibility that our pets are getting old. Both animals are a vivid reminder of how rapidly and inexorably life goes on. I might not see Sophie again when I come home from college in December. But I am not sad; the cat has had a happy and fulfilled life with loving parents, and life always moves on.

I’ll be back in Middlebury, back to the fray within the week. With new eyes and new energy, I hope; I will need it this semester.