Music has always been the greatest passion of mine. It has carried me through turmoil and strife, moved and inspired me and taken me on journeys throughout my life, no mere words could convey. Almost every piece of music that I know, every adagio and lyric, resonates with me to a large degree. Each piece carries with it an association of the past. From the opening bars of Paul Simon to the humdrum of Motown, my youth is a complex mass of echoic memory, stored as a collection of great compositions and choruses.
Certain types of music or specific song, evokes not only memory, but emotion from my childhood and beyond. Yet regardless of its positive or indeed negative connotations, music captivates me in such a way, like the air that I breathe; I could not live without. In my earlier years, I sensed a strong attachment with music, but didn’t fully comprehend its profound ability to inspire, to comfort, or to shape my entire existence. I only knew that the moments of complete and utter joy I felt, the only moments I no longer felt isolated, cast out or afraid of my future existence, was when the music played and I would allow myself to be consumed by the melodies and the beautiful rhythm of its poetic lyric.
My inner feelings and personal identity however, were constantly complex and conflicting. I felt a pull in an uncertain direction, a desire to shake away from the shackles of a mundane world. My everyday experiences were beginning to influence my direction towards a journey of hope, and music was and perhaps is a personal window beyond a spiritual disconnect.
My personal experiences of love and loss illustrate my life as a subjective self-encounter on an individual journey within my own future existence; an existence that begins with great emptiness and ends with a clearer understanding of my purpose in life. The analogy of music is a thread that runs throughout, as my memory of these experiences are saturated with the echoic recollection of certain songs, lyrics and compositions associated within my journey. The question remains as to whether my experiences were made more profound by the existence of music, or that my associative memory of the music as having intense power was indeed instigated by the quest for spiritual reconnection; lost by the absence of music as a form of art.
I have at last found clarity and inner peace, and am no longer simply being; understanding the importance of discovering this spiritual reconnection with others, that is so often lost in the midst of the modern world in which we live.
For me, the journey I have experienced sees a continued and persistent daydream. My personal trace-awakening in this instance has also reaffirmed my belief in the existence of a utopia, not merely on an individual basis, but as far as the notion of a widespread social utopia. My idea of utopia has moved from a matter of hope to that of belief; of concrete faith in its existence, regardless of whether I reach it. The current desire is that of a wishful landscape of beauty, of sublimity. I certainly hope that my experiences may help towards a utopia that is no longer abstract, as music excites and stimulates the capacity of Utopian dreaming and in my case, saved my soul.