Birds

Listening to math rock while I sit out the front, on the porch, watching the birds eat suet balls from one of the two feeders I hung out a few years back.

They mostly lay empty all year until I remember to order more bird feed which lasts often less than two weeks. 5kg of feed and 6 suet balls.

The little bastards devour it voraciously. Mostly tits, though sometimes the odd big fat stupid pigeon lumbers along and parks near the feeder, hoping some will spill over when the little ones have at it. Occasionally a magpie or other corvid sneaks past and attempts to pull the whole feeder off the tree, sometimes with success, until I notice them and bang the window. The little robins are also never far away; fiercely territorial, they will often chase the other birds away from their backyard though the admonitions seem to go unheeded after the initial fracas.

The endorphins flood through my system as I stare out at the parked car and watch the wheels turn and the windscreen warp and bulge. This must be what it’s like to be on hallucinogenics.

Music evokes much the same response, how funny it is that we make harmonies and patterns in the air, in time, and then regard it as pleasing or comforting. We stain the canvas of time with our noise, proof of our existence, and on the next beat we do it again. The chain of events, the repetition, is a pattern that we create for ourselves and others, we look at it as having inherent order or “truth”. As if it is scratching away the dull surface of reality to reveal the lustrous foil of truth underneath.

This is why I think people see fractals on acid, it’s our brain doing the same thing — looking for patterns. We are incredibly good at spot the difference (or spot the similarity); it’s our brains default mode.

Evolutionarily we obviously developed this to tell what things are safe and to spot anomalies. To build our own natural intuition about our environs.

Where though does our appreciation of symmetry and music come from?

Why is 4/4 and 120bpm seemingly a standard rhythm that we can all intuit ?

I’ve heard it’s got something to do with the heart rate. Maybe as a baby we hear our mother’s heartbeat for months during our development which cements a kind of beat of life deep in our primordial brains.

We find patterns everywhere. Who’s to say there isn’t symmetry where it’s not obviously present ?

If only we could rotate through some higher dimension and see our reality from a different plane — observing from a new dimension like in the 1884 novella Flatland, or that Vonnegut book, I wonder would the universe make more or less sense.

I wonder if consciousness even exists at higher dimensions, is our consciousness just a feature of the dimensionality of our universe. Like the walls of a glass beaker bound the water that vibrates in concentric circles as a T-rex stomps noisily from outside the jeep, we are bounded by our 4 dimensional existence; perceiving individuality instead of the fact that we are all just resonating chords of universal matter in a higher dimension, with the length of our strings set by the hollow body of the universe.

I move back inside, I’ve gotten cold now. The sweat on my skin clearly doing its job. The endorphins burn a little slower, the long tail of the runners high.

I finish my existential journey and lie on the couch (still sweaty, my wife wouldn’t be impressed), and eye the guitar on its stand.

Music, I think, connects us, we resonate together, we resonate individually, we resonate with the air and the earth and the water. It reminds us that we are all the same, we are all vibrations. Just energy and matter.