Third Wheel

"Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common."

Iain McGilchrist, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World"

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Dear Alex,

What might be the most brutal thing you do to yourself everyday - without knowing it?

Now you are a clever one, another may say. You read more than sleep, work less than play, love beyond cash. The control of self will, even if mastered within our system of emissaries, becomes reduced to a “talk about what we have done. Point A to Point B.” 

Strange enough, the comparative language - most brutal or more clever - can implicate a competitive tongue of your “little soldiers” distracting you from distractions while the crescendo to superlative and silence in music thrills your master. Without its highest and base octaves, a song turns tepid, maybe as intense as cruel, hovering over a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. And stranger still, joy is born of grief, an eclipse disclosing the most dazzling wonder.

My points from B to A are elongating, my emissaries checking in and out between posts, making false reports to the master, my mastering of points in loop getting nowhere. For most of our worries trifling with the Market, that “Invisible Hand” your physicist friend is trying to handle, we lose sleep and gain fear. The best of our computations and their commendations could not be more brutal in revealing our tone-deaf emissaries, especially the clever ones correct in grammar. Without our knowing, our comforts inflate to religion, habits to manifesto.

As usual in the tick tock of my morning before work, I walked my dog up and down the block, passing a few senior neighbors who too were strolling with their dogs, crossing the path of a young runner in her sports bra, pondering if the bra line liberates, commemorates or disintegrates gender equality, asking if I ought to be asking more, loosening my grip on the dog leash, catching a moment to look at a tricycle left in a garden, chastening myself for not having bought one for my kid in her toddler years, flashing back to the bra line that no longer aligns with my myopia, slipping from the big picture to enter a morning as brutal in beauty masked and muted by wishes for the emissary soon to be trampled by the tricycle.

Yours, Kate