Brian Eno. The Big Ship

I want to refer back to Schopenhauer on the language of music and it's precedence over words, like we discussed over Rossini in class last Thursday. Schopenhauer writes that music speaks its own language with no words at all, but for whom (what entity or faculty) is this language? In Metaphysics, he explains that free subject of knowing is an attribute of our will, it is, "a pure intelligence without aims and intentions" (104). I like to think of it like a metaphysical radar, kind of just picking up or feeling concepts in the meta- realm. And because we experience this, we are in pain. [On a side note: I think the pain stems from not really understanding or knowing truth, per se. We are immersed in abstraction, and this is unsettling to our conscious self.] So this is where beauty comes in, to ease the pain (which is not necessarily good, since this leads us to a flattening of experience, because ending pain simply for that sake also means the abolishment of pleasure). The point is that when we experience pleasure, it is because we slough off the pain at the root of will- the listener is transformed for the duration of the experience, or aesthetic event, into a pure subject of knowing. Schopenhauer explains that, "To become a pure subject of knowing means to be quit of oneself; the pure subject of knowing occurs in our forgetting ourselves in order to be absorbed entirely in the intuitively perceived objects, so that they alone are left in consciousness" (105, emphasis mine). I believe this is the state in which our will becomes vulnerable or receptive to the language of music. Brian Eno's, "The Big Ship," illustrates this point beautifully. If you listen closely (turn it up, lie on your back and close your eyes) the intro starts to lightly tap into your consciousness and wedges its harmonies into it to allow for the melodies to pick you up and take you awaaaaaaaaay into the state of a pure subject of knowing. I hear potential in every count as it builds or unfurls into a kind of slowly escalating crescendo, and I am moved and reminded of the vastness of human potential, and my own. The gentle fade-out slowly returns my conscious, pained will-subjectivity, like a gift. What do you hear?