Spectral Voices: Tell Your Instincts to Mellow Out (Part 1)
August 31, 2010 § 1 Comment
At first fleeting glance, you are instantly concerned. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking because I’ve been there.)
“Oh no!” is the initial knee-jerk outburst. It’s followed immediately by a veritable avalanche of rhetorical questions. You’ve backslid into the sloughs of outrage. There is a terrific profusion of interrobangs:
“What?! Are you kidding me?! Album names like, Innertones, Coalescence, and Sky?! Cover art consisting of funerary fonts tugged gently into liquid nautilus vortices, transparent sepia monoliths superimposed on sepia silver linings, and the last whispers of autumn refracted in tranquil streams?! Tracks with titles like, ‘Noctilucent Clouds‘, ‘Nuage‘, ‘Primeval Forest‘, and ‘Heartbeat to Avalon‘?!”
“Wait.” Now, you’ll try to be funny, but it’ll come off cruel. “I know this guy. He’s some kind of warlock right?! Or maybe a prophet of Baal?! What’s his side project again?! ‘Cradled in the Arms of Moloch’?! ‘David Koresh and the Ouija Priests’?! Something like that?!”
Instincts recommend flight, so you shift strategies, resorting to tact in order to lubricate your exit. “I bet it’s cool. I’m personally just not into the whole Age of Aquarius thing. Agree to disagree?”
And away you go, unscathed. Close call.
Incredible, isn’t it, the intensity of that reflex? How suddenly it overtakes you, almost as if you’ve always been angry at curly letters, ripples, and clouds, almost as if the decision to hate this stuff was hardwired/socialized in the core of your mind long ago. Strangely, you’ve not heard a single note.
Yes, this sort of automatic prejudging may very well be an inevitable by-product of our inductive faculties. But need we give in so completely, so easily?
If you could withhold final judgment for a moment, you might actually grow to like this, you know? How about telling that grumpy little magistrate inside you to mellow out for two seconds? How about listening to a couple of testimonies before condemning the defendant. (By the way, if you are entering our little hermeneutic here already a fan of the whole ‘Age of Aquarius thing’, this admonition is not for you. You are definitely going to like this.)
Click here for part 2.
