song

What is is that we do when we're writing songs? Eight tones in a scale, comfortable chord patterns, moon-June-croon rhyming? Shouldn't all the combinations have been used up by now?

How is it? So many thousands (millions?) of songs have been written and shared, and yet each time a song is written it is an intensely personal, intensely public expression of a particular here-and-now. Each song dances the yin and yang of individual struggle for understanding, for notice, for meaning, for life.

Is it just happenstance that the majority of songs are love songs? No. Can't be. Biology, which humans rightly suppress for its violent tendencies, asserts its fundamental right to evaluation here. In a love song, "what is best" is crystalized through the lens of discernment of survival of the fittest. Isn't it this crystallization that forms the foundation of dreams & hopes--valued for its clarity, returned to in memory for guidance when vision becomes murky and tangled again?

Songs are always a link to the past. The distilled voices of humankind contribute to the form, shape, and content of a song. And, true to its most ancient function as a medium of storage and transmission of information, each song adds to the web of long-lasting communication in which all members of culture swim.

Future sense is present as well. By its public nature, by the innate understanding that it will be sung for an audience, even an audience of oneself, song invariably carries hope. There WILL be a future for which the message has meaning and importance. At least that. At the very least.

At most? How far can it go?

The ancient psalms celebrate civilization and the city interchangeably and indistinguishably from God. Twenty centuries of hymns document the transformation of a distant God who can be addressed only with hope and faithfulness to a proactive understanding that "we are God's hands" within the personal interactions that form and maintain community.

Strong as the symbol of the natural world remains, the promise of life's potential is hard-pressed to fit in nineteenth-century-style paintings of religious entities surrounded by clouds and rays of the sun. In century twenty-one, the elemental forces of energy that hold stars in their courses are being stolen from their work to snapshot bits of ourselves and all that we value and love. In an explosion of communication, older linear progressions of knowledge are being reformed by the breaking of finite bonds of material transmission--all to enable the ability to encapsulate these cherished bits of humanity-turned-digital.

Each photo and blog entry stores an evaluation by one person that THIS is important right now. Of all the directions I can point my camera, THIS one is the one that matters. Of all the issues I can comment on, THIS one is the one I choose. Of all the songs floating around the audio world, THESE are the ones that speak my message. From the state of my heart, this is my song.

Time is that human invention which enables memory and vision, but its power comes at the expense of trapping humanity in its linearity. To the practical mind, time is a fundamental limiting factor, but thank goodness humans are not always practical. To the poet, songwriter and scientist, time is not immutable. In fact, the, the linearity of time has been constantly challenged by exploration, by love, by religion and by hope. This challenge is sung as the promise of new life, of undying love, of resurrection and redemption. As the challenge grows, the promise grows.

And the medium for the promise has grown. Song, while retaining at its core the intimacy of the lullaby, has amplified its reach to the concert hall, to top-10 radio, to mass-produced CD's to vibrant internet musicfile-sharing.

As Flikr and MySpace evolve into a fluctuating primordial digital soup, can anyone predict the new life that will coalesce from the myriad time-linked, people-linked photos, observations, and reminiscences? Could there have been any advance prediction that the tiny sea-creatures of Earth's ancient seas would be carried forth (long after the seas had changed their composition and their inhabitants otherwise extinct) as the blood and lungs of a newborn infant letting loose his first cry?

Will the life-force of the future recognize the humanity of its roots? How can it not? Perhaps someday instead of elemental particles of neutron, proton and quark, the qualities of the world will be labeled "cherish," "melody," and "kinship."

It's a given. From a currently-unattainable but foreseeable position outside the infinity of time, Alpha and Omega share a point in space-time. Resurrection, just like love, just like community, just like hope, exists where it always has, in the singing of the song.