Loops

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else.

One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is.

--Daniel Banenboim.

Minimalism: to express everything in a single note or the simplest and faintest of brush strokes on a blank canvas that is at once entirely free and spontaneous and at the same time the product of great learning and technique. A single note that expresses the different worlds: the natural, the human, and the cosmic. It is reached if one slows down the passage of time , frame by frame, to a single point.

There is nothing to say after the point has been reached. The first note emerges from silence and holds that silence within its innermost chamber; its very structure is permeated by that nothingness; and it must return to that primal state.

If one unravels the note one can hear ancient and modern tunes: the co-mingling of a timeless Japanese stillness that dreams itself into the pain of longing from a Persian poem...and then, with a slight shift of emphasis, to a Highland lament. If one is attentive one can just discern a return to 19th century classical Vienna or the onward rush of the first settlers, frontiersmen, seeking out open spaces and new futures. The first note is always old because of its relation to the origin but also always new because it contains the unexpected, all that hasn't been thought of...

The first note has all the freshness and innocence of the first times, but all of the regret and sadness of the last times as well. A sound thought: a thought without mind. Each voice is present, each vital-as in an infinite stone bridge; to take away but one would be reduce the whole to nothing....

A line of stars would be of no interest to us. But a pattern where some are bunched together and others are hopelessly isolated in the infinite distances, forlorn, as if rejected by fate, is a different matter; in other regions some burn with a scintillating brilliance whilst others quietly fade into insignificance; these fantastical differences remind us of our own fabulous story . ("The creation of the universe is as the creation of a single soul").

The constant star that never wavers, that is a sure guide; the one that dazzles all others with its white light; the blue , mournful one; the star that never stays in the same place, that one has to search and search the skies for until it is found; the one that zig-zags through the universe. Is this not a better way of thinking of life?

-----Swami.

I originally wrote these words after listening to John Adams, but have to repeat them-and if I could understand the nature of this compulsion there would be no more point of writing-when thinking of Reich.

Structure and light. The red tower