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The Joy of Rhythm

Bob Ashley, Canadian guitarist, explains the essential joy of music :

"Nothing has changed for me in 40 years of doing classical guitar. It's the daily re-enactment of the 'somatic' thrill in music, the exact same feeling of the 4 year-old body enacting itself in nursery rhyme motion, which I seek. You see, I see no mind/body distinction, that being merely a metaphorical fabrication at best. We think, feel, with bodies. We do guitar with our body and the music does something back to the body, if we're lucky. Music understands what is lost upon our Cartesian fictions. We are only bodies that think with our bodies. No matter which way you cut it, the mind is only metaphor for a dedicated bodily function.

Children understand this, somatic liberation. With education, though, we attempt to beat this out of them. Mainly, education succeeds, which is why so few people really, really get anything out of music. For most people it music is a dead language, in part because they think it is a 'mind' thing.

  Poetry in motion

The story is exactly the same for poetry, which education, in its grandiose stupidity manages to make it out to be something difficult, something only certain people can do. Horse poop. Every kid is a master of the babble for its own sake, which, of course, is what poetry, at bottom, is. Directionless babble which feeds somatic hunger. And babbling makes the body feel so good, also something every kid knows.

Music and poetry are the primitive arts, and if this concept seems to ring true it is because our primal memory recalls dancing around the bonfire, singing incantations to the gods in the trees and stars. Physical acts. Athletic expressions and receptions of spirituality, in rhythms, from heartbeat to lunar encirclings and beyond. There are no other kinds.

If music doesn't make you dizzy with physical delight, then woebetide unto you! The child is lost."

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