On Losing the Concrete

I want to focus more clearly on what it is that I’ve lost, perceptively speaking, and what I retain. This is in itself a rather ironic effort, because much of what I retain in terms of concrete mental percepts is like peripheral vision. I have internal sensory impressions that seem a steady surround to my inner life, but if I turn my conscious attention to them, they evaporate into mere ghosts teasing the edges of my mind’s eye, my mind’s ear.

And yet, even as they disappear, something remains.

I’ve mentioned before that this is the case with my internal sense of music: “Shadows of sound winnow away if I try to grasp them firmly.” I cannot call a chord to mind and hear it as I could before I started brain-bleeding and seizing. I’ve little left of the inner ear that lets one reproduce loved music and hear the notes resound as they would if ringing in the room outside. The concrete sensory percept is reduced to shadow impressions.

I have mourned this loss and others, raged against the dying of the light. Over time, however, I started to feel rather embarrassed about having temper tantrums over the ways of the world, to accept that this is simply the way things are. (The Tao means the Way, you know, and centuries of wisdom thumb their collective nose at the various forms of denial and resistance that doom us to tedious, pointless battles with the way things are.)

Once I started letting go of fear and anger and letting acceptance take root, I began to find much to contemplate and discover in my altered sensorium. As I have described elsewhere, I found that while I no longer have the concrete sensory impressions of music that I used to enjoy, I retain musical data on an unconscious level. What I’d like to examine here is what I do retain consciously. One thing I’ve gained from my alterations is that I’ve come to understand more about what makes up music in the mind as I’ve explored the gaps and untouched capacities in my inner musical milieu.

We tend to think of music as a seamless entity, but of course it is made up of many components. In listening to music, we appreciate the gestalt of these factors, but basic musical training allows us to decompose musical sounds into a variety of elements. Generally we are taught to recognize such elements as rhythm, pitch, dynamic volume, and timbre. We process these characteristics all the time, not just in listening to music, but in understanding speech, and comprehension of them is undisturbed for me.

To understand where my limitations lie, we have to look at music from another angle. I’ll turn to language as an analogy. Let’s consider two groups of people who have trouble with speech due to neurological damage in different areas of the brain. First, there are those with Broca’s aphasia. These individuals can understand what is said to them, draw meaning from speech, but they have great difficulty producing it, and what they do manage to speak, with great effort, lacks grammatical structure: “Car hit.” Then there are those with Wernicke’s aphasia. These people are deeply disabled by the loss of comprehension and meaning in speech—but they can produce long, fluent, grammatical streams of nonsense: “Marching you know the summer frog in the happiest hospital wanted some of your hairbrush to excavate, thank you.” What these two sets of aphasic people show us is that, in a greatly simplified sense, the brain’s parallel processing of speech separates out responsibility for comprehending semantics, the meaning, the content of speech from responsibility for understanding grammar and syntax, the form of speech.

When I examine my internal attempts to produce music, what I experience is much more like Broca’s aphasics than Wernicke’s.

For example, if I try to recall a song to mind, what appears is vague, fluctuant. It is near impossible for me to hear more than one instrument or voice in the piece simultaneously. If I try to focus on a specific element, say the timbre of a guitar, it escapes my grasp and becomes more insubstantial, retreating frustratingly to the periphery of my internal perceptive frame. I can no longer call into being in my mind’s ear a basic chord. I cannot accomplish simple things, like conjuring a pure tone in my head and altering its volume to hear it crescendo and decrescendo.

But here’s the interesting part: if I try to hear a note starting at the threshold of hearing and raise its volume in my mind, while I can’t actually hear the dynamic shift, the meaning and impact of such a swell is intact. I feel myself straining to catch the sound at the floor of volume perception, feel the sense of growth as I try to make the volume swell, and brace myself against the assault of the sound as it would impact me in the real at a roaring 125dB. While I cannot produce a simple harmonic interval in my mind without subvocalizing the two notes, the musical and emotional meaning of a given interval remains fully resonant for me. When I try to sound them, despite their apparent aural absence, thirds and fifths feel stable while fourths and sevenths evoke a sense of musical tension and movement. A minor third has a somber, regal character; a tritone is ominous; a second feels buzzingly close.

When I try to listen to music in my head, while the elements of form are achingly vague, the content of the piece emerges in fullness. I can’t really hear the music playing out in real time—I get mere bits and snippets—but the sense of the piece unfolds in real time nevertheless. I experience the tension and release, the emotional impact of the harmonic progression, the narrative of the melodic line.

It has been interesting to realize that I am not as impaired as I had feared. What I have lost is the conscious ability to generate musical form and hear it in my head. I’ve lost nothing of musical content, however—the resonant meaning of music. I can listen to music playing in the world with absolute comprehension. And the conscious knowledge I’ve lost of musical grammar has not disrupted my body’s unconscious knowledge of it. I can still sing, and give voice in the flesh to things I cannot hear abstractly.

I have found, once I accepted with grace the fact that I have experienced losses in my sensorium, that I have in fact not lost so very much at all.