We went to a concert yesterday afternoon. The music was by Do'a. The place was an outside amphitheater in the quietly rich town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. The afternoon was delightful.
Do'a, if you don't know, is two people, Ken LaRoche and Randy Armstrong, who are proficient on twenty-five instruments from countries around the world. Their music, as Paul Winter has testified, feeds a hungry soul, and on this afternoon, full of sunlight and gossiping breezes, we soaked up their music as if it were water for a thirsty man.
We were sitting outside on folding chairs, all of us quiet and attentive. As I stared meditatively at the patch of ground between my feet I finally noticed, though they'd been there all along, the ants playing Italian traffic near the Coliseum at 5 o'clock, darting off like bits of dark sparklers in every direction, no particular navigation to follow except for whiffs of pheromones and the clicking metronome of instinct.
Now, any run-of-the-mill opinion writer would sit down and write a single allegory about human life, music, blind movement, and purpose. Not I. Well, not exactly. I offer several allegories so that this piece can service several audiences and thereby increase my reputation and fame.
THE CHRISTIAN ALLEGORY: God plays celestial music all the time, the music of His grace, and it is a music to refresh the soul. Yet we in all our creatureliness, in a stupid denial of the soul, go meanly about the earth like ants, following material navigations, deaf to the music that invests the world around us. We hear only the din of our own desires. We are base creatures whom God has chosen to love. We must give in to His love and lift up our head to worship.
THE EXISTENTIALIST ALLEGORY: Of course we're like ants. There's no God anyway, or if there is one, we ought to deny him because he's a mean dude who likes to see people suffer. We're nothing but lonely creatures doing our beingness, finding our essence by our existence. The music? Vibrations of molecules, randomness. If you want to interpret it as music, fine. That's your freedom. We're all free. Too bad.
THE BUDDHIST ALLEGORY: You have within you, brother, both ant and music, both earth and soul, though the former often takes over the latter and you are fooled by illusion, by earthly visions. You must find your original face, extinguish earthly desire, open the mind and have no preconceptions about the nature of things. The ant of worldly want must give way to the music of your own self.
And so on. I suppose I could have added the Sociobiologist Allegory, the Madison Avenue Allegory, the Libertarian Allegory, but enough. Each of these, of course, has a mutual problem: they're not seeing what's really there. Any person mouthing such an allegory has to wrench reality to fit a particular Procrustean bed and thus continually re-forms the world into his or her own image instead of the other way around. And each has some meta-idea about the way things are. The Christian must presuppose God, a dubious proposition (a "hypothesis" as Laplace called it). The Existentialist must make a virtue of despair; without despair, he is meaningless. The Buddhist must recreate the fiction that man is at the center of the universe and all else is illusion. That meta-idea is like a radio that receives only one frequency. And one frequency does not a good philosophy make, if we can mean by philosophy some explanation of how things hang together.
Of course we all make up the world we live in -- that is what the mind does with the information streaming into it. But there is a difference between making a map according to the information we have about the territory "out there" and making up a Narnia that exists nowhere but "in there." There is no allegory to the music and the ants. There are simply facts and questions: Do the ants hear the music? If so, what is it to them? Do they have any information about what sound is? Why can't I hear the ants? There is no mystery here except the mystery of fact, and that is mystery enough. In a sense allegories are facts, but they are the facts of a fear, a species of insulation against the fact that each of us will die and be forgotten. But instead of creating fictions to shore up our sense of a crumbling self, we should reverse course, dive more deeply into the world, to find our trusses and pillars. We have to try to understand the ants as ants, not as allegorical pawns. And in the same fashion we must understand ourselves as physical creatures inhabiting a physical earth full of unlimited unknown fact, possessed of a mind able to delve, solve, and build.