I sat down this morning ready to begin a project I’d planned for myself: To very slowly read St. Augustine’s Confessions and annotate the entire book. It is a book I’d read in part many times in the past 30 years, searching out the parts that I thought might shed light on my very unholy condition, skipping over the “boring” parts. Only last year did I read it front to back. Early this year I listened to an audiobook version. I now think I have a moderately good grasp on the entire work and, since I am also reading Peter Brown’s biography of the the author, a better of understanding of Augustine himself.
But in doing all this I also realized that both the book and author contained multitudes I hadn’t remotely grasped. It was as though I had only just begun brushing the dust off the surface of an archaeological treasure. I now had an inkling of what was underneath, what might truly be gained by a close reading of Confessions — not quite as in lectio divina, when a faithful Christian believer (which I am not) studies texts as scripture, but as an enthusiastic scholar studies a text or as an explorer roams a previously undiscovered land. And so I have made a commitment to do this.
It was just after dawn when I sat down at my desk and began to read Book One and just then a few car horns honked outside my window. I stopped, froze like a spaniel, my head cocked upward to point my good ear toward the sound. I heard the horns again. All at once. In the random clash of tones there was music, at least as I apprehended it. There was something Spanish about it, upbeat, Salsa-like, something that would drive hard on the quarter beats, four on the floor at a tempo of about 150.
Just like that I stopped reading. I went from a place wholly within myself and in my room, marveling at one of Augustine’s astonishing opening lines — a human hauling his deathliness in a circle, hauling in a circle the evidence of his sin … — to the air above the street outside, out of my body, locked into this accident of harmony. To know myself was to know at that second I was done reading for while. The little horn clash had seduced me. It was as though a firefly had just whizzed by and I was going off to chase it. I was going to respond.
I am like a mockingbird that way. I apprehend and respond by imitation. I got out my laptop and opened up Garage Band. I pulled up the keyboard and quickly reproduced the little melody knocking around in my head on the keys — really hurrying to capture it before it flew away, as though reaching for a notepad in the dark when a song heard in a dream begins to vanish upon waking.
I figured out the note patterns and tapped them out over and over, working toward some form. I then recorded it using an electric piano sample and applied the appropriate tempo. I liked it. It was nothing like anything I’d compose on my own initiative, nothing I’d summon from the silent inner tumult of the “composer,” Beethoven-like, gazing heavenward. I just heard a few car horns outside and made a melody out of it on my computer. That wasn’t what I had planned to do.
Why did I hear music? I have been thinking and writing privately for a long time about this. A few transformative artists deepened this tendency in me to hear the world this way — James Tenney, Morton Feldman, Glenn Branca, John Cage, and among the living, Alvin Curran, Nathan Davis and Annie Gosfield. Since then, the capacity to listen to and hear the world as such has never left me. I am grateful.
For the next two hours or so I played around with the snippet, cut and paste it, copied and looped it. I orchestrated it a bit, found beats and instrumentation to add layers to it and a warm cushion underneath. I did not think about song structure, key changes, lyrics, verse and chorus or bridge. I just patched it together in a way I found pleasing. And it was two hours spent in pure absorption, the coveted flow state. Notably, I experienced none of the anxiety of writing, of producing things that carry expectations, that are supposed to possess utility and meaning. I’m going to think about that, too.
I’ll go back to Augustine soon. I can’t wait, really. The book is just sitting there now as I type, calling me back, distracting me from the very thing I am doing right now.
Is that so wrong?
What I Did Instead of Reading St. Augustine (LES Remix)