And Now, Musical 'DNA'...

        There is really only one thing missing from 2011. A lightbulb that makes the world glow, because that is what it’s doing. Crisscrossing streams of information are circling the globe in nanoseconds, and there is no place to hide from surveillance. Bin Laden’s neighbor tweeted the raid? One simply could not have predicted a future like the one we’re inhabiting. 

But among the myriad benefits there are potential pitfalls. We are swept up periodically in the newest gadget, our concentration gets fractured, and we are scarcely able remember what (and where) we came from. The present is always taken for granted. Its particular sheen seems expected after no more than a moment’s reflection.  But there is always art, the artists, always showing us what we are, what we really look like. 

Thanks to them, we have recorded our history. Historians get to choose their words too, and while textbooks might not exactly be poetry, they tell a story. But now look at what we have here: the internet. A globally accessible, instantaneous recording device. Immediately following an event, certain words are chosen to describe it, and connections between other stories are formed by virtue of those particular chosen words.

So, if you don’t mind using your imagination for a moment: the bowl of stories we have told about ourselves over the years, the milliennia, is filling up, and we are noticing the extent to which we share common threads. It is a beautiful thing. Messy, but beautiful. Sports are especially scrutinized. In fact, nothing is missed. Every play broken down into its smaller parts, fractions of seconds added and subtracted like time were some precious metal, replays shown countlessly for maximum viewing pleasure, and exposure.  

                

          Are not our eyes full up? Are we not approaching some vanishing point where the present slips through the cracks just as it happens? Are we getting so good at dissecting reality that our building block skills have suffered? Are we succumbing to entropy? Surely not. Luckily, this field of webworking drones (that would be us) are using the instant reflecting machine to learn about themselves. 

         But yet we have no endgame. We are struggling to locate the meta-narrative that shall at long last weave together the disparate strands of humanity. What is this? What is our abiding, connecting story? Why should we be searching for it separately? Why should we be searching for it at all? What should we be doing to search for it? 

       My short answer is read a Wikipedia article daily. Focus on stories of people, not just facts and information. My long answer is I think religions are growing tired of being forced to distinguish themselves, old symbols are losing their meaning, new visually-based languages are cropping up every day, and it is increasingly easy to see oneself in the other.

              

        Japan? Those weren’t Japanese people; they were people. Tucson (have we forgotten about Gaby Giffords, or what?) taught us an important lesson, and the President certainly shone, urging us to rise above our divides once and for all… But didn’t we see a little divisiveness sneak out of Donald Trump a few months later and get covered ad nauseum by the media?

        And maybe Bin Laden’s death will once and for all silence the whispers about Obama’s legitimacy, but who’s to say? What, exactly, is at the root of the brutal partisan bickering? Is it our need to vanquish an opponent (Charlie Sheen has synopsized a cultural infatuation with one simple word)? Or is it more primal, more psychologically elusive, more, gulp… biblical? What if it is just fear of realizing how closely connected we are?

        Of course I am being coy, this is precisely what it is. We are all humans, and we can’t stand it. How can we all be so the damn same? Has not the Creator left some secret codes to unlock an independent existence, that we all must figure separately? Well I believe he has and Apple makes a revolutionary product to hold and store and play them. I am talking about songs; I am talking about music.  

       What if we all picked our favorite songs? A list of our favorite songs that together told our own unique story? That would be beautiful, wouldn’t it? We all can’t be musicians (recording artists, I mean), so why not choose our ‘musical DNA’ based on memories, history, and community, and start seeing where we overlap, where we share, where we unite? Seems a small but important step toward furthering our understanding of this ever-expanding marketplace of opinions.

        Maybe then we’d see the glow in our flesh and not our machines.