1. I feel like these thoughts address the question of why music is meaningful, too. Music taps into the mental programming in some hack-y way, directly addressing the constitutent subroutines that are called in our comprehension of emotion, comfort, social relations, etc. without calling on the larger routines themselves. We have trouble talking about “tension and release” in music in ways that seem meaningful because these words are just vague metaphors for things that have no names – we are actually trying to talk about variables and functions, so to speak, in our mental programming. Music manipulates elements of the mental program whose relationship to experience is technical rather than mimetic. Music is a bit like one of those neurological experiments where an electrical impulse sent directly into the brain creates certain perceptions, except that music’s insertion point is hierarchically higher. Or, if you prefer, music is a bit like “POKE“.

2. Part of my problem in writing these things down is that I have been away from writing for so long. Thinking in terms of language is a habit to be cultivated and maintained, distinct from the skill of simply thinking. I have been struggling in these past entries with an awkward translation process, from the non-linguistic to the linguistic. The more time I spend in the realm of the linguistic, the more likely that my thoughts will spontaneously organize themselves along linguistic lines. And the more exacting and clear my writing will be. Hopefully.