Strike a chord on a piano. We say the music is \u201cout there,\u201d but half of it is manufactured in a dark factory behind the eyes. I sit at the piano believing I am responding to the room, the audience, the acoustics, a cough in the third row, a siren down the street. But I responding to what those things become inside me. The cough can be an insult, or a percussion instrument. The cough remains a cough. I supply the courtroom. Improvisation exposes the operation. The mind divides existence into two departments, “in here” and “out there”, then loses the paperwork. The melody outside and the harmony inside keep colliding. A note changes the listener; the listener changes the note by hearing it. Reality is the feedback screech when microphone and speaker discover they are the same conspiracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writer Jan Cox, who died twenty years ago, proposed everything that appears to be outside us, is actually (or also) inside us. The entire circus we call physical reality may be the internal machinery projected outward, wearing a trench coat and pretending it never met us. This doesn’t get much traction at dinner parties. If I try explaining my enthusiasm, my friends leave for the hummus and celery sticks. They think I’m sell a new age retreat but I’m not. I’m not saying there is no objective world. An 18 wheeler remains dangerously objective if you step in front of it. It means by the time reality reaches consciousness, we added reverb, compression and auto-tune. Reality plays through us. The so-called outer world may be the music, the inner world may be the instrument, and what we call a life is the racket while they argue about who started the song.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"