Timelessness Waits for Everyone

Jazz is more closely related to the realm in which music occurs -- time -- than is European music... if music -- as almost all philosophies of music hold -- is the art expressed in time, then jazz corresponds more fundamentally to the basic nature of the musical than European music. --Joachim Brendt 

Well, this book on Theology, Music and Time is a bit of a disappointment. Not much for Bob to work with, a few quotes notwithstanding such as the one above. 

That passage does go to questions of freedom and structure in time, for time cannot be just one or the other. That is to say, pure freedom and spontaneity would be unintelligible, while pure structure would be as lifeless as metronome or drum machine. 

Time marches on. Or does it? Sometimes it feels that way, but it can also slow, stretch, and dilate. Indeed, if not for the latter, then there would be no possibility of slack in the cosmos. Rather, life would be an unrelenting drill until the marching stops at death.

There is a chapter on the modern composer John Tavener, who calls his music "liquid metaphysics," and although Begbie doesn't mention it, it so happens that Tavener was a student of Schuon. I just googled it, and he set a number of Schuon's poems to music. 

There's a chapter on the relationship of music to time, which begins with a quote that poses the question of whether time "is a threat or gift." I suppose it depends on how we look at it. Is it just a velvet glove hiding an iron fist called Death? 

No, it's an ironic redemption disclosing a love ensconced in velvet.

Ouch, Petey. You can do better. 

Not this morning I can't. 

Begbie:

If in Christ "all things" have found their fulfillment, then, presumably, the same can be said of time as an integral dimension of the created order. 

The Incarnation is either "central and decisive for all time and history," or we are somewhat screwed timewise. We would have little rational choice but to escape it by any means necessary, as in Neoplatonism or Buddhism. Time would have no purpose except insofar as it affords us a brief opportunity to flee it.

But in the Christian view "the reality of time" is "intrinsic to God's creation" and has an "essentially positive character." However, our post-Christian culture features a paradoxical combination of too much time and not enough of it:

To state the obvious, being "pressured by time" is a pervasive feature of contemporary life in the West. "It is because our days are too full and because they move too fast that we seem never to catch up with ourselves."

As a result, we are always hurtling toward a future that never arrives, no matter how much we accomplish in the moment. 

Human beings have always tried to control time by attempting to decelerate transience, to postpone the entropic processes of decay.

Which goes to the very purpose of religion. And to its denial, especially as seen in the disordered political religions of the left.  

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.

Time, it seems, is our best frenemy, depending upon how we approach it. The conditions "that produce the time-scarce condition are the selfsame ones that produce its opposite."

Meaning what, exactly? Again, no humans in all of history have been so liberated from the necessities of time, and yet, so persecuted by its presence: "The dominant modern response to the relentless approach of death is massive denial." With the postmodern compression, dislocation, and scattering of time,

there is much to suggest that elements of an intractable sterility and even destructiveness are also at work, extending rather than healing the malaise of modernity.

And Here We Are: a "tyranny of clock-time" amidst "postmodernism's fragmentation and multiplicity of times."  

Where is the slack?! This sounds like a joke, but the perpetual cry of the left is that the fascist dictator Trump is literally going to steal all our slack. But these are clearly slackless people to begin with, or they would be celebrating how much they have under Brandon. It's a simple question, really: do you or do you not have more slack than you did five years ago?

Music "seems to offer a temporal adventure in which time is experienced not as an absolute receptacle or inert background," a time-affirming model of change which doesn't end in death or entropy. 

For example, it "accustoms the mind to grasp immaterial reality." It "enables us to delight in" the unseen and untouched, being that it is independent of the senses (for it isn't actually perceived by the ears but by the immaterial mind).  

Perhaps it serves as a model "to empower the mind" and "to apprehend the unified order of eternity." It "demonstrates that there can be ordered change, that change need not imply chaos," and that

dynamic order is possible, that there can be ordered being and becoming, form and vitality, structure and dynamics, flux and articulation. For something to be subject to persistent change need not imply disorder.

Well, good. Call it Developmental Cosmology:

The created world takes time to be. Music presents us with a concrete demonstration of the inseparability of time and created reality, of the truth that it need not be seen as a vice of creation, that it can only reach its fulfillment, its perfection, through time. It shows us in an intense way that "taking time" can be good, profitable, and enriching.

"Music asks for my patience, my trust that there is something worth waiting for." It "relies with a peculiar intensity on transience for its very functioning," thus liberating us "from the assumption that limited duration is of necessity problematic, that we can only discover authentic meaning in the unbounded and unlimited."

After all, God himself "once took time and thus treated it as something real," and "has allotted the time we need to fulfill our destiny."

"The universe is suspended between nothingness and the infinity of God," and "music can exemplify and embody just this suspension."

All I got.