Music and Art

Good music has something in it that I can recognize from myself but haven’t been able to put into words before. – Jonas of Mew

All good art should have some sort of this quality, this essence of “a mystery solved,” some sort of answer to a riddle, some sort of assurance amid the uncertainty of the world.
This meshes with L’Engle’s idea of art as “cosmos in chaos.” Art acknowledges the mystery, acknowledges the chaos and the uncertainty, and then, as Jonas says, gives some sort of answer, or, when it can’t do that, makes some sort of sense of it. It says, “here’s the sense, here’s the reason, here’s the way to understand the mystery inside you, or the mystery that’s leaving you bewildered," or when it can't do that, “here you are, here is your mystery, here is your confusion and the confusion of your splinter of life, and here it is in the glorious cosmos, here’s where your piece fits, here’s where your mystery belongs." Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t say that, and that’s why we can listen. That’s why we can have ears to hear.

Silence

Dancing through life, I’ve seen too many with their mouths wide open. Raucous, chaos in chaos, noise in noise, spreading the frenetic disease of restlessness. There is no privation of sounds, decrying, declaring, denouncing, so much suffering that is echoed but unheard. Testifiers without ears, voices launching preemptive strikes against an existential cloud of witnesses, battling the sparks and piercing shrieks that find their way in, finding their way out of, our lives. Attack before defense? A knife blade against the lines of hope and help, the cradle of sanity and the embrace of the home. Energy fired from a vacuum of energy, a jug at the speed of light, failing to fill with the coolness of liquid rain. "A glass can only spill what it contains," so what are these voices that lay their bold claims? Worried husks plucked before the fertile, dusky ground could reach up to fill them with the seed and sweet roundness of new growth.
How can water fill this empty bowl if it will not stop rolling? The hunger that all the animals could not quench, could not meet, could not allow to exist but could not answer in a hundred years of trying, it will persist through another hundred if the ears of man will not unstop and begin to hear.

“The righteous man hears the crying of the world through silence, and in it learned to listen to the suffering of others.”

All we need is that "thimble full of fire."

"He who answers before listening— that is his folly and his shame."