Once There Was a Secret Chord

Life at the breaking point.

Photo by Aditya Wardhana on Unsplash

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”
—Thomas Merton

There is a musical chord called the Augmented 5th. It is played by raising the 5th note of the chord by one-half step, and it’s used to create tension, before the progression resolves to the Tonic chord.

I watched this in action at an a cappella gospel performance where the singers hung on the Augmented 5th for a longer than usual time and the audience almost exploded. When the group finally resolved it, the observers collapsed in relief.

We live in a world that is ruled by unresolved tension, an augmented 5th world, and there is no relief in sight.

Every day is like tiptoeing through a field riddled with landmines. We have no idea when the wrong step will blow us to bits.

There is the ongoing pandemic, when a moment of carelessness could bring our lives to a screeching halt.

There is the ongoing threat of environmental degradation.

There is the ongoing threat of societal collapse.

There is the ongoing threat of an economic collapse.

These are with us all the time and there’s no way around that.

There is no pushing through.

There is no bracing for impact.

There is only doing the best we can, given the deterioration of everything we had accepted as normal.

There are little things like looking for bits of beauty and joy, maybe meditating, maybe trying to stay healthy if you still can, but these are stopgaps, looking for a bit of light in the otherwise dark and dreary future.

If you didn’t know by now, I am oftentimes driven to places where the darkness is all encompassing. I come out of it, but the dark is becoming pervasive, and I’m learning to live there.

F.D.R. is credited with the phrase, “It’s going to get bad before it gets worse.” He also said that it would eventually get better and better.

That was then.

This is now.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to write about this without sounding nihilistic, so I hope this doesn’t drift too far into those rocky waters.

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The Priest is under construction. I would like to finish it sometime in the next month or so, I have to postpone some entries.

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