(a scene from the movie Lost in Translation, 2003, by Sofia Coppola)
“Just in time you found me just in time Before you came my time was running low I was lost them losing dice were tossed My bridges all were crossed nowhere to go”
No other art form is more alert, more attentive to human experience than music. It finds you in disarming unexpectedness that, in the moment of listening, you meet your own vulnerability nakedly embraced by the witness of music. The recognition of the listener’s vulnerability is the place of finding. What do we find there? Unfathomed depths of heartbrokenness and unrepeatable moments of joy; our endurance interposed between these two. Finding can only take place during instances of stillness, quiet, and surely, surrender.
Am I saying this because, right at this moment, I am listening to the amazing Nina Simone? Maybe yes. (Her) music defies categories of self-congratulation and self-pity, of optimism and pessimism. (Her voice is beyond that.) Hers is a music of endurance intimately familiar with the tragic sense of life. A music that keeps no illusion therefore the most welcoming. A music so accommodating that the listener is invited into a wondrous absence of judgment and an eluding promise of care. In music one is found in being lost.
“Now you're here now I know just where I'm going No more doubt or fear I've found my way Your love came just in time you found me just in time And changed my lonely nights that lucky day”
The accommodation consists in the listener being carried simultaneously to the center and circumference of the music’s care. We are led to the center of its familiarity, to the heart of its attention as though the music has waited for us eternally; that the music that moves us is made only for us. By that inexplicable recognition we are lost. At the same time we are cast adrift into the circumference of a deeper awareness, into an elsewhere in which communion with others is possible. An awareness which escapes words but grows on us and implicates us in the widest sensitivity and solidarity possible. By that universal sense of hospitality we are found.
Tonight, in a quiet, dimly lit room, alone or with the beloved, listen to Nina Simone.
(Nina Simone)