Just the laugh at the beginning of this old Ministry song. The first 5 or so seconds. ...Don't bother with rest...

The song was called You Know What You Are. I haven't listened to this song or Ministry in many years. They had some good stuff though.

Last night I turned the TV on. Why? Because I decided to lift weights at home once a week for two hours. In between sets TV kind of works I guess. And an old Clint Eastwood movie was on, Fistful of Dollars. It's a remake/adaptation of an old movie by Akira Kurosawa. I hadn't seen it before but not too long ago saw the Kurosawa original so was interested in how this one compared.

Halfway in Eastwood's bartender friend laughs. Immediately I recognized where I had heard that exact laugh before.

What is going on in the recognition of this laugh? Something beyond just my conscious mind?

In the same way, how do we understand when a music note is exactly one octave above the previous note? We're not consciously counting the vibrations. Is it the same process. Is this something occurring on a subconscious/unconscious level. Is it a huge part of why we can enjoy it? That we cannot totally consciously understand what is going?

One octave higher is exactly twice the frequency. The two go together. Like math, the one divides into the other. So it goes. A sudden discordant note isn't so divisble with the rest. How in the world are we understanding that that one note doesn't belong?

I have previously wondered if because we 'understand' it while not consciously understanding it, we automatically think Magic! And that if we instead truly consciously understood it, if all the magic would disappear and all the beauty and enjoyment of art would disappear.

I wonder though, if it possible to go beyond this. I think of a C.S. Lewis book. I think it was the triology, Perelandria, That Hideous Strength and something else, where love is destroyed by explaining that it's just a bunch of chemical reactions. Lewis was trying to call this explanation a sort of evil thing and it always stayed with me.

That perhaps, even though 'love' may be exactly such and such chemical reactions, it doesn't actually destroy it at all to understand such is the case. In the same way, being able to reduce music to a bunch of math and synethesia shouldn't destroy the enjoyment of it. In partially the same way understanding how so much of our actions harken back to how apes live in the jungle shouldn't destroy out ability to enjoy what we are and what we enjoy. In the same way, perhaps, eradicating the unconscious, being totally aware of what is going on inside of us, perhaps, wouldn't be awful.

I think that last one would be awful. It seems some things must remain not understood. Some things must remain 'magic'.

At the same time I still think we should pull back all curtains even as we scream in horror at what we find. Pull it back and then either learn to forget, to disremember, to invent something else beyond, etc.