Music Mosaic

Thoreau had his Waldon. Annie Dillard had her Tinker Creek. And I? Well, I have the mountains. In an excerpt from her book, Dillard emphasizes the idea of seeing—a capacity to notice and understand the unnoticed things, thus drawing meaningful conclusions about life. In preparing this creative project, I thought I understood how to see. I listened to Sam Cardon’s Zion at Twilight a hundred times, picking out the themes and moods, the rhythms and phrases. I assembled what I thought was a brilliant concept—a representative painting in the snow, each part signifying a different aspect of the music, etched on a canvas symbolic of the transience and power of wonder. And then, having finished my work, fingers covered in paint, I walk.

Camera in hand, I trudge up Rock Canyon. Wonder strikes me, and all at once the music is something I feel rather than hear. The echoing bells and chants are the fog drifting down the cliffs, the blowing rain and snow in my face. Jagged peaks emerge from the clouds as the music builds. As I climb higher and higher, I discover the paths of the mountain goats marked out by scattered pellets. I see green grass, a hallmark of seasons lost, still hanging onto life. I find up there a flowing melody of life that thrives in this majestic and unforgiving landscape. It's a gritty kind of beauty. Up and up. Now I am soaking wet, but I can't stop. The music builds and grows and I can't help but follow. I claw my way up cliff faces and scree fields. The music energizes my limbs and I feel no cold. I hear a trickle of water above me and see more and more evidences of tenacious life. The water is clear and pure; its music has a zen-like quality. I've stumbled on a kind of oasis up here. The cliffs loom above me and try as I might, I cannot ascend the cataract to find the source of this stream. The notes build and the mountains stand, majestic and proud, the sentinels and guardians of the wild to which I am but a visitor. I am humbled and stilled. No higher.

I skip and slide my way down the mountain to the trailhead, full of words and music, the echoing chimes still faintly ringing in my ears. Someone’s forgotten banana is smiling at me from the pavement. At that moment it hits me exactly what Sam Cardon is doing with his music and exactly why I had it all wrong. Art is not a manipulation or fabrication of meaningful reality. It's a way of communicating the divine—the kind of divinity that takes special eyes to see. Zion at Twilight is an experience you absorb, not a song you get stuck in your head. It describes a meek communication with elements that far transcend our puny existence. Perhaps this is what Ansel Adams understood in the creation of his photos. There isn't a great deal of moralizing or even interpretation. He simply shows the divinity already present, the same kind of divinity Sam Cardon captures. To think that I can convey, with a few measly strokes of color, the kind of depth and meaning I have just experienced is pretension of the worst sort. I place the banana in my snow-painting and leave it all to rot, perfected.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WTLSPmI7IGQ