The Knowing of Things

I seek to gain as much knowledge as I can about as many different subjects as I can. The main reason being; beauty. Let me lead with an example.

I have always enjoyed music. Somewhere, there exists old footage of me, barely able to walk, bouncing around to some classic rock with a barbie in my hand, ostensibly using it as a pre-toddler version of a drum stick. Maybe more of timpani-stick, actually, judging by how I moved it. The point is, I have always liked and enjoyed music since my mind has been capable of comprehending it. I understood it.

However, it wasn’t until I was 16 that I began to look at music differently and found the true beauty of it, and it was because of something completely unrelated. I fell in love for the first time that year. Suddenly, every sappy song I listened to became real. Every horror story of kidnapping or murder became real. Emotion itself became real, and thus my love of bare emotion in music was born. The passion with which some artists sing and play gave me goosebumps. That year was the first that I was ever moved to tears by music, or movies, or stories in general to my knowledge, and it was because of my understanding of love, meager as it was.

Then, a year or two after that, I began writing music. My first real try of it, and I was pretty terrible. Everything I wrote was cliche and predictable. I’ll give myself credit enough to say I at least showed a little bit of promise now and again, but my songs were not good. I kept at it and steadily improved. I’m still not great, but far better than what I was. After at least becoming acquainted to the composition of music, I realized how difficult it was - how clever you had to be, how witty, how eloquent - to make a truly good song. When I write, I feel my mind work in ways not dissimilar from playing sudoku or chess.

You must be able to extremely concisely express notoriously difficult to express feelings in a tone and timing that will complement the words and mood, in a way that hasn’t been done a thousand times in a million songs. You have to arrange those concise words into one of countless specific arrangements, each separate arrangement having its own varying merits (and deciding the best is often the most stressful part). The words you find must fit into the puzzle of lyrics not only in meaning but in mood and feeling, aesthetically and rhythmically, metrically and euphoniously, and you have to make the story you tell in your puzzle both compelling and travel at exactly the proper pace. And that is just for lyrics - not instruments. Suffice to say: it’s not an easy thing to do for most.

After I had accumulated that knowledge of the difficulty of writing, I looked at music differently once more. It wasn’t just likable or unlikable noise capable of eliciting an emotional response any longer. It was fucking incredible. The eloquence that some artists can achieve is breathtaking. The ear for timing that some artists have is inspiring. Hearing a perfectly placed, perfectly fitting word in a song became so unbelievably satisfying and cathartic. I think the world would benefit if everybody at least tried writing music (and falling in love, for that matter).

One last story:

When I was in some math class around 7th or 8th grade year, I was trying to remember the correct formula for finding the area of a right angle triangle for some homework I was working on and had forgotten my math book. I’m not the best at remembering things like that - naked numbers and symbols detached from meaning - and at the time I found mathematics elegant but tedious. I remember staring at this question for some time. I tried to ‘logic it out’, and after a bit of thought, I had it. I realized that if I created a second triangle and flipped it, I could create a rectangle from the two. I knew to find the area of a rectangle was simply length times width, and I knew that each triangle would be exactly one half of the full rectangle. In that case, I could just find the area for the hypothetical rectangle and then halve the result to get the area of my triangle. I was so excited to show my teacher the next day about what I had discovered - a new way to find the answer. When I got there, however, I looked up the formula for triangles I hadn’t remembered the night before and found ‘length x width / 2’, which is exactly the process I had gotten from logic.

This is somewhat of a weak example, but I use it to show that knowing something is and knowing why something is can be the difference between understanding and not, and to me, the difference between beauty or not. It’s cousin to the ‘teach a man to fish’ adage. Once I understood what was actually happening in the math, I never forgot it again. I didn’t even need to stress about the formula - since I now understood what it actually meant, I could just remember the underlying logic and not the numbers and symbols. I could remember the idea itself.

What does this collection of anecdotes teach me? Sometimes, the more you know about something, the more beautiful it becomes. Take light, for example. Now that I know what causes the sky to be blue, what gives sunsets their hue, what exactly rainbows are, what color itself is, and what I’m actually seeing in starlight, I am granted even more of their beauty. We tend to not recognize beauty we don’t understand, or at least, not all that these things have to offer. I don’t know many other people who know how to build a forge and smith a tool or cast something. I don’t know many people who know how to craft rings or wood-turn a bowl or do spray paint art or make crystals from bismuth or the genius engineering of a simple soda pop tab or how microwaves actually work or how nuclear reactors work or how to make beer and mead and distill liquor or people who properly admire firearms for their engineering instead of their potential for killing.

Now, all of those things I can look at with a measure of what actually went into creating them, and I’m better off for it. I don’t mention them with an air of boastfulness - I was just, myself, taken aback that even the ostensibly mundane or technical can be beautiful. I still have much to learn in all of those areas (and countless others), but the knowledge I’ve gleaned thus far allow a greater appreciation for them. I think most of the beauty of life comes only with understanding. Think of the antithesis: lack of understanding. What does that bring? Superstition and skepticism. Prejudice and discrimination. Hatred and racism. It follows, then, that the opposite might bring the opposite. Nobody needs to actually understand a sunset to find it beautiful, but the more you understand of them, the further your eyes open and the more beauty you can see. As I walk through this world, this life, I want my aperture as fully open as I can manage.

#beauty #knowledge #math #music #composition