Eastern Standard Time

If you cannot see the player when you open this post,  please click on 'read more' at the bottom of the post to enjoy the whole musical experience.

We return to Eastern Standard Time on Sunday at 2:00am. I will be relieved. The mornings are so dark these final days before the change that it seems dawn will never appear. That is all a metaphor, of course, but this morning the writing went well and the moon is a beautiful crescent sliver and the stars are very bright.

Tomorrow is election day and Wednesday I pull my head in and hibernate from the political world for several years. It is not that I do not know what is going on: see the new boss? Same as the old boss! But I will retire my vague hope for a better society, and try to muffle the absurd declamations of the Republican/Tea Party advocates. In good dialectical fashion, the Left is already predicting that the Republican victory will be good for the country as the populace sees the true nature of Republican ideology—take from the poor and give to the rich. Its all been seen and done before.

It might be lighter at this time of the morning next week, but I fear that the world will be just a bit darker.

But the run this morning was almost decent—it has not been so in awhile. This morning it was the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. I was first introduced to this music by Disney’s Fantasia, in which the animators set the symphony in bucolic forest scenes with beautiful centaurs flirting, courting and innocently coupling. Even the fierce storm scene is tamed by the playfully vindictive Zeus tossing lightning bolts down on the chubby Dionysius not drunk but yet swimming in overflowing vats of wine. I’ve spent much of the last several years to erase these images from my mind when I listen to the symphony; I do not want this music tied to a program.

Anyway, toward the end of the first movement—almost at the very end, there is one of the most glorious melody I have ever heard. These measures pluck the strings of my soul as if the music were the wind and my soul an Aeolian Harp, and I experience absolute, uncorrupted and incorruptible joy.



It is always and every time a transcendent moment. I do not know what there is about this melody that affects me so, nor am I now inclined to analyze the measures to discover their alchemy. It is enough to know the light of being.


So regardless of tomorrow’s election results, I will always have my Beethoven.