Washington High School Concert

Oh, what is so rational about this after all. About our lives. Our living. Is what I’m thinking. What is at all rational about this choral concert, for example. Putting on this concert. Attending this concert. This end of the year concert in which they pull out all the stops, so to say. Where they have gathered all these children to sing and all these parents to listen. To sing and watch and to listen to all of this. Well. This aural and visual beauty. This exquisite aural intimation. This auditory soaring. This feeling that one has been thrust into hyper-reality. Has been remade in a world that is super-real. That is super present. As though we, ourselves, are now more present. More actual. More aware. More awake. More observant. More intelligent. More connected. More tuned. More together and more separate onto ourselves. More part of something that is getting. That is penetrating at a terrific rate. That is traveling at faster than light speed. That is arriving at enormous velocity. That is immediate, it is so fast. That is now. And now. And now. At a place we don’t altogether know. We can’t speak about coherently. We can’t articulate maybe with the precision of a frog dissection, let’s say. We can’t all video tape and say, yes. Yes. That is what it is. Because the video tape will not record it. Isn’t designed to get this inner sense. This inward understanding that all of this. The entire enterprise. The whole mare’s nest of one’s life. The complete tangled ball of fish hooks and filament and sinkers and split shot and bright lures and so on that is a kind of metaphor for one’s days. May all be set aside for this. Because this. This is what we are here for. This is what we all want to come to. This love. This excellence. This.

I don’t know what it is to say it. It is something so elusive. So fugitive. So shy. So hidden and so much more comfortable in its hiding place than it is out here in language. Than it is out here in the quotidian. The easily verified. The video reality in which we think we live.

Listen, I want to say. Listen. Over and over again. Listen to that. Hear that, please. Oh. Don’t you want to be here forever. Doesn’t this. Isn’t this the sound of the living water your soul thirsts for out there in the desert of this world. Oh. Sing. Sing and in your singing take all of us with you please to those places the soul knows are all home. The one place that is many and that is one and that is home for us all. The place that is the everlasting place we belong. Here. Together. Singing. Singing, and in our singing opening the invisible door together. Opening the door into the hidden place. Opening the door into the light-filled place. The place where everything and everyone is a startling brightness. Is a light source. Is a song source. Where everything is song. Where everyone is singing. Where the songs are all perfect. Are all flawless. Where our voices are all pure as anything just made in heaven. Just made in paradise. And now praising. Worshiping and praising. For all time. In this moment for all time. Because this is where we live, you see. Where we truly live. Is in this song. These many songs that are one song after all. In this song that is a kind of revelation. A kind of travel. That is a kind of cool burning. Into which we step. And disappear.

What the video camera records is that we’re all sitting up straight. Piller straight. In our seats listening. Looking. Attentive. We’re good listeners. We can be. But this is off the point. This is beside the point because the important thing is that we look as though we’re actually here in the video tape. But we’re not. Of course we’re not. Or only in a sense. Only in one very limited sense of the word. Otherwise, we’re gone. Almost completely gone. Invisible in the hidden place. The place of dazzling light. Of song that is a kind of light. A song that emerges from everything. Everywhere. At once. That is not so much sound waves at so many cycles. Such and such a frequency. Although there is that. That is the medium, of course. The physical substratum. The physical representation in the world out here. But what is carried like the electrons in a circuit fabricated in silicon, for example. Or gallium arsenide. Or gallium nitride. What is carried like information in the circuits of our singing. Is.

Is. Well I hate to sound like John. I hate to be repetitive, don’t you. Don’t you wish you could be original. But that is beside the point. My point is that this is love. That this beauty and truth is love. That this beauty and truth and excellence is love. That this is where we all live. That this is why we strive for excellence. That this is where we all go when we can. When we can find the substratum that will support this sudden communication. This sudden connectivity. This sudden joyful sense that we have all opened the door together here and are in the room where everything is possible. Where everything good is likely. Where everywhere you look or hear or sense in whatever manner you wish to sense is love. Only love. Nothing but love. And one another. One another in intimate union. Intimate interpenetrating spirits. That are joined in love. In the sound of this intimate music. In one spirit. Here. In this place right here. This place that is full of doors opening into the one true room. And this. This concert. Is one of them. And we are here. We are in the one true room that is the inner place. The hidden place. That is the heart of the universe. The light source of all light. The melodeon of all melody. The heart of heaven and all its hosts.