Tales and Journeys

The modern opinion is cynical towards the world, expecting to recieve no compassion or meaning — because after all, the universe is a faceless machine, its gears the cold logic of physics and probability. I battle this opinion under its own terms, showing that emotions like love cannot merely be explained by their apparent purposes, but must have been present since the conception of this world.

Humanity. We live and we persist because it is inevitable. In this world of change and peril, only that which persists, lives.

Our highly developed consciousness, our imagination, made us persist. Our hope in better days, in great wonder, made us persist. Because of them, we still exist to this day.

And because they made us persist, these parts have persisted in us. That is the only reason we have them. If the world had challenged us in different ways, we would have developed different abilities. In another world, we might be unable to learn to swim, climb trees… or feel happy.

So how can we think that there is any meaning to our emotions? That is, beyond their effect upon our actions, and leading us to our survival. How can we ever claim that emotions are anything else than our naive imagination of the world, our colouring of what is truly neutral, a machine?

By questioning how they are even possible.

If emotions are in us alone, then they are part of us but not of the world. This would imply that emotions come through us from somewhere else than the world we know. Which, of course, is a rather uplifting thought.

If this seems unreasonable, then the other logical option is that emotions have got to be a part of this very world, inherent in it without the need of our presence, and made possible by the very laws that govern it.

Great, so our emotions exist. That’s fine and all. But how claim that the very emotions themselves are any more than gears and wheels, pulling our strings? Love is just there because we survived when we stayed together, right?

That doesn’t matter. If I want to put a nail into a wooden box, I get a hammer. But if I lived on a planet made out of jelly, it would be no use. Likewise, if we lived in a world without love, there would be nothing we could do to stay together and survive. Our emotions are seperate from what they do for us, as the hammer is seperate from the need to nail wood.

So evolution might have given us all we have, and that explains why we have it, but not why those things work. It couldn’t have been given, had it not been there to give. All of our abilities, all of our emotions, all our imagination; they are all tapping into the big picture of all things.

So…

What is music, really?