Journal Entry 1411: Cecil Miller

Things are getting complicated. I am in central Missouri as I'm supposed to be. Mission should begin to unfold shortly. I've managed to create a complication, however.

I met a woman.

Not just any woman, though. She seems to have the same mental tendencies that I do; is at least on my wavelength. Her name is Coral McGrey. Emotions are more complicated than I am able to handle in my present state, but there is something very powerful between Coral and myself. Still need to go through with what I know to be the reason I am in this place, however.

I continue hearing the sound and am now convinced there really is something about music that I am expected to understand.

Need to research music theory; studies of rock and roll, what it means, why it is popular, where it will go, etc. Need to read An Essay on Human Feeling by S. K. Langer, Nietzsche's discussions of Wagner's music as talking to God, Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock.

Before rock and roll, did we even hear that primitive beat, did we understand the concept of the groove, did we feel the feelings of the guitar? And what is it about power chords and the wailing lead singer that draws us in; that goes to the heart of our souls? Does rock and roll music somehow join the mind and the body? What are those emotions that are drawn out of us, the feeling of listening even to Boston or Deep Purple or REO Speedwagon as we drive down the Interstate doing 75 mph with the top down and our friends dancing in their seats? Why the hysteria over the Beatles and Michael Jackson so beyond anything we ever managed before as a culture? And how do we explain the ubiquitous appreciation of this music, which comes mostly from the shores of Britain and the heart of America (Gary Indiana, Liverpool, Kansas City, London, Spartanburg, Macon, Birmingham, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Austin and Richmond), only then to NYC and LA for amplification and refinement and production and gestation. And then to the world. It is everywhere now.

I'm not just talking about the rock and roll of Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Savoy Brown, The Who or Led Zeppelin. It's all rock. All of it. The categories don't mean shit. R&B, swing, disco, soul, rap, fusion, hip-hop, punk, New Wave, juju, blues, reggae, even country and western. It's all just variations on a theme. Heart beat music tuned and calibrated to the metronome of human sexuality and our root sense of time. You can hear the sound everywhere if you listen. That little, soft pop.

It's in all music now: from clapping Japanese Buddhist monks to chanting Muslims and traditional South African musicians playing instruments thought to be more than three hundred years old.

And it should be. If traditional wisdom is correct, the roots of rock and blues can be found in music brought from Africa by slaves. And we are all descended from Africa whether we like it or not.

Rock and Roll deifies time and emotion, the motion of the pelvis and the body, driving through space, piercing the mind with streams of headphone-possessed sonic descriptions of Life. Rock and roll is the noise the gods would make were they among us. The mechanical sound of industry and cars, the virtue of machines, wall-of-sound, the guitar. The guitar! Guitar as complicated phallus pointing laser light and electronic magic out into the universe, telling all our secrets in sounds which no words are fit to make — unfathomable depth and the shallow lies and tall tales of the blues, and moments when it all comes together, moments you feel in the crowd, everyone knows, it is there and you are part of what everyone feels and the music says, "Yes," and it is pure. How can it end? How can it end? How does the musician in the polyphonic jam, improvising on the edge of the present, what he knows the world wants -- no, needs to hear -- how can it end? What in his head and everyone else's will allow it to fade out and return to the mundane? How can songs of pure beauty and mastery of Time end? "Eyes of the World," "Love Lies Bleeding in My Hand", "Stairway to Heaven," "Layla," All Along the Watchtower," "Burning Down the House," "Gimme Shelter," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed?"

Journal Entry 1523: Cecil Miller

I listen to some funky instrumental music composed by David Byrne and drift into the edges of the altered state that we discovered. But I don't want to go there right now.

It is comical to continue with the struggle to figure out what happened earlier this year. Interesting, though, that after last summer I can re-read any of the books I have studied over the years and inevitably find something new in them. Can't tell if this is because of what we went through looking for the answer to questions posed by Lucas Fancher and his friends, or because I shall be married soon and will possibly be spending the rest of my life on McGrey Farms.

In his book True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna makes the first set of references that I ever came across about the implications for sound in the psychedelic experience. He and his brother developed a theory during their travels in the Amazon about the impact of a specific sonic phenomenon established during a trip on ayahuasca and psilocybin in which the human reproduction of a sound heard in the brain might harmonically induce an effect on the DNA of those present, effectively linking the chemical structure of the mushroom with the biochemistry of the emitter. The McKennas went so far as to hypothesize that the introduction of this sound could actually stop electrons in their tracks and thereby place cognitive chemistry in a state of Absolute Zero. All of this was a "scientific" attempt to get at the mechanisms that create a paranormal experience while tripping.

I'm not sure any of this is valid, but it lends fuel to the notion that somehow sound as a form of energy can be a medium of extreme power during the psychedelic experience.

Coral is in the bathroom peeing on a pregnancy tester. I'm waiting and listening now to a tape of guitar instrumental work called Aerial Boundaries by Michael Hedges.

It is cold and rainy outside. The world is enveloped in a shroud of silver gray fog. Branches glisten and drip from eighteen hours of early winter rain. This music, with its bursts of guitar harmonics and bright, gliding, golden sound, wants to take me into the other universe. In my mind flow pastoral views, flat calm seas at sunrise, vistas of glass cities and mountain ranges in the distance, standing in a prairie of dry heat and soft copper wheat. It is all there in perfection. It is all there alongside my longings and hopes for the children we will have as they grow up, searching for lost toys and asking me to change the radio station in the car so that they can hear music that talks to them.