Sept/Oct 2000 The Arts Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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A dull and garbled murmur teases my ears, snug in the embrace of my headphones, as if I were floating at the bottom of a pool, half aware of the conversation above. In these moments, outside sounds are summertime icicles, their sharp tips of detail quickly melting into acoustic puddles, and only a diffuse, frothy awareness of a world outside remains.

Down the red stone hallway, in the bomb shelter-sturdy chapel, Mary's forlornly open arms receive the chanting of two dozen brown-smocked monks. While they intone Psalms, I lie in my room here in the monastery where I am on retreat, the light of my laptop shining in the darkness.

There's nothing particularly original about Creed, whose music I'm soaking in, but at ear-damaging levels they are a guilty pleasure, with lyrics elliptically Christian enough to sustain crossover listeners who like their music loud, their doctrine grated through refrigerator-sized amplifiers, their spiritual sentiments unvarnished, and their piety vaguely evangelical.

The effect of the music coursing through my nervous system is to produce a lift, a somatic levity that sends me at once deeply within and outside my body, spacing me in three simultaneous modes: as embodied spirit, as disembodied spirit, and as a spirit ecstatically holding them bound. Playing electric bass in rock bands for the past 15 years has induced similar effects. Occasionally the music, without premeditation, achieves a viscous density like the Catholic oil of chrism at baptism. The resulting lift paralyzes both of my hands, and as they hang in suspended animation for a few beats or a fragment of a beat, I am already recovering them and the lift has passed.

The digital environment of the CD is the plastic, virtual "enclosure" today ...