Learning guitar and the meaning of life

Learning guitar and the meaning of life

Samuel Bird

The lowered window on the car let in the sunbaked July air as my mother drove the car down county line road. I let my mind wander as the fence posts whipped past the blacktop road. The advertisement on the radio ended and a song began. This song and what it changed in me was unlike anything I had experienced before. The guitar riff roared to life before being met with drums and bass to provide a constant crescendo. Something about the song seemed to wake something up inside me. I had a little thrift-store radio that I listened to old music on, but I had never been so intrigued by notes and beats. My life changed that day. I began to be obsessive about music. I found a favorite band and corresponding favorite albums and songs. I did everything listening to the radio, hoping I would luck out and that song would come back. My obsession with music became more than liking it for its own sake as I began to see a part of my identity with it. Looking through the piles of junk in my family's basement, I found my great-grandfather's old jazz guitar. I had been dreaming of learning to play, but I didn;t have a guitar and had a sense that it didn’t fit into our family's habitus. Now both these dilemmas were solved at once. Every hour I wasn’t working, I was messing around with that instrument to see what wretched sounds I could get to come out of it. To this day, whenever I hear a talented musician, I think of the patient mother who didn’t strangle them long enough for them to become better. The old jazz guitar was limited was a start, but it was limited. 

I started working in construction at the age of fourteen to start a better life. I woke up at four a.m. and then worked until eight p.m. I would then try to read books to keep my mind sharp until midnight. I did this until my $20 dollars a day salary built up to enough cash to buy a knock-off version of the guitar my hero used. I bought it and began to play for many hours a day. It slowly became less wretched as I found that I could say something from my soul words just couldn’t. I learned other artist’s music at first, but I then found it boring, seeing as they already played it. I began to write my own riffs, licks, and solos. I took notes on what I wrote and the pile of papers became larger and larger until I realized I needed to improvise my songs or my writing hand was going to give out on me. As I went from being a cowboy, homeless, and living in poverty, I kept my guitars and kept practicing. I was sure I would make it big one day and make a better life for myself. The first day I was homeless, I had $10 to my name. I knew I had to choose carefully what I was going to do with it. I decided to buy an album because I was going to go hungry anyway, I might as well have something to believe from a sermon said in the melody. 

I have carefully planned my life around my obsession. I made sure I was never too far for too long. More instruments came into the equation and I began to record the music. It varied in quality, but it mattered to me. In a universe I saw as cold and void of what the human soul sought for, my music was something to live for when there was nothing else. Last night, I stayed up late into the night jamming on my acoustic. Lyrics came to mind to say something, but the music expressed what I couldn’t. Pouring out from my soul of the ineffable is ever as important as I try to put meaning to paper via pen. Playing that guitar was every bit as important to me as it ever was. How was it that I could see this as good, important, and even meaningful? I clearly know that each of those doesn’t exist outside of my mind. However, I was able to believe, and have justification for believing, that this part of my life was meaningful. How could I do this when as a philosopher, I should know better?

I don’t think in a vacuum, and while I have things to say because I think they matter for their own sake, I am in part responding to the world I live in. I have however labored to not just parrot what has been said, but to build the next argument in the human conversation. Sometime in the late modern period, it began to become increasingly apparent that the conceptual model people were under removed them from assuming that certain parts of the human experience came from the world. The turn from dualism to monism left people struggling to ground the ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Platonic forms had no other plane to exist in and there was only the material and what could reproducibly be derived from it. It then became quite easy to prove determinism via materialism, when your system assumed each in the first place. This reason was inevitably reduced to the world I was raised in. This is a society brim with nihilism and inappropriate replacements for their ideals. An idea of justice from on high was replaced with a social penalization for those at fault. Finding a deity to believe in turned into a political idealogy. Fighting the temptings of the devil was replaced by whoever the villain was in your iteration of conflict theory. I may have lived in a world where a person is much less likely to be killed by others, but it is also a world where one is much more likely to be killed by themselves. This deep naysaying to the core of our existence is a fact I would only accept if it was past questioning, but I am a philosopher. We love questioning. The late modern and post-modern philosophers had one fallacious thought process that I seek to exploit and respond to. Just because there is possibly no necessary good, truth, or beauty, does not mean there is no possible good, meaning, or truth. This is where I think the human creative method can build what we need. If you were so kind as to assume that what I am saying is the case, how would I then propose we go about it?

Music was meaningful to me. When life lost its savor, music was something sweet to me. It gave me a reason to persist when reasons were few. It took chaotic and painful moments and made them a part of some story or progression. In moments that were nothing more than random and separate events, it afforded me beauty to experience the world as more than it was. If we were looking at the facts, I would be clear that I had something effectually meaningful. Why was this? Was it because it was a fact engraved in reality and I discovered it? While the arithmetic of music is fascinating, no. It was not meaningful unto itself. In fact, I later found out that I heard the same music I loved when was a young child and I hated it. What made the difference? What I did with it. That is not just why I enjoyed that song on that hot summer day. It is also why I love playing guitar. The experience was meaningful because of what I put into it. I sacrificed time and energy for it. In doing so, a hunk of wood and metal with six strings draped across began to have the emergent properties of being the focus of my life. And how much did this matter to me? Exactly as much as I committed to it. 

I have never been married, but it is one of my greatest dreams. This has prompted me to interview friends and strangers and watch countless people, read a small shelf of books, and think late into the night. All so I can do it right if providence shines my way. I have heard all kinds of advice, but much better, I have seen the fruits that resulted in success. I can infer causation from the people I have met and the commonalities for how successful their marriage was. I am defining success as the people in the marriage considering it so. There is one thing that comes up often and clearly. The variable that makes the difference is not finding the perfect person you are predestined to be with but instead committing to the relationship. Their beauty, natural qualities, and even deep love are no match to many years of neglect. The marriages persist and even grow when both parties are engaged in a labor of love. To selfishly prove my case with this, we are not looking for the one perfect ideal to fall in love with, we rather can find the best thing we can realistically respond to, and then focus on responding to it. I knew many people smarter than me, but I am the only one mad enough to stay up late into the night structuring my ideas and putting them into language. From the sheer effort alone, there is at least now something to be meaningful. My engagement breathed meaning into what I engaged with

Truth value is certainly a vital factor to weigh in choosing what to commit to, but it certainly can’t be alone. Religion is one institution that has been ravaged by such thinking of the primary merit of truth value. God’s existence will always be a contingent fact that is past empiricism and the choice to believe is what allows one to believe. Once one has epistemological access to religion, then the question is what good can it do? Once again, anything meaningful coming from religion would be directly proportional to the effort and commitment invested by the believer. Many religions have rights and rituals that past their symbology can seem confusing and random. However, I see it as a focal point for people to pour in their efforts allowing the same to be an avenue to meaning in their lives. The commandments or required behavior by their faith is not seen as just a rule to follow but as a chance to carry the message of their faith deeper into their hearts. As meaning is mind-dependent, a concerted mind would be able to bring more of it about. 

You suffer and have problems. I find these to be necessary facts of existence. This combined with a desire for something good, true, and beautiful, will lead one to a massive chasm between where they are and where they would like to be. The answer to this predicament would be meaning.  Giving a point to pain, a weight to worries, and a reason for randomness will allow the world to make sense to us. While this meaning may seem wonderful, it can seem horrifically inaccessible. This is where I come in with the good news. Not only can you have your life be meaningful, but you can even choose exactly how meaningful it is. This is done from commitment. This commitment is showcased by work. This work is possible because of strength. What I am then asking you to do is to grow your character such that your will can overcome your convenience and go about working toward something. While I hope you choose well in what you put your shoulder behind and are more concerned with the degree to which you push. Almost any reasonable ideal is good enough at least to start, you are now the variable that needs to be maximized for yourself. 

As I wrote this article, I listened to those same songs from my youth I referred to here. They are less serious and certainly more simple in their writing than I felt them being at the time. They are still enjoyable to me and have objective qualities that could be subjectively preferred. I don’t think I was a fool to obsess over this music as much as I did, but it is clear that I don’t share that same sympathy. Still, these songs inspired a wild young man to think of something better in a life that wasn’t. It prompted an effort to work. It even started me in the process of wondering what a better life looked like. I started to invest in myself and work. I found more faults along the way, but while my own deficiencies were daunting, I was there to work and not necessarily for the reward. I learned to love the labor and the striving that came with it. Pain became part of the game and pulled me deeper into being present. When I play a song now, it matters what key and tempo I start in, but I have found the beauty of the song comes from the conviction and passion that I express through each note and beat.