Thematic Music and Cliffs: Esse Maxim as Lens

Thematic Music and Cliffs: Esse Maxim as Lens

Samuel Bird

I craned my neck up enough to feel a sharp pain in my spine to see the top of the cliff. It was black with pockets and caves all the way up. Inside were birds which were the only creatures that could make it up the straight face. The same lively part of me that said yes to life seemed to push me to find my way to the top. I put my fishing pole and tackle box in my car and began to look to the sides to see how I could make it up. I found a hillside that had a series of smaller cliffs. By scaling each twenty or thirty-foot section and taking breaks on snowy ledges, I thought I could break the expedition up. I started up as the flat lands turned up to a hill, then a mountain, until finally, I was grabbing for branches and ledges to climb up. I was wearing a denim jacket and work boots. There were no ropes, harnesses, or anything else to prepare me for this. In fact, there was something I was forgetting. My brother! He made me promise I would start telling him where I was going so they could know where to send a search party. Oh well, I guess my death will be all the more surprising. 

My fingers wrapped around porous lava rock as the tip of my wet boots dug into the smallest of cracks I could access. The ledges became further apart and the face above became more dreadful. I looked behind me, which was to look down. It was a sheer drop and the odds of me catching the thin ledges on the way down were not great. I felt a drive to feel some way about this. However, it was not clear to me what I should see this experience as. Like too many young people in my age, I listen to music too often. I use it to put me in the frame of mind I desire to be in. The Ionian mode brings a peaceful joy, Aeolian a mourning of facts, and Phrygian a concerted aggression. The only music to be heard then was the whipping wind that was blowing in a dark blizzard from the East. It had no suggestion on how I should feel. I quit thinking for a moment and lowered my body. The next moment would be of great consequence, but I knew anything less than my full devotion would be dangerous. 

I clenched up the muscles in my leg as they shot me upward. I reached out to grab a brave sagebrush grown in the stone. I didn’t grab close enough to the base and it seemed to blow up into wirey dry shards in my hand. Being prepared for this, I reached out my other hand to grab lower toward the base. This stopped me at the top of the arch I jumped before I found my way tumbling down the mountain. I found a ledge that was just the right angle to just barely hold me. I stopped to reconvene and breathe for a moment. Now, at this moment, how should I relate to it? Was the sheer bravery and heroism something to be proud of? Perhaps my physique’s investments had paid off? I looked back down at what I just jumped up. Was this a wondrous adventure I would feel whimsy and tenderness telling my children? Was this scarier than my foolish mind would believe? Was this the beginning of a tragedy where Esse Maxim dies with me and my family replays the story of my demise in their minds for years to come? Would I miss out on my greatest goal, to be a husband and father? It was clear that there were so many options, and even with the depth of human complexity, only a certain few could stay alive in me. I chose to say it was a risky and wild step toward something great. I was conquering something within my mind as I climbed this face. 

A few more close calls later and hands scraped raw from the stone, I made it to the top. I closed my eyes, breathed, and smiled as the mostly flat ground below me held me up with no focus or pressure exerted from myself. I still had a quarter mile up a smoother-hilled incline to make it to the top of the aggressive edge above. I fought through the deep snow and tried to step where I could stay driest in my lacking outfit. The silence at the top of a mountain is wondrous, or perhaps haunting. Whenever I have made it to the top, for some reason there was never any wind. There was no river, no voice, and no machine of man. The loudest sound was the beating of the blood up my neck. That is, if I could still my laborious breath in that thin high altitude air. There seemed to be a cruel or perhaps a hilarious irony to how much easier and more relaxed this part of the journey was than the last. I walked up to the edge and looked down. I had never heard of this cliff before finding it and couldn’t find a name. I related it to other heights and guessed its height. Four hundred feet below was the river I had just been fishing at. Its torrential current was so wide, that a skilled fishing cast could only make it halfway across. Now below me, it looked like a current of built-up condensation dripping down glass. The colors were a deep and rich blue, and I could see spots that would be better for fishing. 

I looked at a thin thread running through the land below that had a small black dot on it. It became clear that the tiny dot was my car. I stood very carefully as no safety rail was placed there as I looked at the world around me. Snowcapped blue pine mountains faded into contrastingly dark clouds that reminded me my time was limited. In moments of triumph or of great importance to my personal story, I have a few songs I would listen to so that I could be in the moment and pull in the beauty. Without that music or any sound, I was left up here to wonder how I should feel about this. My body had its series of thoughts on the matter, but none were solely convincing. Was this a great feat and a scream to the sky above would be appropriate? Maybe this was humorous and a good laugh at how absurd the world looked from here would follow. Perhaps this was a sacred or divine experience similar to many sunsets or landscapes before. Nothing was necessary, and in the lack of something obligatory, I knew to will the best thing I could. I prayed to God. I told Him I was grateful for a slew of things and that I was committed to some important things He and I have worked out. No tears came and it was simple and honest. A flake rested on the tip of my crooked nose, tickling it. I looked around to see the landscape’s definition lower as snow began to fall and fall fast. 

I followed my footprints back as my upturned collar fought its best to keep out the snow. Slowly, my tracks filled in with more and more snow until I could not see them anymore. I started to think of ideas to brush off one step at a time, but then I remembered how treacherous the way I took here would be in the snow and with limited visibility. I went even further away from the cliff face and went down steep snowy hills, but no cliffs. I lost elevation until I was nearly back down to the road. I thought I was pretty smart and had saved myself a lot of heartache until the hill I was walking down came to an abrupt end. I looked down at the road only forty feet below, but it was straight below. I looked around and saw the only other path was to hike all the way back to the top and go down a different direction. This thin crack was my only option to get down, and there was the top of a pine tree right in my way. I looked down to see that there was a ledge eight feet below, and a few ledges more until I was home free. I ran this scene through my animalistic algorithm until a clear plan was in view. It being the only option, I swung my leg up and over the tree top as I jumped out. There was one small problem. My pant leg was caught in the top of the tree. 

I was stuck with one hand holding the cliff, one leg caught in the tree, and my other limbs with nothing. I wasn’t moving, but it was because I couldn’t. I could hold myself here, but when I couldn’t anymore, I would fall as my leg stayed there just in time to hit my head on the sharp stone below. I stayed in that random and uncomfortable pose, catching my breath. And what did I think this experience meant? What should I feel? Should I laugh at how ridiculous this all was? Should I be angry at how unlucky I was that the one spot I needed my leg to be there was a tree? Should I feel pity for myself that I was about to die? I decided to find it comical, but with a decent amount of rage. I went back to planning and hoping this time I would do a better job. I came up with nothing and began to punch the top of the tree as I yelled out obscenities I was trying to avoid. On my last hit, the tree top moved just enough to no longer be in the way, but now there was nothing holding me up. I consequently fell before I could prepare. I arched my knees and started grabbing anything that would stay in my fingers. By chance or skill, I stopped at the ledge below and looked down with wide eyes. The next few jumps would be rough and would check just how much cartilage was left in my knees, but I had pretty well made it. I made it to the road and I walked back to my car. Now, I had to wonder what to feel, think, and attribute the entire experience. I thought of something good enough that was in line with my Esse Maxim and went home. 

Existence is full of random and often uncorrelated sensory experiences. Young children will think much of what happens to them is because of them to make sense of what everything is about. As we get older and the earlier method seems maladaptive, we have to make all these events attributable to multiple parties. But what about all the events that are not caused by conscious beings like other people? Well, perhaps reality is conscious or is being acted upon by a very powerful consciousness. We do this so there is a reason why all these things happen. Philosophy right up until now has been a realization that those systems of attribution are not necessary. Where they find nothing necessary, I ask what is possible. If you have read my article, “As I am,” You will notice a lot of similar ideas and even a similar theme, but there is a key different focus here. When we have an experience before us, music, art, and a social sphere can help us figure out a meaning for it, but that can be random and arbitrary. No doubt we will need something that is not offered. 

Esse Maxim can be our theme music, our lens, and our spice. As we look at the world, we look at it as we are. Perhaps this process left to the randomness of the world is not to our advantage. I have known hearts heavy from a perception of a minor key. I have known fools who never know the weight of the world from a constant major key. Our poor kind is stuck trying to find the right spin to tell themselves when they lie down to sleep, but they have bad scripts. When I was a child, I had many adverse experiences to my well-being. These give me a powerful lens that has tremendous strength in seeing diversity and suffering. It does however limit the trust I place in others or the worth I see in myself. This is my natural state with no intervention, but like a mad climber, I intend to get myself involved. I am going to see the world in a way no matter what I do. What I can do is figure out how to make it an honest impression of the world and be centric to my needs. I don’t want delusion, but I want what I think is valuable. Each time that I chose how to see the experience with the sagebrush, at the top of the cliff, or caught in a tree, I ran the situation past my subjective Esse Maxim. What did my base assumption of everything necessitate or allow this to mean? I then acted in accordance with this. You may say that it would be difficult or impossible to expect people to run every experience past their Esse Maxim. This is fair. I have found it is easier to train yourself for patterns of thought than to individually make new individual conscious decisions in given situations. Then, simply do that. Train yourself to see the world in terms of this truth below all truths, value above all values, and meaning all over. You may find this to be difficult, however, I have found something of what we are, likes difficult things. Even something as crazy as almost dying up on a mountain in a snowstorm.