It’s been pretty hot around here recently. Weather systems come and go over Manchester with disregard for the residents of the city. This heatwave came at a very crucial time in my life; I am between jobs, I am growing my teaching business, I am working to meet a deadline for a composition, I am expanding my website, I am keeping up with a load of reading which will be essential for future projects. I am sat at my desk, sweaty and exhausted under this unusually hot weather. There’s an expression: when it rains it pours—perhaps we can come up with an alternative: when it simmers it boils.
How is our inner life like the weather? Moods and mental states pass over us like chaotic systems of high and low pressure. Events have a way of amalgamating, so that small breezes (conflicts, jobs, personal matters, health concerns etc.) build into hurricanes before we are quite ready for it. We are clouds: enjoyable, white, fluffy, almost whimsical—turned menacing, dark, gloomy. When are we ever in control of the meteorological events of our lives? Perhaps we never really are, we just learn how to ride them out and how to barricade against the worst of it, the worst of ourselves.
In L’Étranger, Meursault (the protagonist of Camus’ novella), is controlled by the unbearable, scorching Algerian sun, to the point that it may well be blamed for an act of violence. How terrifying to see that person, who rides through life as a weather pattern: impersonal, object, emergent property of factors apparently without control. And how terrifying to be that person, when we find ourselves in the midst of a storm that we did not intend.
I am currently working on a piece for voice and piano which combines several texts relating to weather. My aim is to create a character piece, in which the music depicts something of the feeling of retreating into the objectivity of weather. Yet this retreat cannot be completed, we are subjects and our subjective selves survive despite our best attempts at rending ourselves as objects. Music provides this subjectivity: music cannot exist without the subject who made the music and the subject who listens to the music; music forces emotive responses because of its role as a kind of proto-language which doesn’t contain the semantic value of other languages and which, therefore, cannot be reasoned with towards to objective conclusions. Music can signify the parts of ourselves where our subjective experience cannot help but break through; it is a compass which points us away from our hiding place in the objective reality of weather, and which encourages us to face our subjective life as the person who experiences weather.
It is a very difficult thing to accept the stress that emerges in the stormiest moments of our lives, it is much easier to search for hiding places. But the only way to grow to meet the difficulties of life is to face them and accept our role within them.
James Waide 