sense-making and breathing//from the editor's desk

Art plays with cognition. We can say the art process is strategic, leading to the works of geniuses and production of masterpieces. But the objects of these accolades pool at our brainstems; they wrap around the medulla oblongata (follow my cranial nerve analogy here), a structure essential to vital functions such as blood flow and breathing.

Music, for instance, delivers us our own humanity and we applaud. It introduces us to ourselves, and slowly. Setting the keys of symphonies.

The key of G, the key of C… they calibrate a range of notes, set a spectrum of all frequencies one deems suitable for hearing in the same piece. Following the examples, root notes can be G or C which would tend to set the realms of their pieces, the aura of the notes surrounding them.

Now how do staffs and orchestras introduce us to ourselves? They make us want to realize something without even knowing it, and then help us realize it slowly.  Most of the music-writing and music-playing is done to prep our ears for some eventual eruption, some crescendo, which we would find startling if we hadn’t been implicitly and slowly processing its rumblings. A bridge to a chorus offers a good example: Maybe the notes of the bridge inch a bit closer to the tune, tempo, and/or notes in the chorus. This eases us into it. A swift progression from verse to chorus would, on the other hand, sound a bit jarring, at least in Western cultures. That’s why we call such music “experimental.”

And what about lovers in films, who preface the loving with insinuating interest? It’s tasteless when they embrace each other out of nowhere. Some call it bad on the part of the director. In coffee shops we seem unstable when we immediately confide all our private insecurities in another without first hinting at those peculiar neuroticisms. Hinting is done slowly, in a midnight battery of texts or at the moment you lose your earring, and prepare each end of the possibility, with eyes strategically dodging each other and assembling with the steam of tepid coffees, for the holy glory complexities of what a relationship could bring.

disclaimer: this is not entirely accurate; there is no "left-brained" or "right-brained" personality. each hemisphere is needed in processing, but each does offer a unique orientation to tasks and behavior.

but again, it is not like only one side of your brain knows how to have fun, or be creative.

We process things more quickly and to our satisfaction when they are embraced by both hemispheres of the brain. Take movies, dancing, or, again, symphonies; the sequential is complemented by the spatial. Music’s logic and progression pick up on the scene, movement, or tone, and the latter three pick up on the logic and progression. Everything feeds off each other. Moments like these successfully deliver what would otherwise take time to understand (e.g. emotions, love, tension) The immediacy of them make enough sense to halt breathing, the process which makes the most sense of all. 

To survival, anyway. Maybe that’s why sometimes it feels okay to die. Things can suddenly make enough sense that the essential mechanism to living must be suspended, for a little while.

Do we only keep on breathing because things don’t quite make sense yet   ?

Take-home message:

 love your medulla oblongata

                                             and art is anything that leads you to abuse it

ps imma try to post a recipe soon i swear this is still a food blog