Really, this is why Jesse and I shouldn’t be parents yet.
Archives for March 2009
Clarabelle the Acrobatic Dog
Some of the games that Jesse and Clara like to play are tame. Others are not. Here’s one that they invented, wherein Clara sinks her teeth into a toy and Jesse raises her into the air.
Dissonance
Today, as I was on my way to school, I started having a thought. This thought grew into more thoughts, and before I knew it, I was so deep in them that I almost missed my exit off the freeway.
My thought began as I was thinking about musical cadences. So many times, my kids complain about the V7 chord, mostly because it sounds dissonant. What they don’t know, is that if the v7 chord plays by the rules, it sometimes gets to be the second to last chord in a song.
And the last chord is then a I chord. Which sounds beautiful and perfect within the context of its scale. It’s like the “Ahh” moment you have at the end of the song, wherein your ear can just TELL that the song is over.
What is the most beautiful part of the song, When Your Mind’s Made Up from the movie, Once? The part near the end, where the dissonance is suddenly resolved into one of the most complex harmonies of the song.
So the question that my thoughts settled on was this: Can we ever see Beauty, Goodness or Truth without first seeing their dissonance? We see through a glass dimly, through mirrors. What we see will ineveitably be tainted on some level, since we can only see reflections. Reflections are never the real thing, so they are tainted.
This leads me to think that perhaps the only way WE can see things is by comparing and contrasting. We need something to contrast Perfection with in order to accurately see Perfection. We need something to contrast the Goodness, Truth and Beauty with in order to see what they truly are. It’s like lifting a rug after ten years. You don’t realize that the carpet AROUND the rug is old until you see what the carpet USED to look like, weathered and bleached. If we saw Perfection without its contrast, we wouldn’t even know it was Perfection. We would call it something else, like Cookie Dough Icecream or Macaroni and Cheese.
Perhaps this is why God allows bad things to happen. Would we ever know what good things were unless we had bad things to contrast them to? Would melodies be as beautiful if they didn’t have a dissonant chord right before?
Would harmonies BE harmonies if they weren’t contrasting with the melody?
Perhaps God didn’t create this as a flaw in us. Perhaps He created a Universe so Gorgeous, so Perfect, that only the He could see everything JUST as it was created and call it Good, without needing a contrast.
Closed
I have decided that it might be better if I made this blog closed. This means that only those whose email addressed I have registered will be able to access it.
So….if you want to continue reading this, please make sure I have your primary email address. Send it to me via facebook, gmail or bubbs, but whatever you do, send it to me. Additionally, this will allow me to update my address book!
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