Arvo's Tempo

I was introduced to Arvo Pärt in 2001 by one of my philosophy mentors, Dr. Daniel Kolak. 

I would do research with Dr. Kolak on lucid dreaming.  I’d sleep at night with this fucked up face mask that flashed red LED lights into my eye sockets when I was in REM sleep. 

Blasting through my eyelids and into my visual cortex shit would get mixed up.  A traffic light in my dream would go crazy and I’d have a ‘cue’ that I was dreaming.

Let the lucid dreaming experience begin!

(But this will be another post.)

One day when talking about Wittgenstein, Dr. Kolak name drops this cat Arvo. 

I now use Pärt’s music during many routines.  Mostly for strength and balance routines.  Always when stretching.

Pärt goes into a tempo few can listen to.  Particularly in Für Alina, a masterpiece of an album. 

Essentially 3-4 arpeggios are dissected at an absurdly slow tempo for 45 minutes or so.  Part plays with your sense of reality and calls into question the scary question our perceptual time, our spectrum of awareness, is really that significant.

How do things sound to Mercury in her orbit compared to Pluto shambling along.  We hear things in as humans on Earth in BPM:

Beats Per Minute.

But what if it were beats per million years?

What if a song, a series of numerical values, was at relayed at such a tempo that it took centuries to wrap out the Morse code equivalent of “a”? 

And then imagine this signal had to be broadcast 10’s of millions of light years to find a listening ear.

I’m sure the music is out there.  I’m sure we are surrounded in it right now.  I’m certain of it.

We are saturated in celestial strains beyond our Beat Per Minute mind. 

Maybe a phrase get’s transcribe in history every few centuries.?  We can hope.

Arvo Part taps into this slowed world, this stretched out yawn of a sentence.  It borders being nonexistent.  It’s a white noise of space. 

The same kind of sound you find when you let sand fall across glass:  a drumbeat of 10 million beats per millisecond. 

I just soak it in and stretch.  And breath. 

Thank you Arvo.  Thank Dr. Kolak.

I’ll be snowshoeing 100 miles steep mountain gradients in less than two weeks.  I can’t wait, but I’m not in any hurry.

Today's 2nd workout of the day:

Ready For Bed:

20 minutes yoga

50 burpees

200 squats

20 minutes jump rope

Stretch

You missed some fun out there at 4am this morning.