Philosophy Discussion Forums

Many people can relate to feeling "the chills" up and down their spine in reaction to certain forms of music. I have more examples than I can recall in terms of different compositions. Some pieces affect me more than others. More recently I've found that my own willingness to accept the music to the point of taking what's already there in the composition and altering it to a hire intensity, in fact, accelerates and prolongs the experience of the chills. As much as one should leave the magic of how this type of rapture overcomes and invades the body by and from music, I was wondering what people's take on this is. Is there a general formula that musicians use to approach this kind of effect in their work? Or is it simply an aspect of the art form which cannot, or merely should not, be disseminated? I wonder, because often it is the music which induces this state and often it is also the content of the lyrics. Or else it is both, or simply the - pause, that sends the body into such a pleasant state of "being-shocked."

I have noticed in the past whilst speaking to associates of no particular distinction; simply people I get along with well, that in certain moments I feel this same emotion within the context of my own statements - however mundane these statements might be.

Working at a pizza joint, there was a man named Al, who helped run the business. I was a dish-washer and he was a runner; a runner of pizza-pans from one pizza location to the other. What we shared in common was a complete appreciation for the bizarre and stupid. The moment Al and I met we harmonized in a symphony of disregard for outer appearances; letting the best of our mutual retarded-ness shine through in every encounter - for merely the sake of a good laugh. And at other times, we would broach certain topics of a minor serious nature. With our mutual trust built on the sturdy foundation of not-giving-a-damn-about-how-we-looked-when-we-acted-like-morons, my similar enthusiasm towards such topics of minor importance, like the price of gas, would incite prostrations of such greatness, so it seemed, that even as I spoke the nerves within my back fired without so much as a warning or indication, as if the chorus of my soul were singing out through my teeth in harmony with my voice.

At other times, though for some reason only at this pizza-joint, the same feeling of inspiration through spoken word invoked these feelings when my enthusiasm for a certain thought on a related topic revealed itself in dictations that purported something of beauty in script and syntax. I found this from time to time not only with Al, but with the waitresses and perhaps, though I don't recall so well, the big boss-man.

I'm no Stalin, but every once in a while I somehow have a stroke of brilliance with my spoken word; the kind of brilliance which I cannot prove for certain invokes a sense of rapture in the nervous systems of those listening, but must - for it is their listening and our mutual appreciation not for the speaker - but the spoken words that create this feeling in us.

Being visited by a ghost will send you into the same state as well. I never figured out why, but it was always pleasant to be so close to the invisibly real with such a fear for one becoming frightened to their own death; as nice a death as it might ever have been -though I am still alive eerily enough.

Narwar Bosapth Tumgeit.

Speaking of sounds, words, meanings, and feelings; anyone ever openly recited the word "cellar door" to themselves?