masterpieces on blank canvases of silence

Music speaks in the world's only universally understood language. There need be no fear of precious meaning, lost in translation, forever irretrievable. Zimbabwe, Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cairo - you name it. No matter where you're from, you can feel the bounce and rhythm of a song. You can tap your feet to the beat, that is, unless you are melodically handicapped. (Such poor, unfortunate souls.) You can get goosebumps listening to silky smooth vocal runs, like I do.

Gets me every single time.

We are a people with whom the majority have been equipped the ability to empathize with music on a crazily sublime level. To be moved by notes and voices from all ends of a revolving 3-D spectrum of hues and colors. Some identify better with the raspy throats of hoarse soul artists, others with the striated timbres of violin and viola, and yet others with electronic synthesizers and voice box technology.

Sometimes I wonder how beautiful the world would be if words were sung, rather than spoken.

So that expressing how you care for someone wouldn't amount to meaningless mumbles, but to rhythm, chords, and ultimately, divine melodies. Imagine if there were soundtracks for every emotion. Soundtracks for joy, fear, anger, hope, despair. After all, don't we always say that how we feel "can't possibly be put into words"? Words apparently don't serve proper justice to the intensity of human emotion. In no way can it capture the fine lines, and the unfathomable depths between those fine lines, the way music can. Words can't overlap and layer and interweave and contort like the notes of a root chord and all its variant chords - the seventh, fifth, ninth, diminished, major, minor chords.

I believe that ears can shed tears, can bleed convulsing in pain, can smile wider than the heart can grin. I'm so thankful that I'm not deaf. If and only if God willing, I were ever to go deaf, I suppose I would paint quarter and eighth notes in the air, in hopes that they would magically come to life and reverberate the airwaves surrounding my eyes. Perhaps I could use those digital, visual metronomes so I could sing and play, if not audibly, then at least visibly.

Until then, music will always speak for me when hurt penetrates so deep that I am numb at the mouth and frozen at the feet, drowning in my own miserable pool of writer's block.