One of the most interesting things about teaching English is the people you meet and the different world views you encounter with each group. However, sometimes I feel more like a referee than a teacher. And, sometimes I’m less than honest about my own personal viewpoints. Christians, for instance, would be very offended if they knew my actual religious views (if there is a God, he’s a fucking asshole) and most of my students would be seriously surprised, even shocked, if they knew the extent of my drug use. (Just pot, but I smoke a shitload of it)
Anyway, the discussion in class today was quite interesting and even thought provoking. One student was asked what he was going to do on the weekend and he said he was going to a Techno Party. I did a quick survey of the room. Two guys about the same age but considerably more clean cut, one who is totally obsessed with Muay Thai, he is learning English so he can spend a year in Amsterdam, but not at all for the reasons I would. Apparently, Amsterdam is the place to go for kickboxers. And one young mother of two children who’s only been coming a short time but she doesn’t strike me as a techno type at all.
So, anyway, she asked him why he liked that kind of music because it struck her as so much noise and he said something along the lines of it’s not so much the musicality as the vibe, that he likes the whole scene but also can actually feel the throbbing beat, the music is actually internalized, and I said, trying to be funny, well, why don’t you just go stand by the train tracks and his response was really interesting and, therefore, the subject of tonight’s blog.
He said that once he was at the bus station standing next to a bus with an idling motor and he was totally grooving to it until he realized where he was and had a WTF moment, but I thought, wow, that’s kind of cool, personally I hate the whole industrial world but it’s great
See the music, Hear the colors
that someone can appreciate the poetry of power inherent in an idling motor and I realized that a techno party is probably a bit like Nascar without the smell and with a slightly different audience.
I like the idea of being able to feel the music, it goes back to the original reason so many of us did so many hallucinogens back in the day, or at any rate the reason we all said we did. It was so we could see music and hear colors, break down barriers and experience the universe in a different way.
Now, admittedly, in all my experiments with LSD, Peyote, Mescaline and Magic Mushrooms, I never did actually “break on through to the other side,” or at least not for more than a moment. I’m still very much living in the real world, but it’s nice to know that all of the different pathways to perception are still there and the 8 billion people of the earth are not all walking down the same ones.
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