you are the music while the music lasts

I am always in awe of that moment when, sitting in the audience, suspended in time, I wait for a performer to step into the half-light of the stage. It is a rite of passage, the archetypal enacting of a microcosm, a sacred space where something hitherto invisible becomes visible and something, someone is born, becomes body, flesh, sweat, naked emotion.

At the beginning of his wonderful book The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damásio sees in this moment - 'the passage through a threshold that separates a protected but limiting shelter from the possibility and risk of a world beyond and ahead' - a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the momentous coming of the sense of self to itself. And he chooses the perfect verses to illustrate the moving quality of such a moment, from the most memorable of poems on our sense of time and its music:


...Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.


T. S. Eliot, 'The Dry Salvages', from Four Quartets.


How I remembered it tonight, like a mantra against the surrounding noise.