She’s lying on my chest.
My head lazily peers outside,
catching glimpses of the crowds
returning from buzzy lunches and gentle errands.
The floating breeze
carries courtyard noise
across summer heat,
filling our room with something I recognise.
I hear joy.
I listen for more
and realise
the birds outside
are in applause.
They are congratulating me.
Congratulating us.
Their wings,
their chatter,
their calls across the piazza
fold themselves through the air of our room.
Her hands find my shoulders,
and I pull her closer,
We fall together
into a space
a little closer
than before
and for a moment,
there is silence.
Broken.
only when I realise,
that I can’t tell,
if it’s her heartbeat or mine.
Symphony.
There are so many sounds,
That I lose myself between them.
All perfectly synced with this moment.
My mind begins to shut down,
And, as it fades away,
It carves me a little note
“This is something I will never forget”
While it passes through my mind,
consumed by what’s left of being awake,
I feel eternity.
A moment in time that is just for us.
I’ll never hear these sounds again.
No way to find them on spotify,
No way to have caught it with a microphone
or replay it on command.
Anything done in that moment would have ruined it.
Just like a phone held high at a festival,
pretending to remember what can only be lived.
To be so completely there with someone.
To hear what it is like to be inside a bubble that belongs to no one else.
It’s one of the most beautiful feelings we will ever get to experience.
And, when those moments feel out of reach,
when life gets louder and distance grows longer,
I find it easier to return through sound.
Sound decorates time.
It marks it with chords and patterns to help us return.
Tonal checkpoints we can use to find our way back to.
Sound and song can get us back to places we thought we would never see again.
Of course,
There are sounds that take us to places we no longer want to revisit.
Sounds we wish we could silence.
Echoes that remind us of things breaking,
of words that never should have been spoken,
of doors closing with no one on the other side.
And those sounds, too, live inside us.
But those are stories for another day.
Muses
So far, this process of tying my weeks to the Muses has left me slightly unstuck.
Week one with Polyhymnia, the Muse of Prayer,
had me reflecting on the deeper reasons
of why I keep pointing my life toward being an artist,
even when every logical root tells me
It’s not the easiest way to live.
Week two with Melpomene,
the Muse of Tragedy,
forced me to grieve the loss of a friend
and hold myself together
while trying to stay afloat.
This week has been focused on the Muse Euterpe.
Historically, she’s the Muse of Music.
I expected that this week would bring some relief.
I imagined rapture.
Music.
Dancing on tables.
Singing songs with friends.
But reality is rarely predicatable.
The songs didn’t play.
The music didn’t carry.
And instead of being swept into joy,
I found myself stuck.
This week was the first time in a long period
that I felt daily pressure about what I would say here.
What was the big insight?
If no sound plays,
what was I supposed to reflect on?
The more I pressed,
the quieter it felt.
It wasn’t until today that I realised
maybe I’ve been holding too tightly.
That what music teaches
is that flow happens
when you let go.
The chase creates noise,
forcing it creates tension.
And when you stop interfering
and allow it to arrive.
You finally hear it play.
You can’t hear the whole song
until you are so still
that you stop affecting the music.
It’s not the insight I expected,
and not the one I wanted.
But it is the one I needed.
Strange,
that the Muse of music didn’t teach me to dance or sing,
but to do the opposite.
To shut up and listen.
Channels
Euterpe literally means the giver of delight.
She is traditionally depicted with the flute, the aulos, sometimes as double flutes.
Instruments representing breath, rhythm, and ecstasy in Greek ritual.
Ancient writers like Hesiod or Pindar rarely separated the Muses in detail, but later Roman writers and Renaissance humanists gave her domain over music,
especially the lyrical and instrumental side of poetry.
Euterpe was often placed alongside Polyhymnia and Erato, because sacred song and love poetry formed a natural cluster of emotional current.
But I think of her more cleanly in a channels triad.
Polyhymnia channels devotion upward into higher resonance.
Melpomene tears the channel apart with tragedy.
And Euterpe is the harmonizer,
regulating the flow,
giving sorrow and prayer shape.
She reigns over rhythm, tempo, and composition.
She’s the scaffolding for feeling.
When I think about how artists have wrestled with this idea, I go to the Russian spiritual avant-garde of the early 20th century,
Kandinsky,
Gurdjieff,
Malevich,
that circle of thinkers who wanted to make painting as direct as music.
Kandinsky used abstraction as a way to bypass representation entirely,
to try and hit the soul the way sound does.
Later, Rothko achieved something similar in America,
but by then, abstract expressionism had already been folded into soft power by the US.
The work still had beauty,
but its authentic spiritual experiment was drowned out by its political utility.
Painting became a demonstration of strength.
The question was no longer is this true?
but does this project power?
The same thing happens now.
We might know it is better to buy slow,
to use objects that last,
to resist fast fashion and planned obsolescence.
Yet marketing budgets overwhelm knowledge.
A company can convince us of anything,
just as dating apps have convinced us
that swiping is synonymous with love.
People admit it at weddings
“we met on Tinder”
but rarely with pride.
It’s the embarrassed acknowledgement
that the song of connection
had to be mediated by an app.
Within the modern world,
success is rarely about the beauty of the idea or the elegance of the design.
Success is about capital at hand and the marketing machine in support.
Even if the idea was once correct,
once true,
the advertising drowns it out.
Capitalism erodes the song until only the revenue remains.
This week reminds me that even though this is loud.
it is not music,
it is noise.
Beautiful form comes from stillness, composition, and rhythm.
Harmony comes from the alignment of forces that would otherwise be scattered.
It is the quiet that allows the song to arrive,
the pause that gives sound its contour,
the space to breathe that keeps melody from becoming propaganda.
Polyhymnia lifts us upward,
Melpomene breaks us open,
but Euterpe gives those extremes their tempo.
She teaches that emotion without rhythm is chaos,
and rhythm without emotion is empty display.
In a world where capital, marketing, and volume can drown out truth,
She lets me know that:
The song that endures is not the one played loudest,
But the one that resonates most.
Deep State
Auditory control isn’t new.
We just forget how deep the rabbit hole goes.
We are born into worlds already engineered to keep balance.
The tools that one generation used quietly become the norms of the next.
In the 1930s, background sound was designed for factories, offices, and malls.
A company called “Muzak” called it “Stimulus Progression.”
Playlists adjusted tempo, volume, and key to influence worker productivity.
Faster tempos mid-morning to keep workers alert.
Softer melodies after lunch to prevent slumps.
Ambient control.
Like taking a Xanax every time you fly.
Or adderall to revise…
The same logic lives in architecture.
The new JP Morgan tower in New York will open with seventeen restaurants, a year-round JP gift shop, and air systems that pump through three times the fresh air of a normal building.
Engineered environments that tell you how to feel, how to work, how to spend, how to move.
Art does it too.
Mine do for sure.
I’m always trying to build a mood for whoever is looking.
Sometimes it fails.
But when it works, it goes deep enough that someone becomes a friend, or parts with enough money to keep me alive.
What feels like harmony is often orchestration.
And we only notice when the song ends.
So what?
If I’ve learnt anything this week,
it’s that there is a certain harmony to my practice that has been missing.
Since January I’ve been trying to force structure into it,
to find a bit of purchase.
For the most part,
it hasn’t worked.
I enjoy being unstructured.
Where I’m looking for structure now isn’t in the large blocks of time
months here, projects there
But with the tempo and rhythm of my day.
The routine.
It’s not natural for me to want alarms,
or to repeat the same actions each day.
But if I want to keep improving at the rate I’m improving,
if the projects are to keep growing at the rate they’re growing,
the freedom I need to surrender
is the freedom to define every morning on my own terms.
That’s frightening,
because I came to art seeking complete freedom.
Yet the lesson I seem to be learning
is that whatever route we take in life,
we always end up building the cage we live in.
Those with more freedom may build the cage they desire,
not noticing until it’s too late,
what they’ve left outside.
Next week I’ll share some of the paintings and projects I’m working on.
I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for your time.
Nothing but love.
- R x