{"id":8075,"date":"2024-07-06T16:40:13","date_gmt":"2024-07-06T20:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/let-the-last-thing-be-song-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-07-06T16:40:13","modified_gmt":"2024-07-06T20:40:13","slug":"let-the-last-thing-be-song-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/let-the-last-thing-be-song-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Let the Last Thing Be Song \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning. The word person<\/em> itself takes its root from the Latin for \u201cto sound through.\u201d <\/p>\n

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And Pipe the Little Songs that Are Inside of Bubbles<\/em> by Dugald Stewart Walker, 1920. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yet this musicality is more than a metaphor \u2014 it is part of our material nature, our creaturely inheritance. \u201cMatter delights in music, and became Bach,\u201d wrote<\/a> the poet Ronald Johnson. Music thrusts our neurobiology into transcendence<\/a>. The poetic physicist Alan Lightman saw it as a language for the exhilaration of being alive<\/a>. But it is also the language of mortality. \u201cThe use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,\u201d Richard Powers wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Poet, French horn player, and choral singer Hannah Fries<\/a> (who is also the visionary editor behind the Universe in Verse<\/em> book<\/a>) celebrates this enlivening relationship between music, meaning, and mortality in her stunning poem \u201cLet the Last Thing Be Song,\u201d read here by Hannah herself to the sound of her young son improvising on the piano:<\/p>\n