"Lose Yourself" - Eminem (video from "8 Mile")

Everyone has seen it but the brilliance of it is undiminished by exposure.

It's rare for something to come back from Facebook but the theme of losing yourself in the music applies to everything.

Bob Marley said everything is blues but, with all respect to the Master, it's not true as blues don't work when you have blues.  Sometimes you Lose Yourself because it really is that fucked-up and you need a different way to say it.  Losing yourself in the music isn't losing anything you need.  The self is a construction but music is forever and nothing can take that away, nothing ever has.

That started a conversation on the self as a construct and you can get intellectual with it if you like.  Ask a psychologist about a self and what's in it and that will keep you busy all day.  The shorter answer is they don't know.

In music there is no self, there is only the sound.  I see my fingers doing this and that know that moving them in this way or that will make different things happen and I focus, focus to make sure they do it when they're supposed to do it.  But still there is no me in it as the music is beyond me, around me, and places words don't go.

Cat asks me what I think when I play and I really don't think anything.  Everything is absorbing what is around me and feeling what I feel so this translates through some mechanism I don't even know into making my fingers do what they do.  There is no self, there is only the conduit and the wider you can open it the less need for self you will have.

Trying to say where that conduit goes will get the same kind of answer as you get from a psychologist when you ask what self is but the musician has the advantage because you don't have to say it when you can play it instead.  In my world, it's the only way you can.

There is a level of self below that of the verbal consciousness as words are an abstraction impossible for some and yet self-awareness is clearly present.  Therefore, that deepest self cannot be approached by words but I strongly believe it can be approached by music as the heartbeat is likely the first stimulus we ever get and goes to the lowest possible level of consciousness.  We aren't even fully built yet.

Whether the varying layers of self are different or manifestations of the same thing is all very well for psychologists but I don't care and it's probably a safe bet you don't either.  If you do, go off to read some Carl Jung and have a ball.  But I ain't ridin' that trail, cowboy.

Just like Eminem says, I'm not trying to find myself, I'm trying to lose it.  This is not self-destruction but purification of trivial influences.

(Ed:  mumbo jumbo)

Dunno about that, matey.  Thirty-eight million people didn't think so on that song.  He stated it brilliantly.