"Why'z your phone on DND?"
+ getting into the flow and why music is the next best thing after ... music
- personal entry. 12 october 2024. 17:48.
I am listening to Nemzzz now and I can hear him say "DND" many times. Guy does this mellow, melancholic grime. Like, you'd hear a pleasant R&Bish sample pulsing, (like on PTSD and STAR SIGN) and then those drums just kick in, and you're like oouuww sh*t …
He's rapping monotonously but you don't notice unless you are 'thinking about it to write about it' aka analyzing.
And you forgive him. You can relate to some of the things he says and somehow you want to relate to the rest.
Guy was broke (just like two years ago) and now he's pound rich.
But he likes to talk about his phone being on DND1, and you slightly wonder if a distaste for disembodied voices is a side effect of the psychological satisfaction of seeing more than five figures in your bank app (I wanted to say, "your OPay", oh Jesus)
It has to be.
Nobody ever expects a rich or important person to pick their call, from experience.
People are like, he didn't pick, I'll try calling him later as though it is just the right thing. As though they'd have been surprised if the big man had answered.
And almost every time, they actually are. They are briefly caught off-guard when that tone drops, and the ringing stops instantly. They look around the room quickly with a smile. They stutter.
The call is always very brief. Hurried and mercilessly butchered with sir on this their end. Cold and measured on the other, like how they serve wine at elite European restaurants.
It's the way I answer the phone. Calm, cool, collected.
Sometimes, I revel in the jittery submission at the other end. How well did Alexander Bell understand that his invention would be a conduit of power?
- entry ends. sorry.
I was reading one of Tim Denning's emails and he was talking about “flow”.
That state where "5 hours turn to 2". You are working at your god-like best, with approx. zero distraction, zero sense of time and zero exhaustion.
It's like being on some kind of high.
Tim is one of my favourite writers, and he was writing about how he teaches other writers to enter and maintain the flow state while working on their craft.
And I get this flow thing.
It's actually hard for me to start writing. To begin the process. It might surprise you. Almost always, something has to prompt me, push me. Most times, it's when I feel a certain way: complex emotions, downright despair. That's why most of the work I have done2 feel dark and gnarled.
I am talking about expressive, creative writing here.
The exception was late last year's holidays when I committed to writing for at least 1.5 hours every day. And with every fibre of honesty in my bloodstream, it was one of the most fulfilling periods of my less-than-thirty-years of life.
I felt I had found what I wanted to do; what I wanted to be doing …
Because whenever I started, it was grimly difficult to stop.
As the words formed on the screen, it was pleasurable to me. My typing fingers would always be trailing behind my skipping, skating thoughts and I could feel them, the words, squishing and morphing in my mind, like I was some artist of the verbal kind, consequentially crafting the art form of logos.
Like I was flexing some visceral muscle I had only recently discovered.
This's why I have been this big (personally) on doing what one loves. And that's what I was telling this girl last night when she said she was going into baking, but didn’t love it that much.
Baby girl, you love makeup and wigs and nail tech.
Beauty.
Then do it.
There's some kind of flow in what you really love (and obsess over, like Zach Pogrob preaches), and in the name of Christus, you'd be godlike when you experience it, whenever you experience it.
And it’d be frequent. And pleasurable. And powerful.
And it'd be the magic sauce that keeps you going and ahead, even during the lows.
Because it is your own high.
I can write a 500-page collection of essays on music in one sitting.
I may sound hyperbolic but that's how I feel. And you’d feel the same if you're to write from a source which is infinite, limitless and sewn into the sinews of your person-hood. Writing from such a place is writing you; authentic, inexhaustible, beautiful in the most subjective of ways.
Because I am nothing without music.
The world is nothing without music.
There is no conception of reality without music.
Those sounds should pulse and push and play even when these words stop forming on this screen.
Even if I should ever lose my sight, I should never lose my hearing. I’d die. Please, Lord.
Because to think of it, my love for words is not in the fine curvature of the fonts. Yes, I love that3, but when I see the words in my mind's eye, it’s not in the shape or ink colour, but in their state of being, in the real way that they exist, their unvarnished4 meaning. I can almost taste them on my palate.
It feels metaphysical, and I grin when I experience that feeling. I say the words back to myself, the smile growing, tightening my cheeks. I caress the syllables, holding that metaphysical image in my metaphysical arms, caressing them again and again.
I can experience this whether I read the words or hear them spoken.
I write to deliver that bundle of excitement. For people with this kind of sense, or some appreciation of words in this form.
The world is (seemingly) meaningless. And our minds are obsessed with finding and seeing order in chaos, patterns in puzzles, harmony in hellish hell. And where there is none at all, we create it, we invent it.
That’s why you see bearded men and horses and all sort of things in puffy clouds.
Music is the purest language of harmony, of melody.
It’s was our first attempt to make sense of this; this swirling mass of meaninglessness, this monstrous gibberish. Our longest-lived attempt.
And the deftness with which we have created harmony, simulated meaning, in the level of coherent beauty and our ability to craft it, only points back to us.
Our art smiling back at us.
Saying, you are harmony, you are art.
You are not a messy glob of flesh.
Yes, partly. But it’s like seeing a jazz rendition as people blowing air through a tube, or a singer, as just flexing their larynx and throat muscles. Or, this song playing now as sticks on a pad, looped again and again.
It’s more.
Artfully more.
And when we see it, aha!, it’s revealing of the true nature of things. That's the lens that music gives us:
Art is everywhere. Everything is beautiful.
What an Artist we have behind the scenes then!
I want to do more. Thank you for prodding and helping me.
Until soon again,
With love & ink,
Emmanuel
he even has a diamond-encrusted with a huge "DND" pendant
and most are private
God, I love Georgia!
or tainted, coloured, I can’t really tell
Do people use DND because they want to avoid talking with people, or they want to focus on their craft/work?