Schild's Ladder; or, An Informal Prog Metal Review
I've been listening to a lot of old music this year. No, not old necessarily. Rather, music from different periods of my past.
Firs this began when I hooked up my oldest functional hard drive, a 1TB external HDD which I bought at the end of high school and used into college. On it was a lot of music that dominated my life over about 5 years - prog metal in particular. For fun I put some on, probably starting with Ayreon: The Human Equation, Into The Electric Castle, and The Universal Migrator albums.
I was genuinely surprised how well many of my favorites held up. The low points, I'll say, were often even more cringe than I realized. Ayreon suffers from particularly weak lyrics at times. But then I put on 0101101 because I kept hearing bits of it in my mind. And honestly, I still feel like it's one of my favorite albums. Top 100 I'm sure. Musically it's a masterwork, and while it holds some of Lucassen's biggest whiffs lyrically (Connect the Dots today sounds to me exactly like an I Think You Should Leave skit and I can't take it seriously since realizing that), I think most of the album actually really excels in lyrics, too. The story is among Ayreon's most solid, and it's told with really solid emotional structures, and the cast of singers is phenomenal. It was Hansi Kursch brought me to the album this year and also all those years ago in the first place, but every single voice is seemingly at the top of their game.
Speaking of Hansi Kursch, in between Ayreon albums, I was putting on much Blind Guardian (particularly Nightfall in Middle Earth) and Rhapsody Of Fire. Or, Rhapsody. I can't remember which is the correct modern name. Actually I think the whole thing dissolved and reformed as Luca Turilli's Rhapsody or something.
Anyway, without chronicling the entire journey, I've been thinking about what it means to me to be coming back to all these songs. I don't think it's an accident. I'm moving across the country in a couple months. And to be honest, it's been extremely hard for me to get excited about it. I'm in such a different place, personally, from where I've been every time I intended to move away in the past, and lately I've been feeling quite lost. Who am I? What matters about me? Why should anyone else care?
Nor do I think it's a coincidence I've fallen so heavily into Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy. It's just the kind of fantasy that feels like it connects me to my childhood, with the historical depth that connects me to my youth in college.
What I'm saying makes sense if you've read Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. I'm not sure if I can explain it on my own, but I'll give it a shot:
After these long and difficult years, which have brought a lot of changes to my life in unexpected ways, and fewer expected changes than I might have hoped, it can feel difficult to maintain any sense of identity sometimes. But over each step of those changes, I was the same person before and after. As long as I can look back at those changes, I will always know who I am. I can draw this line from my present to any snapshot of my past; o μέν pointing to who I am now, δὲ pointing to exactly who I know myself to have been.
It's no new insight that music holds power over our emotions, but I'm glad I noticed this. It could have slipped by me unexamined, and I think that would have been a shame. Even seeing myself do this processing makes me feel, well, more myself.