The Magic of the Black Disc

A friend emailed me recently and said that he had just purchased Bob Dylan's Planet Waves. It just so happened that I had been listening to a track from it that morning on my iPod ("Tough Mama"). I told him how those lines "Dark beauty / with a long night's journey in your eyes" and "with the badge of the lonesome road written on your sleeve" get me every time, and the way he sings them! There's something visceral about Bob's songs. In some kind of sub-rational way they just hit ya where ya live! My friend is doing Masters work in multi-modal therapy at the moment, liked my use of "visceral" and told me how his studies were moving him away from "the rational only [not irrational]...to a total experiencing...visceral is a good word...so descriptive....so...visceral...I havent got into ipods and probably wont....love my cd collection too much...love the fussing around with the cd's and ancient cd technology...so visceral." Well the use of an iPod hasn't superceded my use of and love for CDs. (Man, I still use vinyl!) Both CDs and vinyl records are objects of beauty in themselves and things I could never replace in my life. It's just that the iPod gives me portability and I love the shuffle function which keeps me guessing about what's coming up next. I've come to the realization that I love these objects because they are magic. When as a child I took a solid black vinyl disc and placed it on a spinning turntable, music came out of it for no reason that I could explain. I didn't understand or need or want to understand the technology behind the magic. The wonder of the music carried its own explanation. The CD revolution gave me the same experience without lessening my love for the magic of the black disc. Ditto for the iPod and the CD.