WRITING NATURE: 
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY

The first note rings resoundingly, wavering throughout the air before quietly slipping away into nothingness. It never returns to its origin. The single melody line continues; whispering pitches fade in and out of existence, and I follow the flow of mood, my emotions leading me into the rich resonance and guiding me through unfamiliar paths. This is the music which I instill with life before a set of 88 black and white ivory keys.

There wasn't always this freedom, though. Saturday mornings found me squinting tiredly in my youth; I'd be lost in a swirl of dreams, deceiving myself to have awakened and finding my body sunken deep in the bed once again. As a child still reveling in the days of X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was difficult to look forward to a morning of lost cartoons, a day full of intangible scales and classical sonatas. Whereas one sometimes finds moments where decisions pivot and branch off in numerous directions, I only saw the lone road aheadŠ so I accepted my fate as a necessity and swallowed.

Unconsciously, though, I was absorbing continual influence. Every lined dot that I read on a sheet, every key that I pressed down embedded part of an invisible framework defining my musical style &endash; my styleŠ my style of taught techniques, teacher-inspired tendencies, and ancient recycled theory. The distinction between personal choice and foreign influence became blurred, and I lost sight of the original direction that I had determined for myself.

The notes hesitate briefly, a soft sigh in preparation of a passage echoing a familiar tune from somewhere distant in my life. Still hushed, the music rolls gently into a comfortable pace, the breaths slipping beside one another in crafted patterns; the movement almost feels beyond my will, a self-contained organic art slowly unraveling its own inevitable end.

I want to own my music. I want to create it, develop it, hold it &endash; I want to enclose my works in an impenetrable bubble inaccessible to othersŠ but perhaps I am simply living through it, feeding off its self-propagating nature and falsely merging its intentions with my own. It's like searching for the line where your life ends and the life of your creations begin; everything becomes a jumbled mess, and you realize it's not a dividing line but a box which surrounds the components of your existence. We are all shaped to some extent by the lives of others, the lives of their creations, and the lives of our creations; these influences begin as a spark and rapidly expand outward, consuming and altering us until they exist as intrinsic to our nature.

Society calls it environmental influence. The concept relies upon internal feeding as a renewable development cycle being constantly altered by external intervention which in turn embeds itself within the host, leeching its own life like a confused parasite.

Don't bother rereading. You've already experienced the concept without even realizing it, and the complexity of the passage merely mimics the method in which environmental influence functions. You don't get it while it's occurring, but by the time you think about it, it's already over.

The pattern is apparent now; a semblance of a theme begins echoing within the chasm of the grand piano, and it repeats.

So is anyone truly unique? Can people distinctly define themselves and not exist as some manufactured product of society? Our existence is dependent upon a collage of personality, preferences, character, and beliefs &endash; all of which society has infiltrated. We believe that we contribute to ourselves, but our lives may simply be reactions to environmental conditions rather than personal creations. We desire to fill in the blank pages of our life story, but perhaps the tale has already been written, and we are simply living the pages as they turn.

Science calls it the study of complex nonlinear dynamic systems. It is the foundation of chaos theory; essentially, there is a correct prediction for any given event, except it is impossible to always predict the right outcome since initial conditions cannot be accurately calculated. Pause for a moment. It is not as irrelevant as you may believe; if there is a correct prediction for every outcome, our notion of free will becomes disturbingly distorted &endash; what choice is really being made if the outcome can be known before I make the decision?

A gradual crescendo, then the pace picks up slightly. The keys begin to follow each other in faster and faster succession; the dynamics cease fluctuation and increase to a steady forte. I'm playing, yet the notes are appearing naturally, on their own, as if they already existed in my mind and are simply drizzling through my fingers. There is a direction, but I cannot see the destination; the music lives and breathes and runs along a previously beaten path.

Take a game of pool, for example. The individual billiard balls each have the potential to travel in an infinite number of directions, but upon being set in motion, there exists only one path which they can take &endash; the web of chaos is reduced to the single solution.

I often wonder if I have the ability to change the flow of my music whenever I please; I question whether free will enables me to bend the notes off a predetermined course, or if I am forever cursed to a one-way ditch, the sides rising too far above me to crawl out. Admittedly, what are our minds but billions of synapses strung together, continually pulsating with electrical signals which have been affected by chemical reactions we deem emotions? Effect follows cause, and it seems even we cannot escape this pattern.

If the billiard balls had free will, they could choose the paths they took, potentially defying the laws of physics. In organizing the balls and subjecting them to some reaction, the individual balls could traverse unique paths detached from the predicted routes. But we witness only one such path, and if the scenario were replicated, the path would remain unchanged.

Rhythm shift. The tempo reduces, and the notes drown each other in soft tones. Colors and moods overlap, and the music meshes in a tender waltz. None of this feels unusual, but then again, it could have always been thereŠ nascent since the beginning.

I still can't be sure whether I drive the music or the music drives me; perhaps the control is irrelevant, and I should simply be cast forth as a note piercing the empty air. We do understand the world as we perceive it, and so perhaps we may delude ourselves into believing our choices are purely personal &endash; our lives are our own and each holds his own will. Regardless, we move on, and there is always a trail extending beyond the horizon, just over the next crest.

The melody isolates itself to the few barren notes that it began with, gently touching the air before fading away. A quiet darkness settles over the keys, and the notes begin to trickle down like thin whispers, unveiling silenceŠ they never return to their origin.