Repetition in Music and Running leading to Spiritual Experience

Six Names of Beauty

Crispins Sartwell’s lovely little book ‘Six Names of Beauty’ allows the reader to play with the idea of beauty from the perspectives of the language employed by six different cultures. Sartwell provides six names and definitions of beauty within these cultures put into context of the cultural practices, but then also applies those concepts to expressions of beauty outside each specific culture. Here are the six languages, names and definitions:

1.  English – Beauty  ‘the object of longing’
2.  Hebrew – Yapha ‘glow, bloom’
3.  Sanskrit – Sundara ‘holiness’
4. Greek -  To Kalon ‘idea, ideal’
5. Japanese – Wabi-Sabi ‘humility, imperfection’ 
6. Navajo – Hozho ‘health, harmony’

 Sanskrit – Sundara ‘holiness’ invoked through repetition in music

I was pleasantly surprised in reading the book to see a substantial section of the Sanskrit chapter devoted to exploring the relationship between repetition in music as a source bringing forth spiritual experience. I found much of this section really beautiful and I also feel a resonance with the concepts in connection with what could be described as spiritual running experiences. I am going to quote fairly extensively from this section.

All music makes use of repetition. The fugue structure, for instance, is a structure of growth within repetition. But the structure of reggae is extremely repetitive: as repetitive, probably, as any musical style that has ever existed.(1)

Sartwell who is a professional philosopher most known for his work in aesthetics, has also been a music critic, and an amateur musician himself ( harmonica ). Sartwell is an atheist, but denies that the mystery and enchantment we encounter in the world can be explained away purely through science and rationality. Spiritual experience can emerge from ordinary experience, and beauty can be found in unexpected places or through ordinary practices.  He mentions the fugue structure to show how growth or progress as abstract concepts can be related structurally to repetition, and also to point to the connection between Bach fugues and spiritual music. In the section Sartwell focuses mostly on reggae music and provides context through the cultural and spiritual roots ( Rastafarianism ), the musical form roots ( ska, rock-steady, “roots” reggae ), some of the greatest practitioners ( Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Augustus Pablo, Culture ), and their capacity to transmit spirituality through their music. To limit the scope of this post I am going to focus on how he deals with the idea of repetition, but I recommend reading the entire book.

…reggae consists essentially—the whole song, but also every song: the whole history of the style—of a single rhythm. In this sense it is a chant or mantra, which is thematized explicitly in the music.(2)

The chant is, first, a contemplative form in which concentration leads, ideally, to transcendence, and the form is restricted inversely as the dilation of experience it engenders. But it is also a “work” rhythm or a march or a dirge, something that shapes a social as well as existential unity. (3)

I really love this particular quote. Repetition begins with a contracted field of awareness, a focus on the aspect being repeated, yet as one aspect contracts another must expand. As a degree of mastery over the repetitions unfolds, the experience of existing gaps between the particular repeating aspects dissolves, and the separateness dissipates into a unity. At this point the initial contraction yields expansion or a dilation of experience surrounding the rhythmic repetitions which are felt but no longer in need of direction. I have experienced this process in various physical practices (basketball, Juggling, tai chi, and now running). Below Sartwell continues his take on this process:

…repetition over time is also a template for development, and each run-through takes on a different significance. (4)

…where the periods of repetition become very short as the overall structure of repetitions enlarges, each repetition becomes more predictable, and each thus becomes somewhat harder to invest with a distinct significance. It is at that point that the sound becomes a mantra, at which it begins to mesmerize, to tip you over the lip into something else.(5)

As every rhythm is a structure of repetition, repetition is itself the very principle of unity for beings who are condemned to live in time. (6)

What is spiritual in music is above all tempo: the structure of its development and return through time that becomes our own development and return. Thus music itself is an exemplar, an agent, and an element in union, showing its beauty. It is always a return, and always a sequence of returns. But when these returns are as emphatic as a heartbeat and almost as simple, we get the sensation of seeing the center of unification itself that we long for, and of coming to be, moving or dancing with it.(7)

Sometimes the world flows through you, and sometimes you flow through the world. Or: the sensorium is a zone of visitation, a zone of interpenetration. We possess the equipment to forget our separateness, that is, to recall our connections; we long for this. And each experience by which this purpose is accomplished is a powerful riddim.(8)

I don’t think I can improve or add to Sartwell’s description, but I will try to describe a running experience from last Saturday in my own words. The schedule for the run was to wake up 5:30 AM make an initial 5.25 mile run through the state park to meet up with running friends at 6:45 AM. From there the harder running would commence. I am only going to describe the first solo part of the run to keep the length down. I should note that every run has a different quality, some more effort intense, some more social, some easier commutes to work and back listening to music. Nearly all tend to result in some degree of intrinsic meaning and happiness.

A Spirited Run

I am fortunate to live in scenic Topanga Canyon, CA that includes a state park with mountain running trails and even pacific ocean overlooks. The park trail is just 3 miles from my house, but I drive there as the slim windy roads can be dangerous for a runner.

It is 6 AM and the sun is rising. The run begins the first ½ mile or so with a fairly steep grade climb maybe 200-250 feet of elevation. I can feel my body align itself to the angle of the grade and my heart accepts the work asked of it with little complaint. There is the slightest discomfort, enough to tell me I’m working, but not the claustrophobic feeling an inexperienced runner feels when the body is grasping for fuel. I briefly think back to the time 30 years earlier during an extended (4 year) illness when walking a flat street block was often a daunting task, but soon the chirping of the birds orients me to my surroundings.

As I reach the top of the first climb my endorphins are kicking in, and suddenly as I emerge from a covered section a glorious view opens to the canyon and distant mountains. There is a misty fog covering the canyon floor softening the rising sun. I’m at about maybe 1300 ft elevation and I can feel a sense of my smallness in relation to my surroundings. The part that feels smaller is my sense of separateness, and it is necessary for that part to decrease in order to feel part of the grander environment. While my separate sense of self has contracted, my connected sense of self has dilated. The trail winds like this from one side of the mountain to the other sometimes climbing sometimes dropping all the time becoming only more enchanting. There is a brief stretch where the trail opens to a vast view of both sides of the canyon. The sense is quite different from winning a child’s game of king of mountain. Instead I would describe the experience as one of ego-less receptive gratitude to the natural majesty that inter-fuses the situation or to re-quote Sartwell:

Sometimes the world flows through you, and sometimes you flow through the world.

Here, for a time, the flow seems to go in both directions unobstructed.

Whether one considers this to be a spiritual experience or something else of course brings us back to a process of abstract judgement. I'm not concerned with the label - Just looking forward to my next run in the Mountains.

The day of the run described above

1-8.   Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty (p. 49-52). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.