The tyranny of measure

Bar by bar, minim by minim, beat by beat, the tunes tick on, and because you know what is coming next, they never seem to end. It will be another beat, about the same as the last one, or it will be another note, also similar in length to the last one, because you've heard it all before. It has been driving me mad these past few weeks, because I don't want to know what's coming next. That is the trouble with something like music, you can only ever hear it once for the first time, and then for ever after you know the score.

I could blame my Grandparents for this. It was their mantlepiece clock that ticked steadily on in their sitting room and first made me feel the frustration of measuring time. For me, wanting to get out of the room, to get back home to things that I would rather be doing, each tick was a torment, because I knew it would be followed by another one soon enough, and that there would be yet another, and so on, with no hope of stopping. I had no way to escape from this monotonous pace that the repetitive noise was holding me to. I had discovered the misery of Zeno's paradox before I had even left primary school.

Zeno's paradox is a piece of Greek absurdity that demonstrates movement is impossible. An arrow loosed from a bow can never reach the target, because first, it has to travel part of the distance between the bow and target, say to the halfway point. From there, you would think that it was a straightforward dash to the finish, but no, said Zeno, from the halfway point, it still has to go half of the remaining distance, and once it has reached that point, it yet again has to reach the half-distance point of the remaining distance. By extending this premise it becomes possible to show that the poor arrow is forever travelling through a succession of halfway points, and if it had any sense at all, it would give up once the number of halfway points increased beyond a figure that it could comfortably contemplate.

So too did I give up contemplating how many remaining ticks of the clock there still remained between the 'now' of my fretfull boredom and the 'then' of the distant and unobtainable future point when I would escape the ticking. I stopped listening to music while I'm driving. At least, I stopped listening to 3-minute songs on CD's. Instead, I put on operas, where I can't understand the words and so can't leap ahead in my mind to assess how many more verses there might be. Or recordings of radio shows. Anything that has no distinct measure. Any anything that isn't regular.