Sounding Off on Love
How love is the driving force of my new podcast
Photo collage by Jillian Crapanzano @Jilsview
This week, our first to Sound Off on a theme, features our new ListenUpNYC podcast and a complementary article focused, aptly, on love. Happy Valentine’s Day and thanks for tuning in!
Link to: ListenUpNYC The Podcast
Tune in to our new podcast! Developed with the help of producer Jillian Crapanzano and production assistant Caleb Sciannella. This first one features yours truly introducing the core concept of the podcast, namely how music and art function as languages of love.
The Meaning of Life is…Viktor Frankl Says ‘Love’
I couldn’t sleep the other night, and so I started scrolling. I cannot remember my trajectory exactly, just that I somehow moved from listening to tracks by avante garde American composer Phill Niblock, who died recently, to scouring through quotes from Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. The air in my living room sizzled as my brain fairly exploded.
There are so many musicians, artists, thinkers who have come before, who live now, people whose life work is to help us uncover why we’re really here, to help us when we wake in the dead of night wondering with heart-aching sincerity, “what’s it all about?”
I know I have heard of Viktor Frankl and his groundbreaking book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” but sometimes things exist in the periphery of one’s life until they are meant to come in fully, until we are ready to really absorb the full power of them.
On this particular night, Frankl’s hard-won understanding of the importance of purpose hit home. In his experience living for three years in the Theresienstadt Nazi concentration camp, he determined that those who did not lose their sense of purpose and meaning were able to survive much longer than those who lost their way. It gave me goose bumps. Of course. It is not an add-on to life, but crucial to our survival that we take responsibility even in the harshest circumstances for our own hopefulness, that we understand that it is a choice we have to focus on love and beauty beyond all else.
He put it plainly, “life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose…Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This is the basis of his school of thought, dubbed “Logotherapy,” that it is wholly up to us to distract our minds away from the negatives—hatred, cruelty, ugliness—and focus them on the outstanding aspects of the world that can fill our hearts and offer the greatest of transcendent joy, among them the beauty of nature and, most especially, love.
“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth: Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which one can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.”
It is in the expression of love through artistic endeavor, sound and music most especially but not at all exclusively, that I choose to focus my mind, to distract myself from the harsh circumstances in the world that threaten to derail me from feeling like Life is Grand.
Love is the underlying purpose, the ways to it sometimes elusive and yet always worth the journey to seek it out at all costs. It is our choice, after all. It is up to us if we want to get up and get out, to climb the highest mountains (literal or proverbial) to find what it is that fuels us, to find the love in our hearts for ourselves, for others, for life.