undertones
do you just have pictures of mangoes or do you know what biting into the perfect one tastes like
I don’t have any tattoos yet, but I really want to get a lot of them.
I know what my first one is going to be, I want it to be the text “can you hear the music”.
It’s a line from the film Oppenheimer by Chris Nolan. It goes something like —
Algebra is like sheet music. It’s not important if you can read the music, it’s can you hear it.
Can you hear the music Robert?
Neil’s Bohr says this to Robert Oppenheimer in a scene where him and another professor of Robert’s are asking him to move to Europe, to go away from the beakers and potions of Cambridge and move where Robert’s mind could run wild, where Robert could learn the ways of the theory.
That line slapped me when I first heard it. Can you hear the music ?
It felt like someone laid out my seemingly unstructured obsessions in life in the perfect poetic analogy.
Can you hear the music ?
We live in a world dense with symbols, rules, and representation. Social conventions, language, professional protocols, even the roles we play in our relationships—all of which can be perfectly executed without ever touching the deeper reality they’re meant to express.
You can scroll your entire life away being mindless about most major decisions of your being. A life where the notation is correct, but the music is absent.
I am afraid of a life like that.
There are heaps of sheets all around you, pages with filled with shallow slop, with propaganda, with agendas, with things other people want you to do, with crap companies want you to buy, with ads, with porn, with drugs, with unfair expectations, with hatred, with vengeance.
Do you just read the sheets or do you have the courage to hear the music and decide ?
We learn what to want by copying others, following the notation of desire without understanding our own authentic needs. We pursue careers, relationships, possessions not because we hear some internal music calling us toward them, but because we’re sight-reading from society’s score.
The symbols of success become more important than actual fulfillment. You can hit all the right notes. The degree, the job, the house, the family, but still feel like you missed the whole point, because you’ve been reading music you never learned to hear.
Reading those sheets won’t make you shiver, they won’t make you cry, they won’t remind you of the oceans you have inside you.
Can you hear the music ?
Some people never progress beyond this mechanical repetition, going through life performing the correct gestures while remaining deaf to the harmonies they’re supposed to create and cherish.
They shake hands, make eye contact, say the right things at funerals and weddings, but something is always missing.
The question “Can you hear the music?” is my attempt at a deep inquiry into everything I see around me, to question if I am just performing the notation of life.
I don’t want to just read and move on, I want to hear the music, I want to feel the tears and shivers.
Welcome to undertones.
