Music is the opposite of nihilism.
This is a sentiment I discovered when working through my PTSD. In order to explain it, I have to first characterize trauma. To be clear, the exact nature of trauma is entirely unlike other emotional states—it operates on a plane of the emotional spectrum all its own. It is not the lethargy and disengagement of depression, or the persistent itch of anxiety, although it might contain those things; it is something altogether other. So describing what it feels like is something like describing color or sound. There is a strong sensory and experiential nature to trauma that can only be pointed at, not captured by, language. But it isn’t true that trying to translate it is futile, since it’s based on (or, rather, attacks) something fundamental to the human condition. In fact, it might be the thing that comprises the human condition itself.
That thing is storytelling. People do not respond well to meaninglessness and chaos. The human mind craves order, sequence, sense—and we do this against our will. The part of the brain that recognizes faces (it is a miracle of evolution we see anything other than assorted body parts, much less that we can ascribe consciousness and emotion to people around us based on expressions) works overtime, and we see them in clouds or paintings. We view objects in the world in terms of how they might serve or impede us. We have a conception of our own selves, a reflexive narrative of how we got here and why, and this unexamined set of beliefs guides our actions. Storytelling is the essential function of language—beginning, middle, end, a plot arc, more than just the transfer of raw information—and it might well be one of the oldest traditions we still do as human beings.
Trauma, essentially, is the upending of meaning. It is the enemy of storytelling. When I was having flashbacks, they weren’t just a confusion of senses and a hurricane of feelings; they were the breakdown of the fabric of reality. In this state, words like ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ do not apply; these feelings might come afterward, when you can process the event, when you return to the realm of meaning. It took me months to fully realize I was enraged about what I had witnessed during my bus accident, because I simply hadn’t yet come down to Earth enough to possess the reflective tools to make sense of it. Without sense, there is no rage. Trauma operates in this world of senselessness, or rather in no world at all; it is the utter tearing up of the systems of the soul that relate in any meaningful way to the events around it. I can best describe it as terror, bewilderment, panic, and a feeling of profound vulnerability. It is a storm.
Many people, especially Jews who received a religious education, are taught that the basic dichotomy of the Bible, Judaism’s Yin and Yang, is “something” and “nothing.” But the substance of creation does not, in the text itself, emerge from nothingness. It comes from chaos. The insertion of nothingness into the biblical account is a much later interpretation. The struggle between order and chaos is a much more primal account of the nature of humanity and the history of the human soul, and in this account, trauma is the ultimate assault on the human capacity to construct order and meaning out of the world. That’s why so many war veterans abandon religion—it isn’t because of a methodical, intellectual conclusion that a divine power can’t explain what they’ve seen and done. It’s much deeper, much more intuitive than that. It’s because their encounter with the profound chaos at the heart of reality just doesn’t square with humanity’s attempt to make meaning, to make the world out to be more than it appears.
But music is something different. Music can’t be ignored. It’s like a face—you have to perceive it in its totality; you’re literally incapable of breaking it down to its constituent parts and disregarding the whole. When it comes to math, you can study the terms of a formula one at a time, but music is about narrative. It’s about relationships—about meaning. Music is a kind of applied math, but it’s also impossibly more complicated. My guitar students frequently make errors in basic arithmetic because of how involved the math becomes when it’s being used to calculate the relationships between notes in a chord. Imagine doing a basic equation, but every number has a color, and its color changes every time you compare it to another term in the equation, and its color changes even more profoundly and evocatively when you compare three terms at a time. It’s easy to see—impossible not to see, in fact—the emergent color created by the blend of all of the terms. But it’s incredibly difficult, not to mention boring and senseless, to isolate each term. That’s what storytelling is all about—emergent experiences, sequences, relationships. Meaning.
Another thing about music is that it hits your body, not your mind. And your body is the locus of trauma. Some people, especially those who experienced abuse during childhood, lose memories of their trauma, but they continue to engage in behaviors, and often exhibit physical symptoms, as if the trauma were present consciously. The body knows when the mind doesn’t. And that’s where music goes. Nothing is uglier than me dancing, but when you put on a Latin groove, I don’t have a choice. Music demands something of you. It demands movement, demands attention. It demands that you make meaning out of it—and if it’s really good, it demands you make meaning out of yourself.
It’s especially this last trait that rendered music an indispensible tool for my trauma processing. It took weeks before I understood what I had been through—precisely because trauma is all about subverting understanding—and the only feelings I was capable of having about the accident were those trauma-sensations, feelings of stormy collapse. It was only in listening to music that I found myself capable of sadness and rage and loss and grief. Trauma had robbed me of my humanity, and music returned it to me. Maybe in a much broader sense, too, music is an antidote to the nihilism of trauma.
Gavi Kutliroff lives in New York City, where he works as a case manager for child welfare. A recent graduate of Brandeis University, he's also a musician, a poet, a Wikipedia enthusiast, and an avid fan of indie coming-of-age films. He believes in the value of a public, open discourse about mental health and in the power of writing and communication to help people understand each other and themselves.