Music

Music uses similar mimetic effects to writing. Unlike painting and sculpture, but like writing (but even more than writing - you can't experience it 'at your own pace'), music is relentlessly temporal, but it expresses the kind of non-linear temporality that we really experience. The same things characterise my experience of music as characterise my experience of life: not only repetition (and no, nothing is completely a repetition, things are always different even when they're the same), but the sliding together and apart of different layers of experience, different registers, different pace, volume, effect. Sometimes change is gradual, sometimes sudden, overlapping, hanging, dropping. (Great rock pauses.) Sometimes it will surprise you in a way that straight away seems obvious, predictable, and perfect. That is the great moment of pleasure in music for me - and, maybe, in life.