The Vagus Nerve, Beethoven, and Outer Space
The vagus nerve is the wandering nerve. It hangs from your brain stem like wild roots of a stubborn weed to have conversation with your guts, heart, liver and other organs you probably wouldn’t want to touch if you could for fear of harming your darkest, most internal self. Also because touching your own guts is weird and unhealthy.
Our insides are private so we can stay alive. Our vagus nerve listens to our organs as they tell the brain if we are okay or not, and it also, from the brain, tells our organs whether we need to get the pedal to the metal and get the hell out of Dodge because the shit’s hitting the fan or if we can sit back and digest the lovely apple we just finished eating.
Eve, before she ate the apple, was in a good vagal state. She was relaxed, happy, thrilled to be naked with hot Adam. Then God came in, pissed about the apple, and Eve’s vagus nerve promptly slowed down her digestion system so she could get busy feeling really bad about herself. Eve probably had diarrhea later that day.
You know what I mean?
I’ve been so excited lately because everything is going great, and my sweet, confused body has been translating excitement as anxiety, and so, suddenly, I’m anxious! And nothing’s wrong! Welcome to the body of someone with a dysregulated nervous system (the fine print stuff they leave off the adoption paperwork—(good kid with anxiety problems stemming from sudden loss).
I’ve been getting acupuncture because the ancient Chinese knew the body like nobody’s business. The acupuncturist keeps sinking her fingers into the space below my xyphoid process, below the center of my chest, and it feels like her fingers are a knife.
“What is that?” I gasped the first time.
“Tension,” she said. “You hold things in. Worry. A lot of women have this.”
“What can I do about it?” I asked.
She looked up at the ceiling. “Sing,” she said. Guess what helps activate the part of the vagus nerve that helps us to get to rest and digest?
I have a new ritual. It’s called—wait for it—”Singing”.
Last night I lay on the couch and had iTunes chose a song at random from my music library.
The first song was Midnight by Yaz. I had my earbuds in, and I sang my heart out. I don’t know all the words so I made a lot up, but it was so fun! Because I was lying down, I could really focus on the way the vibration of my singing voice touched my back body—my spine, my ribs. My voice became a tool, a granulated, sandy thing, that I could use to explore and touch my internal self. Reader, this was hot! No wonder people look sideways at people who walk around singing in public! It’s like sex—super fun. Super happy, super celebratory, super alive.
Keep it quiet, Cowboy. We don’t do things like that here.
I was thrilled that the second song was Beige by York Lore because I’ve had it on repeat for weeks. Tell me something I don’t know, and lead me to the place where no one ever goes. Let me go under your skin and let me find the demon that drives those heavenly limbs. You know you’re beautiful…
My body loves to sing! The best part is that when I have ear buds in and play the music loudly, I think I sound just as good as the singer. I think I’m rock and roll! If I close my eyes and sing, I’m on stage and it’s a big party and I’m wearing cool clothes and everything is A-OK.
My body eats this shit up. My stomach growls. My dinner digests. My mind goes Maui.
Today’s song in Year of Wonder is Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 13 in B flat major, op. 130 5: Cavatina: Adagio molto espressivo. Clemency Burton-Hill writes, One of classical music’s most complex minds, Beethoven bequeathed us symphonies, choral works, instrumental concertos, chamber music and sonatas that rank among the very finest ever written. And then, towards the end of a sometimes troubled life, he wrote a group of string quartets (for two violins, viola and cello) that took this genre of ‘chamber music’—indeed all music, into a new realm. With their form, their ideas and the heady sound world they weave, these pieces sent musicians and audiences into rhapsodies. Nothing had ever been heard like this before. Beethoven was coming up with music, as the Romantic composer Robert Schumann would later put it, that contains ‘a grandeur which no words can express…[standing] on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination’.
It seems fitting, then, that this movement was included as the final piece on the Voyager Golden Record, the phonograph that was sent into outer space in 1977 to provide a representative range of the sounds, languages and music of planet Earth in case of any meaningful future encounter with extra-terrestrial life. (The Voyager 1 probe entered interstellar space in 2012; Voyager 2 is expected to do so around 2019 or 2020.)
Beethoven’s ethereally expressive Cavatina already feels like music that gets to the places other works could never reach. Beethoven was fully deaf by now and seems to be pushing at the boundaries of what an be expressed through music—what can be heard. To my mind, the Cavatina explores in a little over six short minutes the profoundest rhetorical questions about human frailty and folly, life and love. In seeking these answers, it reaches a sort of exhausted transcendence.
I sure hope the aliens have a decent record player.
I want to whisper something to you.
Are you close enough to hear?
Beethoven was deaf when he composed the piece Clemency-Hill described as transcendent.
Imagine that.
