A new post in the series - "All Music is Only the Sound of His Laughter"
In my very first post in this series I made a reference to these famous line from Shelley, actually, the last line in particular....
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark
Today I found myself remembering these lines as I heard this beautiful song, composed by A.R. Rahman and sung by Sadhana Sargam. Based on the early morning raag Bhatiyar, this song has a certain haunting quality - in a pleasant way of course. It sort of stays with you long after, it brings a type of quietness that is both endearing and lingering. The heart-touching lyrics of the song are penned by Sukhwinder Singh.
There is a certain sweetness in the emotion of sadness, and when captured in a beautiful composition it can be powerful in its impact, almost soul-stirring. It is a quality, if we can get to it somehow, that doesn't allow us to wallow in our sorrow but rather takes us higher in a way.
It can move us beyond our narrow and egoistic self-pity, away from the "oh, how unfortunate I am" type of sentimentality to some deeper place that is a bit more detached, a lot more calm, and certainly a whole lot more gentle than the brutality of a raw emotion of sadness and despair.
Beautiful music can often help us move to such a place, a place of cleansing....opening the way to a more peaceful place inside, a place where we may begin to experience emotions in their sublime form, in their more purified form.
The Light begins to shine its way through such an opening within, the Light of Life, the Light of Love, the Light of Beauty.
Painting by Freydoon Rassouli
When I hear this song again, and again, and slowly take in the beauty of this painting, somehow I begin to feel that the truth of Shelley's thought finds its truer meaning when seen in the light of these lines:
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.
~ Sri Aurobindo, from a poem titled 'Who'
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