Written by: Will Darpinian

The Hours and Music By Will Darpinian

“Music do I hear. Ha, ha; keep time! How sour sweet music is \ When time is broke and no proportion kept. So it is in the music of men’s lives.” (Shakespeare’s Richard II, 5.5)

Reflecting on my life, music has often been the thread whose skein has held together the hours of my days.

For relaxing, for sleeping, for daydreaming of faraway places… Music enumerates its own uses in conjunction with the soul, and everyone is different. But for me, soundtracks often had more of a daily influence on my life than the originating media. “He’s A Pirate” from the Pirates of the Caribbean is an instant invitation to distant waters, for example, or the lonely strings of Ramon Djawadi’s scoring of “Winterfell” in A Game Of Thrones put me in a calm place of snow and ice. Ambient soundtracks for relaxation and sleep have been catching onto YouTube, and I am grateful to The Witcher 3 and the Elder Scrolls series, among others, for their excellent soundscapes which many hours of my rest are indebted to (in spite of my insomnia).

And so when I became incarcerated and my access to music was fundamentally disrupted, I have felt a sea-level change in the dynamics of my personhood. No longer could I take for granted my access to a flitting lyric of song becoming a full playlist at my fingertips: music and freedom are inextricably intertwined. If I hear in my head the haunting bassline from 28 Days Later’s “In The House, In A Heartbeat,” I can’t go launch myself into a zombie movie playlist with the likes of “East Hastings” by Godspeed You Black Emperor! Nor can an errant humming of “Karma Police” lead to listening to OK Computer for the hundredth time. (“For a minute there \ I lost myself.” “Don’t it always seem to go \ that you don’t know what you got ’til its gone?”) 

This relationship between freedom of expression and fundamental personhood is further explored in Richard II’s Act 5, Scene 5, which I have also been contemplating in my stint of jail time: “Thus play I in one person many people \ And none contented. Sometimes I am king; then treason makes me wish myself a beggar, \ And so I am.” (Richard II 5.5). My time being no longer fundamentally my own, I am forced into a new perspective of music. This outsider’s perspective has, in a way, made me much more proactive in my experience of songs, pushing me to become a less than adequate musician myself to perform my own experience of music that I once took for granted. Remembering the beat and the lyrics to myself, putting on my own performance if I want music at all, has acquainted me with the limits of my fallible memory.

I’m left with my memories of songs half-completed, desperate to become the music and yet unable to do so. Music, for me, weaves together my better nature, enhances my thinking, and motivates me to imagine entire worlds beyond myself. And while the contrast between incarcerated life and freedom is of course stark, losing access to music has thrown into relief its instrumentality to my own thinking. Channeling my creative energies to purpose even for this piece of writing is made easier by the presence of musical muses, and I direly feel their absence.

That’s not to say I’m entirely without music options, but inside jail (and prison, I imagine), all the internet radio stations and movie apps except the religious charge by the minute on our stripped down smart tablets, which isn’t really viable financially. I’m lucky enough to have books to bridge this new abyss in my cognition, but for me now, music and the sweetness of freedom will be forever intertwined.