The Dreamy Wonder of Existential Creations

“A chic type, a rough type, an odd type—but never a stereotype.”

—Jean Michel Jarre.

I grew up at a wonderful time in the 1980s when, if you chose that path, the various inebriations brought with them some of the most wonder-filled imaginative music known to humankind. Jean Michel Jarre’s, Oxygene (1976), was one of a kind, totally out of the box, marketed I’m sure for those steeped in the dreamy drug culture many found themselves in back then—and probably still today.

I recently took a step back in time and played Part II flat out. Throbbing all around were the Gallipoli-bound beats and the images in mind of space and time, asteroid clusters and the like; the transitions and clarity of the composition faultless.

The things that music and the arts do to, and for, the mind and heart are tremendously blessed things. They conform our experience to places we’d never seen, and we reminisce on that which seems weirdly external and hardly real, yet we’ve a taste of it in such “visibly” tangible ways.

And we step back, as I said, to a period when from a formative viewpoint we’re hardly what we’re to become, yet we are. Our history is. We are in that time. This is where contributions like Oxygene and Jean Michel Jarre’s work, by example, take us—to the farthest reaches of our minds; to the existentialism of intrapersonal life itself.

And so we become. We transmute slowly into the people we eventually become due to our experience—what God gives us and we take, and we add that to what God gave us in the first place. All that remains is to take all of what God’s got to give us, leaving that which would deter our purpose, leaving it well alone.

Music is art and it creates for us, building as it would, our imaginations. The machinations of the lifespan owe a debt of gratitude to music, for we become motivated, enthused, inspired and moved to the core in our journeying with music.

Existential creations such as Oxygene, and Jean Michel Jarre’s work to that end, get us exploring the blend of imagination with our existence—our entire experience; all inputs considered and all we can take in.

We see—with the eyes of the heart—and therefore are.

© S. J. Wickham, 2009.