Cosmic Times

 

It's a very "cosmic" time with the 50th anniversary of the release of Dark Side of the Moon.

A few days ago I was at my local bookstore perusing the 50th Anniversary Book of photographs and other illustrations, Pink Floyd: The Dark Side Of The Moon: The Official 50th Anniversary Book. I had gone out thinking I was going to see the alignment of the planets in the Western sky, and I was just killing time in the bookstore waiting to see the spectacle. But it was anti-climactic: there was no visible alignment in the Western sky and I was probably much too early. The half-moon was directly overhead, which meant another hour to wait. In retrospect, I felt FOMO was real: It's like trekking 300 miles to see a total eclipse only to arrive when clouds roll in.

We naturally pine for these kinds experiences in life in which there's a potential for numinous synchronicity between a musical or artistic idea and something that's happening cosmically but they disappear beyond the horizon or outside of our sphere of experience.

The takeaway: We look to art for potential magical moments, which do occur, but are very brief and fail to be as numinous, or as life-changing as we'd like them to be. Dark Side was one of these fleeting moments in the history of the band, which soon afterward took a turn to a darker period, so it was in fact, "life-changing" for them.

One of the most interesting things about the album (as well as the remaining albums with Roger Waters at the helm) was that they had lots of human universals in them, including all the bad ones. This is what makes art lasting. The album cover also had a universal resonance: when the first mock-ups were presented to the band with the the pyramid/prism theme, they all immediately reacted to it positively. Perhaps something cosmic was at play there as well, and universal in the sense that we see an eclipse, for example, as a universal life-changer.  

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My personal commemoration: Dark Side of the Mars. My theme: The colonization of Mars remains quixotic. I was thinking that as well in 1999 with Miles From Mars.