In the end, music stands as the most powerful reminder that time is not so much about the so-called moments of time, about the ossification of the confrontation with the course of time into past/present/future, as it is about dissonance. Heidegger, of course, is the one who dedicated himself to thinking precisely such dissonance.

Real participation in music draws us into the dissonant body and into the full instance at once, and it does so (so says Nietzsche at least) more fully and profoundly than words can ever communicate. Music places us, body and soul, at the site of dissonance, the very site of the pain and contradiction of life that get plastered over by the so-called truths of religion and philosophy. Religion and philosophy, having effaced the body and denied time, are incapable of thinking and affirming the profound pain, equally the deep joy, that issues out of the contradiction of being at all. The "musical sense" that Heidegger finds requisite today carries with it a receptivity to precisely what has been effaced by a thinking guided by the images of onto-theology, a thinking modeled after an infinite and omnipresent mind that has no body and suffers neither pain nor death.

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¶ 9:59 AM