On Sunday I moved my grandfather's piano into our office. After readjusting the other furniture in that room and feeling pretty set up I felt the urge to place an old photograph of my grandparents on top of it. My grandfather always loved music, he taught music at a few schools in New Hampshire, conducted a town band, and loved to play the trumpet. When he was an officer in World War Two one of his assignments was to conduct a dance band, which was composed of musicians from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands. When he tells me this story, at the age of 91, I always try to listen intently as if it is the first time I've heard it, much like when he tells me of dancing to Harry James at a place called the "Totem Pole" just after he returned from the war. These are dear stories for him, and in some way I feel his love of music because of his experiences was passed along to me. He gave me my first trombone lessons, and I remember playing one of his trumpets one afternoon as a young child. Having my grandfather's piano in our office is a complex emotional scheme which I think can only be expressed as "my-grandfather's-piano-in-our-office."
James wrote that the stream of consciousness when we speak is really about sentences as thoughts, rather than the meaning of individual words. "They (words) melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way." Taken as a whole, my-grandfather's-piano-in-our-office stirs up many memories, or tangible thoughts in relation to my grandfather, music, the past, the present, and many other things. These are felt somewhere along a spectrum of "harmony and discord" though as specifically vague as they are they are left nameless. "But namelessness is compatible with existence." My-grandfather's-piano-in-our-office is matched in my stream of consciousness by an "inward coloring" of my own. All of the thousands of "dim relations" illuminate the piano for me, which puts me in a very personal context with all of them. Even if there were words for each and every one of them, and if I read Wittgenstein and James correctly, they can not clearly be communicated.
So the picture of my grand parents sit atop my-grandfather's-piano-in-our-office, and now they are both in relation, for me, to James' "Stream of Consciousness."
