Pseudoesthesia

This is a song about accepting loss. Not an ordinary kind of loss, but a loss that a significant portion of yourself has become entangled with. A kind of pseudoesthesia, if you will; the pain of a loss of a part of yourself.

Why the Title

Pseudoesthesia is “An illusion of feeling in a limb that has been amputated. Also called ‘phantom pain.’” (source: [PsychologyDictionary.org]). This is a psychological and clinical term for phantom pain; sometimes when you lose a limb, you still have the sensation that the limb is there, and sometimes, you even feel pain in the area as if it were coming from the place that limb used to be.

There is a kind of spiritual limb loss associated with certain kinds of loss. I chose the title because it’s about what happens when you let go of the portion of yourself. When you lose a part of yourself, the pain of it persists. The truth is, you can’t actually let that piece of you go; the only thing you can really do is suppress it, and ignore it until it falls silent. It is not a death of self, but the sensation of death certainly does accompany it.

Some Notes on Pseudoesthesia

This piece begins and ends in c# minor, which I consider to be the darkest key. There is a darkness. That is, there is a terrible nothingness. Spiritual pseudoesthesia accompanies these things. The piece is slow and stoic about itself. It undergoes a development section, and there is some polyphonic emergence against the primary theme. Then piece returns to c# minor, and ends on a double octave with an embedded fifth scale degree in the higher octave. This gives the piece a hollow emptiness at the end.

Some Notes on the Featured Image

This image is one of the ones that the generative AI algorithm on [StarryAI.Com] came up with when I prompted it with the featured term (pseudoesthesia). I thought the image fit the concept. If you look closely, you can see that the main portion of the image appears to have lost a part of itself.