There is something unusual about childhood, these first couple of layers that fill out the imaginary, the real that is perceived with no connection to the past (because there is no past), but rather to nothing. It is eternal, yet, not observable. We don’t see it immediately in the present, but we always feel its presence. Like in melody, when we listen, we do not hear the Tonica at every moment, yet every note, every movement is being perceived, felt and understood in relation to/through Tonica. In life, then, childhood establishes Tonica. And Tonica creates the structure and internal relationships of the experiences; it forms the tonality that fills the space in between the individual notes. Hence, the very first events you contemplate: people you see, how things are when you wake up or go to sleep, the everyday routines that you have, your hands and how they explore certain objects – determine what and how you see everything else in later life, it sets the meaning of the later phenomena. No wonder Tarkovsky says that artists employ the material from childhood: that material is the meaning of everything you can see..

Nothing is humble. It always gives way to things. It listens, and no thing listens better than it. It loves every-thing so much, it completely yields itself to it. But, in childhood, for the phenomena to emerge, it has to push back. That is because every phenomenon is to be created by the touch of the real with the imaginary, and, in the beginning, there is no imaginary, no memory for the reality to touch. There has to be a solidified bottom so that the waters of experience won’t fall into the void (as it happens for inanimate things, I imagine). Nothing has to share some part of itself (or the whole; it does not make sense mathematically either way) for the first layers of the real to construct the first phenomena. So, Tonica accommodates nothing as a part of itself, inheriting its listening abilities, its immense love for every-thing there is to observe. That love is gravity. It initiates an opening, asking for more of the real to join in; it draws in the experience. Similarly, in music, the establishment of Tonica is not just asserting a certain harmony, but enabling the possible context around it, providing the tonality which is, in reality, merely an empty space to be filled or not filled.

The unstoppable strive for new knowledge - for new things to incorporate into ourselves originates in that quality of nothing we inherit. We want to be filled; we gravitate things from the inside, and if we are to be filled, the search ends, and so does life. And before that, while the search still progresses, we find fewer and fewer things to be able to love with a similar passion as we used to, fewer things to fit in ourselves. No wonder childhood is the time when the most love is given to us and the most love we give away. The surrounding world to a child is like the Sun to a young forest: every beam of light makes every leaf flourish. It is a form of deep care from the Sun and is received with the respectively absolute awe. But as the forest grows, the trees cover the light from one another, becoming unable to take most of it.