Jack Keroauc was a Catholic and a sufferer and a vagabond and he took all the pent-up energy of the fifties and took it on the road only after he decided that he wanted to create a novel out of a trip. Jorge Luis Borges was handed care of the largest library in Argentina after he had gone almost totally blind and after he had written about the world over, and no one was more sensitive to the irony than he. He had books arranged on his shelves in such a way that he could find his favorites by touch.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
Each of them were like a relevation, a genesis of sound that seemed to signal that something *new* was happening, sort of like those big obelisks in "2001: A Space Odyssey," as if the time in which I was listening to them was in fact unique and that this period had its own story that could now be embodied by this certain sound, the likes of which I had never before encountered. I was not living the same day over and over again; things were actually changing. Historians name epochs in history much like music gives the moments of my life their own identity. (2001 was actually the year of Pearl Jam's Ten.)
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
1 comment:
i'm so glad i found this blog! now begins the reading...
see--it's interesting, i know what you are saying. except i would have to say that the distances for me are the same. the distances between the heart and paper, staff or ruled. not that i actually write music on staff paper...but someday? it's good that you are okay with that, with the double vision you have. things will change in your life sometime, they usually do, i've heard/experienced.
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