Category: Culture

I was rum­mag­ing through my old sheet music last night in search of some­thing sim­ple enough for me to play on my gui­tar. While doing this I came to the con­clu­sion that eight years ago I was a damn good sax­o­phon­ist. Up until high school march­ing band killed my love of musi­cal per­for­mance [a love that had already waned since becom­ing involved in orga­nized ensem­bles in 6th grade] I was start­ing to play some Coltrane and learn­ing the art of jazz impro­vi­sa­tion. Then I up and quit. The upshot of this is that all of my sheet music is far too com­pli­cat­ed for me to play on my gui­tar. For now at least. But some­thing as mun­dane as this did get me think­ing. [sur­prise!]

I am in a con­stant­ly strug­gling with my art. I have a well of cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion that I can’t quite ever ful­ly tap into. I feel like I am stand­ing in front of a leak­ing dike with a bowl and just catch­ing drib­bles until I have enough to take a drink. I fig­ure this might be the typ­i­cal state for many artists, and the peri­ods of rapid pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and genius are when the lev­ee breaks. Since all art [except for writ­ing*] is, by its nature, inef­fa­ble I think my dif­fi­cul­ty lies in the basic con­nec­tion between trans­lat­ing the inef­fa­ble into some­thing. Which is a pret­ty damn big prob­lem. A fun­da­men­tal one in fact. A prob­lem that says, per­haps I should­n’t be doing art at all if I can­not trans­late.

My prob­lem is that I’m not very good at any of the art forms I’ve been try­ing. I’ve avoid­ed draw­ing and paint­ing because I don’t know how to do them and I don’t think my mind is arranged prop­er­ly to deal with that type of visu­al artistry. Film­mak­ing is the clos­est visu­al art to my mind­set because it is sig­inif­i­cant­ly eas­i­er to make things look the way I want them to. My writ­ing breaks down because I always end up writ­ing about writ­ing about things. I want to tell sto­ries, not be a writer or film­mak­er. I want to be a poet, not write poems.

So I’m think­ing that per­haps music is an art I can be good at. With music I don’t need to describe the inef­fa­ble because I can make it myself. This strikes me as the reverse of what I have just talked about. Instead of inter­pret­ing that which can­not be ful­ly inter­pret­ed, if I play good music I can lead myself and oth­ers to a place where things can­not and do not need to be inter­pret­ed. Because being there is enough.