What I Have Discovered Through Music In My Life

The things that making music has taught me about the musical condition:

1) In being a writer of music, there is NO substitute for being a good listener with a clear and peaceful mind. This approach forgives many other limitations.

2) Changing what already exists in search of something new is a shortcut that costs the musician in purity of vision.

3) Melody is troubling in its common tendency to usurp the ability of a song to be a conversation. Instead, a song becomes an untouchable train rolling by.

4) Jazz is generally right to structure the song as a conversation, but to me it misses the point when it forfeits emotional nuance for cleverness or even eloquence, which is simply another tool in the ultimate goal of emotional communication.

5) Most "perfect" sounds are not created by traditional instruments, although traditional instruments are an important practical means of inspiration.

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I have to admit that I am so excited for the new Brian Eno album that I can hardly stand it. What else excites me right now? Everything Christian Fennesz has recorded, Boards of Canada, the first Animal Collective record (which is not derailed by melody).

Things that I lost somewhere along the way

A short list of things that I used to enjoy doing in my youth but that just don't cut it anymore:

- Taking quasi-artsy fake-spontaneous pictures of myself
- Driving in the countryside while listening to loud alternative rock music
- Hanging out at Taco Bell on a Friday night
- Drinking beer on a crisp fall evening

Something About Metaphors

So, tonight I went and saw Fang Island open for some band, which was entertaining but at some point was somewhat repetitive (in the midst of a 3-song medley of their thrashiest material). I sort of got into a free-associative haze (day-dreaming?) and through whatever progression found myself thinking about the scene in the movie Orange County where the girl is at the college party and is listening to the poor guy talking about his TV show idea that he says is about "Vampires, ostensibly. But, underneath, it's actually about the reunification of Germany." And, I have laughed out loud at that line every time I've watched the movie.

I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in between the two possibilities - that I find it funny, or that I consider that "my type" of humor and want other people to know it. Which is what it is. It can't matter much, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone else react to that line or my reaction at all. It's also a little brittle because I can't know that I even find it funny in the way that the writers intended, although it seems somewhat Dadaist to consider that maybe it doesn't matter how they intended it, so long as I find it funny, the meaning is proved present by my identification of it.

But, I have always taken that joke to be a comment on how young artistic types (particularly guys) are often attracted to the concept of metaphor before any other tools of art, and in the world of art, metaphors can be sort of like hammers, they are a good way of replacing other more elegant tools with something that gets a variety of jobs done but they generally lack grace. You might also extend the concept of metaphor as it blurs with subtlety and nuance, and realize that a continuum exists between a big fat metaphor and the infinitely more elegant juxtaposition of elements whose relationship is elemental and grounded, with perhaps some semblances of duality that suggests a metaphorical underpinning. If you wish.

So, I guess, this describes my own maturation as an individual that thinks about art (I would be flubbing to call myself an artist, except to the degree that art resides in the mind). I used to love the big dumb metaphors just as much as the next guy, but now they have grown familiar and have lost their sparkle. I usually find myself longing for an elegance that isn't there except in a cosmic sense.

In a nutshell, I suspect that I have laughed out loud at that scene from Orange County for the last time.

Impulse Response

I was on antidepressant medication and other medicines for AD/HD or other various "behavioral disorders" for a period of many years, and it was a wrest of control to stop taking them without turning into a social vegetable. If there is any justice in the world, one day the term "behavioral disorder" will be exposed for the unscientific voodoo that it is, and medicines purporting to treat these "disorders" will have to be tested in a manner that acknowledges that chemicals have effects on the brain that don't necessarily show up within an 18-month study window (or, are not within the powers of the study's purview to identify). (A thought: any time a medicine is used to treat a condition that has no physiological definition, I would think about how much the drug manufacturer is likely to know about what it really does or how it really works.)

Coming off of these drugs has been a frustrating, seemingly impossible, impenetrable task. Getting here has happened over an amount of time that I am guessing is just what has been necessary for my brain to re-adapt. And it hasn't done it perfectly; my skin often itches for no reason than (I would assume) that my serotonin levels are low; my compulsions (picking under my fingernails, for instance) are strong and difficult to resist.

A person who is ruled by such visible compulsions on the surface is almost invariably consumed by them beneath the surface as well, and this has been my struggle for the past couple of years as I have slowly backed away from my medication: I can take it and become a paean of rationality and slow overheating, or I can refuse it and never have a truly quiet, isolated thought again. It would be an easier choice if consistent medication did not have the equally undesirable tendency to wind me up so tightly with focus that I would give myself headaches, backaches, even swollen eyes.

There is a reality to the world that is hard for any one of us to see natively, that our consciousness always seems perfect until we go to some trouble to drop an anchor and see which way the waves push us. This is an exercise that some people never do. Unfortunately, given enough time with these medications, I've discovered that both states are reliably troubling. For years I thought one or the other were correct; first, I thought that my normal consciousness must be the answer, and second, I accepted that the medicated consciousness was correct. Now, I am old enough to know that both posits are absurd. Not because an ideal consciousness does not exist - it certainly does - but because man-made tools of attaining it are hopelessly blunt instruments to use on something as elaborate as a human brain. Pardon my awesomely crass and lazy metaphor, but it is like doing brain surgery with a hammer.

My question ending this post is like the question that ends many of my posts. I suppose that there is a predisposition at work here. After all, I tend only to write about subjects that I cannot dispatch. It makes sense, then, that I would end posts with the natural summary of a question - the place the post began and ended.

How do I establish mental balance without the use of side-effect-addled (and potentially damaging) chemicals?

McCarthy

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

-"Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West", Cormac McCarthy

Discipline

Why is discipline (of all kinds) so difficult for people to adhere to?

Well, it is my belief that people's minds are not built to natively enforce discipline. Human cognition is more like a regression model than a flow model - that is, factors are weighted for "best fit", not added or subtracted in order to mimic functional need. In order to be a flow model, evolution would need sufficient time to work and sufficient latitude for proper selection (in other words, rationality would have to equate to higher reproduction rates).

When we have to make a decision, first, a situation compels us to utilize conscious thought to identify relevant inputs and generate a new output (action). We will retain a gestalt sense of the decision, along with a more vague sense of the factors we considered. One thing we will not retain well is the actual process by which the factors are weighted to come to a decision. If we try to remember why we made a decision, we will overwhelmingly confabulate the reason based on our memories of the inputs and output (this based on studies of patients with separated brain hemispheres).

Our output for a given decision will be of varying quality, based on our rationality, experience, and the decision subject matter, but ultimately, it is not the quality of the decision that matters in the long run. What matters is how well we are able to select pertinent inputs in a manner that is consistent across decision cycles. This is to say, how disciplined our mental processes are.

Pertinence is important for fairly obvious reasons - if we allow cognitive distortion to destroy our ability to normalize brain process to true rationality, we will not achieve sufficiently successful outcomes to optimize our learning.

Consistency is important because if we make a similar decision in a different way each time, we will never improve the quality of that decision-making process. This is because we will never accurately identify correlations between our decisions' quality and our decision-making factors.

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Enthusiasm, Is That You?

I've certainly been an enthusiastic consumer of many artistic forms in my time, but so what? That's easy; ideas beget ideas. Do you want the secret to a good life? Self-examine your heart and your ways, and learn what turns your mind on. Then, in that mind, sow some lonesome corner so many flowers bloom.

I have gone through phases of false promise in regard to creating art. I could eliminate some occurrences that would fit some people's technical definitions (The Real Inspector Hound), and I would be left with a series of haphazard disappointments and frustrations (losing song lyrics and at least one entire short story at different points). These frustrations may be symptomatic of a latent capacity for one or more art forms; or they may be nothing. Maybe I am pawing at the glass and I will turn around to sleep in the wood chips now.

More mysterious is what triggers such latent desire to create. There have been two occasions this year that have left me feeling ready, and they have come during times that I can not explain by any conventional means. Perhaps their triggers are not explained by my external life, or my internal life, but by happenstance to encounter their mediums with time to explore and a little luck to bolster confidence. Yes, confidence is often my undoing. I would sooner call it "sobriety"; that I try to control my ego and be objective, but the difference between myself and most others that make music or write literature is that they ultimately have a surplus of confidence in their abilities to do something worthwhile, while I do not.

And to end with something that I think most people would think is a total lie: I have little desire for others to experience what I create. What I want more than anything is to be able to admire something I created for myself, knowing that it was born in my mind alone and the result of my witness to the world in its becoming. And if this is a satisfaction born out of loneliness or isolation, then so be it, but I will go on at peace with an idea, which is enough for me.