It's my understanding that a number of religions use meditation/focused awareness to usher celebrants into a higher state of being.
Saying a rosary is meditation - repetitive words, stillness, focusing inward and upwards to a perceived greater/larger. Meditation is prayer through releasing - reaching in and through to a freedom, to a wider space.
All of this effort, relaxation, focus, stillness, repetition- all aiming towards enlightenment, a state of being above and beyond our normal selves.
I get that writing. Not so much singing, since I really have to be present and accounted for when singing. I know most folks think of voice as effortless, but for me it's a lot of split second decisions and keeping the pot stirred so the bottom doesn't burn.
When I'm writing, things expand. Sitting in a coffee house with the world milling around, I apply pen to paper and time slows. Hours can slip by, light distorts, sounds fade away and I'm in a floating bubble of deliberate movement. Pitch pipe softly sounds, the click of the triangle edge on the table, pen scratches.
So is art religion then? Music nourishes me, renews my sense of amazement, brings me peace. When I write music, I move into a state of expanded awareness. After all this time writing I suppose I've become quite adept. Is the distorted experience of time that occurs when moments get tuned and turned into math the same as the reported bliss of the mystic?
Perhaps the biggest difference between art and religion is that artists usually suck at large group organization.
Inherent in art is point of view. All art is shaded by the physical body of the artist - their eyesight, their sense of sound, their body space. This gives every worshipper at the temple of art a different line of sight towards their own viewed goal. Organized religions have a common goal - art insists on individual targets.
I wonder though if everyone was able to sit down at a table in a coffee house with pen and paper and feel themselves unravel at the edges and expand out out out...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Discipline into Momentum
I've told myself the best thing to do in all the chaos/whirlwind that outside the music brings is simply keep to one windmill. I'm tilting at writing daily.
I found a box of books today on the sidewalk. Don Quixote/Man of La Mancha dog eared at the top of the pile. Name carefully written - in pen - on the flyleaf of each book. Who Adele was and why her books are neatly boxed on the corner eludes me.
Man of La Mancha rips me back to my father working for IATSE Local 33 in downtown LA and me sitting quietly in a free theater seat as Richard Harris tried once more. Dulcinea's song - born in a ditch etc. - had more of an impact on me than the impossible dream song. I sang it under my breath for weeks, trying to figure out how it was true for a young, untried, unchallenged girl who'd never even seen a windmill, let alone a soldier.
Back then I did think that singing a song meant living the exact words. I considered hitting Hollywood & Vine, bought a short dress. A bit of time living Dulci's world simply brought me a huge wave of frustration. I was trying to find a way into a world that was so far out of my range of experience that no bridge short of leaping into full time immersion would get me the reality I wanted to convey.
I wanted to convey that feeling of being Dulcinea, excelling at one life and yet aching to try another one - knowing the ins and outs of one way of being as another person beckons from inside you. Finding a guide to show the way out of the now, but not finding the trust needed to leap after them as they navigate the corners easily. The same corners that bruise you as you take turns too fast, or lose sight of your sherpa as you hesitate.
It took me weeks to figure out that my frustration at not being able to join Dulcinea's world was the same as Dulcinea's rage at Quixote for showing her a world she could never live in.
I learned from Man of La Mancha that for veracity in singing what counts is the feeling. Not the reality.
Dulcinea was wounded, battered, triumphant, powerful. She saw a world outside her own and reached/withdrew/reached/withdrew for and from it. All that is needed to sing her song is the feeling of hesitant yearning, the fierceness, and the frustration.
Years later I found a windmill at the ocean end of the big park in San Francisco. They're huge. I can't even imagine how much courage Quixote had.
I found a box of books today on the sidewalk. Don Quixote/Man of La Mancha dog eared at the top of the pile. Name carefully written - in pen - on the flyleaf of each book. Who Adele was and why her books are neatly boxed on the corner eludes me.
Man of La Mancha rips me back to my father working for IATSE Local 33 in downtown LA and me sitting quietly in a free theater seat as Richard Harris tried once more. Dulcinea's song - born in a ditch etc. - had more of an impact on me than the impossible dream song. I sang it under my breath for weeks, trying to figure out how it was true for a young, untried, unchallenged girl who'd never even seen a windmill, let alone a soldier.
Back then I did think that singing a song meant living the exact words. I considered hitting Hollywood & Vine, bought a short dress. A bit of time living Dulci's world simply brought me a huge wave of frustration. I was trying to find a way into a world that was so far out of my range of experience that no bridge short of leaping into full time immersion would get me the reality I wanted to convey.
I wanted to convey that feeling of being Dulcinea, excelling at one life and yet aching to try another one - knowing the ins and outs of one way of being as another person beckons from inside you. Finding a guide to show the way out of the now, but not finding the trust needed to leap after them as they navigate the corners easily. The same corners that bruise you as you take turns too fast, or lose sight of your sherpa as you hesitate.
It took me weeks to figure out that my frustration at not being able to join Dulcinea's world was the same as Dulcinea's rage at Quixote for showing her a world she could never live in.
I learned from Man of La Mancha that for veracity in singing what counts is the feeling. Not the reality.
Dulcinea was wounded, battered, triumphant, powerful. She saw a world outside her own and reached/withdrew/reached/withdrew for and from it. All that is needed to sing her song is the feeling of hesitant yearning, the fierceness, and the frustration.
Years later I found a windmill at the ocean end of the big park in San Francisco. They're huge. I can't even imagine how much courage Quixote had.
Monday, March 9, 2009
On Creativity
It's fitting that this, the first of my blog posts, be triggered by an article on creativity.
LA Times- September 29, 1989 - Anne C. Roark - Creativity: It May be More Than Biology
I searched for an online posting of it to no avail. The wonderful thing about the article is that it stresses the importance of time spent alone and a personality that absorbs solitude as nourishment.
My mother gave me the article. Bittersweet. She's 74 now and after a stroke her ability to paint and create is lessened. I look at her now, so fragile and paper thin, rowing with fierce determination and tiny effortfull strokes through these last years of her life. She is working, head tilted forward, with the endless focus of someone whose body no longer supports their spirit. When she cannot paint, she writes out painting lessons. The woman who prided herself on never learning to type is playing hunt and peck on her computer. Fierce, tiny, effortfull strokes.
I wonder if I got my creativity from her. Nature vs. nuture and whatnot. I know I got my physical voice from my father - as well as my ear. He's in assisted living in LA - mostly drifting into other worlds and coming present to clutch my hand and tell me to get him out.
Both my parents are artists. My mother a visual artist - my father a jack of all trades artist. The two of them seem to have been more capable, more creative, more able to produce worthwhile work than I have been. So many memories of my mother painting - my father sculpting, singing. Now that they are both twisting round the Maypole tighter and tighter, I search for a way to shift the pattern - give them more time. Give them back their capable hands and strong backs.
Art is hard work. Physical, draining, focused. My mother and father cannot do the physical work of their art anymore. Their eyes have layers of shadows, cast by the undone, unfinished, unmade. And the ironic thing is that now they both have solitude and time to do their art. Endless hours stretch before them, each one luring them on to that moment when the ribbon runs out and is tied off, ending the dance.
Will that be me? Will I finally have the time and solitude to create, when I'm no longer able to do so? I'm not scared of growing old. I'm scared of growing unable.
LA Times- September 29, 1989 - Anne C. Roark - Creativity: It May be More Than Biology
I searched for an online posting of it to no avail. The wonderful thing about the article is that it stresses the importance of time spent alone and a personality that absorbs solitude as nourishment.
My mother gave me the article. Bittersweet. She's 74 now and after a stroke her ability to paint and create is lessened. I look at her now, so fragile and paper thin, rowing with fierce determination and tiny effortfull strokes through these last years of her life. She is working, head tilted forward, with the endless focus of someone whose body no longer supports their spirit. When she cannot paint, she writes out painting lessons. The woman who prided herself on never learning to type is playing hunt and peck on her computer. Fierce, tiny, effortfull strokes.
I wonder if I got my creativity from her. Nature vs. nuture and whatnot. I know I got my physical voice from my father - as well as my ear. He's in assisted living in LA - mostly drifting into other worlds and coming present to clutch my hand and tell me to get him out.
Both my parents are artists. My mother a visual artist - my father a jack of all trades artist. The two of them seem to have been more capable, more creative, more able to produce worthwhile work than I have been. So many memories of my mother painting - my father sculpting, singing. Now that they are both twisting round the Maypole tighter and tighter, I search for a way to shift the pattern - give them more time. Give them back their capable hands and strong backs.
Art is hard work. Physical, draining, focused. My mother and father cannot do the physical work of their art anymore. Their eyes have layers of shadows, cast by the undone, unfinished, unmade. And the ironic thing is that now they both have solitude and time to do their art. Endless hours stretch before them, each one luring them on to that moment when the ribbon runs out and is tied off, ending the dance.
Will that be me? Will I finally have the time and solitude to create, when I'm no longer able to do so? I'm not scared of growing old. I'm scared of growing unable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
