You can't have the thing you want the most....
It's a sorry fact of life, but it seems as if the things we want the most are jinxed. Almost like God wants to teach us not to want any one thing too much. I'm not sure why I should divulge my personal jinx, but, for whatever reason, I want to.
I'll weary everyone if I re-recite my institutionalized background, so I won't. But the truth is that, as a result of it, I have an enduring fascination with creative and rebellious people. A large portion of my conscience believes that only those kinds of people attain an enlightened happiness; only they can transcend the brainwashing forces and ho-hum of everyday life. At the same time, I'm well aware of the many intellectuals and artists who live tragic lives and the many everyday people who are perfectly happy to follow convention. My preocuppation with the rebel as artist is as complicated as romantic infatuation: it's a mix of truth, untruth, rationality, irrationality, good, and bad.
To cope with my infatuation, I put posters of Green Day and Bowie on my walls. I listen to loads of recordings and fantasize about making them. Can you guess what I want to be? A creative musician. (And not some correct, accomplished classical-pianist like I already am. They aren't musicians.) Music is the most instinctive of all the arts. It cummicates the most powerfully and purely to myself and to most people. Creating music like that would be redemptive. It would be my way of knowing that I have good instincts, good ideas, and a good soul, with an instictive message coming from the heart. I already know I can be clever and regurgitate the information they give me in school. But can I say something original? Do I have an original mind?
Daily observation shows me what happens when you don't have an original mind. I won't name names, but I look around at most of the people in my life and think they suffered because they didn't think for themselves and didn't find their voice. To not have a voice or to fail to articulate it is spiritual death to me. I'm deathly afraid of not having anything to say. Of not having talent, ability, soul. What is there to life, then? What motivation to grow up? What is there to look forward to? I have to be in love with life to want to live it. I have to find my voice in music or else life does not seem worth living.
"Pressure cooker pick my brain and tell me I'm insane"....a great Green Day lyric that describes my situation. A kind of stalemate. Why? Because when you want something so bad, to the point that failure would kill you, you never try. Because failure would, well, kill you. As a result, I rarely write songs because I think they're horrible. And then I'm just reminded of my inherent inability, or I become afraid of my inherent inability. When you want something so bad, you'll never get it...you'll strangle it. Take it from me.
I'll weary everyone if I re-recite my institutionalized background, so I won't. But the truth is that, as a result of it, I have an enduring fascination with creative and rebellious people. A large portion of my conscience believes that only those kinds of people attain an enlightened happiness; only they can transcend the brainwashing forces and ho-hum of everyday life. At the same time, I'm well aware of the many intellectuals and artists who live tragic lives and the many everyday people who are perfectly happy to follow convention. My preocuppation with the rebel as artist is as complicated as romantic infatuation: it's a mix of truth, untruth, rationality, irrationality, good, and bad.
To cope with my infatuation, I put posters of Green Day and Bowie on my walls. I listen to loads of recordings and fantasize about making them. Can you guess what I want to be? A creative musician. (And not some correct, accomplished classical-pianist like I already am. They aren't musicians.) Music is the most instinctive of all the arts. It cummicates the most powerfully and purely to myself and to most people. Creating music like that would be redemptive. It would be my way of knowing that I have good instincts, good ideas, and a good soul, with an instictive message coming from the heart. I already know I can be clever and regurgitate the information they give me in school. But can I say something original? Do I have an original mind?
Daily observation shows me what happens when you don't have an original mind. I won't name names, but I look around at most of the people in my life and think they suffered because they didn't think for themselves and didn't find their voice. To not have a voice or to fail to articulate it is spiritual death to me. I'm deathly afraid of not having anything to say. Of not having talent, ability, soul. What is there to life, then? What motivation to grow up? What is there to look forward to? I have to be in love with life to want to live it. I have to find my voice in music or else life does not seem worth living.
"Pressure cooker pick my brain and tell me I'm insane"....a great Green Day lyric that describes my situation. A kind of stalemate. Why? Because when you want something so bad, to the point that failure would kill you, you never try. Because failure would, well, kill you. As a result, I rarely write songs because I think they're horrible. And then I'm just reminded of my inherent inability, or I become afraid of my inherent inability. When you want something so bad, you'll never get it...you'll strangle it. Take it from me.
posted by Kristin @ 4:52 PM
1 Comments:
At 7:26 PM,
Anonymous said…
The happiest moments in life are those wherein the sensations of joy and pleasure are so intense that one is conscious of nothing else; there is no distinction made between the self and what the self experiences. A person in such a state does not even formulate the thought "I am the person experiencing this state of happiness". In fact, the moment this thought arises, it signals the end of the enchantment. Many people make the mistake of seeking this state of pure pleasure, but one must forget one's self and the desire for pleasure completely; one must find this blessed state by accident in the pursuit of some other good. There is much said in C.S. Lewis's writings about this phenomenon, particularly in "Surprised By Joy" and "The Pilgrim's Regress." Contrasted with this is the tautology "the unexamined life is not worth living." There appears to be great tension between these, yet I think that together they form two sides of a unified truth, or as Chesterton put it, a paradox which is the truth standing on its head to get attention. I think the Skeptics,while they were wrong in general, were on to something when they used philosophical discourse to get to a point where they eliminated philosophical discourse and just lived simply. I am not suggesting that it is advantageous to eliminate philosophical discourse, but at some point one must take some truth for granted as the basis for living simply. Which is to be rated more highly: the discourse about philosophical truth, or the real life opportunities to put the fruits of that discourse into practice? How could the study of life, the debate about its possible meanings, or the artistic renderings of life be considered apart from or in preference to life itself?
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