Years ago, half my life away, I wrote poetry and music regularly. They even won contests. Even though the poetry itself is backed up on some dusty floppy disk, the creative swarms are lost along with most of the colorful friends I had at the time. One activity I was engrossed in, and what helped during uncreative times, was poetry or lyric interpretation. I would go deep into some poem that already had enough levels of complexity that English teachers feared to tread into them because they could alone spawn half a semester of banter and commentary.
For example, T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, which tends to address the journey of the soul from a newly acquired state of death to its completeness. There are allusions to Dante, Conrad, Morris and Kipling tied together to show political angst supposedly towards the Treaty of Versailles. I’d tend to think, as others do in this trying time, that most politicians are hollow, stuffed and already dead. Didn’t Dante dedicate a special canto in hell just for them?
Other poetry was much easier to cypher, like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “A Few Figs From Thistles” which is primarily about blazing through life, though you’ll make regrettable mistakes along the way … and tends to go into typical relationship taboos such as adultery, cheating, lust and bondage.
Rush, Sixpence None the Richer, Tori Amos and Sarah McLauchlin were bands that I frequented concerts to, as news of them came to me, in the Austin area and had all albums available and ready to be brooded upon. The styles of the last two particularly influenced my style of music, though some strong religious differences and some blatant blasphemous songs from Tori Amos sent me on a decade long boycott.
For some time, music was what I breathed, ate, drank, slept. I surrounded myself with music every moment of the day when it made sense. But over the course of the past ten years that craving became more of an emptiness. Music lost most of its meaning and lyrics were chaff in the wind. Some of that is because of the gross amount of bad music that started coming out. But it had more to do with becoming more “responsible”. Though the probability of most of these risks are the same, the consequences are much higher.
But what was interesting when reflecting over how the apathy towards music increased was noticing that, as one “civilizing” or “taming” event came after another, my spirit was eventually broken. My passion for much of anything was chopped at – hacked away – by worldly forces and I felt myself become just another work drone. I remember one employer laughing at me after one of those experiences and literally saying: “So you can be broken!”
Ugh!
Yes – but by breaking people you lose … the creativity, the passion, the responsibility, the fearless risk taking, the adventurous spirit … you kill it … it dies like a fading melody into the grave of white-noise that was so easily attainable to begin with.
These are all necessary for art, beauty, entrepreneurship, adventuring, exploring – in short, it’s required to really live out life. I have never met a suicidal person who was passionate about life and enjoying it. I have known one or two who were passionate but constantly getting brow-beaten by the world until they had nothing left to live for.
The challenge is to remember these lessons when my seven year old gets permanent paint on my jacket, or looks up longingly for approval on some messily crafted crayon drawing, or her eyes light up eagerly to pick up an expensive clarinet though she hasn’t learned how to play a note. Eventually, and directly from my reactions, she’ll either learn to love messes like Pollock and Picasso, or dream of it while she passively files papers. She’ll either color the grey world like Julian Beever, or she’ll quietly beat the pavements with the masses. She’ll croon the world with new music like Goodman, or puff out sad sighs and conform. I don’t want her to end up like me – at least not like the me that exists today.
Just like how trees that are chopped to the ground can grow back, that root of inspiration is still buried deep in my soul somewhere. It’s a mess getting through the scar tissue and it’s a fighting struggle to be enough of a conformist to support my wife and four kids, yet have enough creativity to show them that the world God made for us has more beauty in it than the government would have us believe.
