Often Blindly
“I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore - often blindly - the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.”
- Javier Marías
I’m in a restaurant having breakfast, sitting near the kitchen. I’m hearing metal on metal, plates sliding around, the sounds of the coffee percolator being refilled with grounds, and behind me the chatter of 30 diners. Music comes from somewhere but for a moment over the general din I interpreted the music as the sound of car horns in the parking lot. Music mistaken for car horns.
Or was it the other way around? When was it that sound organized in such a way began to stir wonder in me, to reach me as something beyond sound, call it beauty, call it music, but to signify the intention of another to evoke beauty? And is there a path back through the fog of wonder that is the conscious mind to the an unfiltered experience of that sound?
I wrote about another experience like this years and years ago — emerging from a nap on a friend’s floor somewhere in the midwest, and hearing something that I interpreted as fire in that dreamy state (heat and flame as sound) only to come to recognize the sound of trees full of birds at the very second that they went silent. I sat in the silence of that recognition for a moment before writing it down.
So the process goes: feel something new or surprising and write it down, then sit with those words until they become a song. Recording the song, then, is like rubbing that memory of that something with oil to reveal the shimmering grain in it. When I set out to write an album, there’s a period of calibration: am I using a stethoscope, a microscope or a telescope? Am I shining the things up, or smashing them to pieces? The process can be cathartic, brutal, lovely, confusing, revolting, or full of pleasure. Beauty isn’t an ingredient of the process – beauty is the context.
The opening and the closing lines of this piece (and the overarching theme) keep converging in my head to summon a letter of D. H. Lawrence where he talks about a candle flame:
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. […] I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed onto the things around.
And I am not so much concerned with the things around —which is really mind— but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything — we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half-lighted things outside us, we ought to look at ourselves, and say: 'My God, I am myself!'“
Maybe songwriting is the ability to hold that outwards and inwards, macro and micro, telescope and stethoscope in sweet equilibrium?