BODY

I know people who like drumming because it is music made from the body.  The body is the instrument that plays.  The body touches space and beats time; but I like singing better.  Singing is music made from the body.  The body is the instrument that is played.  The body breathing formulates song.

What's more, singing calls us.  Singing entreats us.  Singing invites us.  Singing allures us, by the magnetic power of connection.  A soloist singing expresses the loneness of the human condition, but when another singer joins, the two singers together express the possibility of community.  

Dry bones beaten together can sound a heartbeat, but only with the animation of Breath do those bones Live.  Rhythm shapes the song, but singing gives human language to the music.  Singing relates us by words.  Singing takes us a step past being and into particular meaning.  The body touches space and beats time, but it also communicates itself with other.

Don't get me wrong.  I love drumming, too.  It is just that I think it must be a kind of singing.  It must participate in Voice to matter.  It must translate into something human to become other than a repetitive percussion; and it misses that vital component to human existence-the profound singularity of a body as it knows itself separate from each and every other.

Singing is a work of the Body, that inexplicable place in which we find ourselves breathing and whose boundaries we constantly seek to define.

The Dangers of Crossing the Border

We are made by the boundaries we keep.  Often, satisfaction arises not so much in knowing what definitions others expect us to have, but in discovering which fences we ourselves are willing to cross.  Reminded by Bolt's Thomas More, life and death are symbiotically bound.  More's humanity-More's soul-is defined by a set of principles.  To stay alive, he is asked to renounce those principles.  Yet, without those principles, More has no definition.  He cannot live without them.   To live or not to live.  That is his question.

I recently spent months worrying about how to keep a balance between Thing 1 and Thing 2 in a foolish desire to keep all possibilities open.  That may be a trait to how human brains function, but it is not the purpose for which human brains are made.  Humanity means shaping the raw materials of thought, feeling and physicality into an existence-a being distinctly, and, simultaneously, indistinguishably human.  That happens by defining the set of principles which will bind or release.

What I mean is that choosing matters more than the choice.  Choosing has to do with testing my own principles.  I like to say "drawing a line in the sand."  It is how I know how far I will go, and from what I am willing to turn aside.  If we are honest, the fate of humanity rarely rests on any one set of shoulders.  A "wrong" choice is as informative as a "right" choice.  It brings me face to face with a principle or characteristic of my humanity which I have failed to uphold or respect.  It brings me face to face with the principle or characteristic of humanity which I must, at some level, revere and value.  The next choice will be closer to that ideal or farther away from it.

Like More, it may take me to a place where my very life is in the choice, but it is much more likely death will find me on its own. That being the case, I would rather it find me crawling through fences and checking the gate latches, than sitting on the verge of the roadway waiting for some local to come along and give me a lift.

Thing 1 and Thing 2?  They are pretty much the same.  I am is the only difference.

FEAR

This is what stands in our way: fear.

To avoid loss, I accumulate things.
To avoid falling, I attain height.
To avoid failure, I strive for achievement.

I have things.  I fear loss.

I have status.  I fear falling.

I have success.  I fear failing.

I fear loss, falling, failing, because I believe I am weighed and judged by forces outside myself; others' eyes, ears, and concepts of taste.  I am the things they see, the respect they afford me, the results I can give them.  My life becomes fear, arbitrated by forces outside myself.  I forget what I look like without accessories.  I forget what I am naked and alone.  

Yet, deep inside, I know I cannot trust a mirror.  The mirror is only ever a reflection and not the real thing.  I can never know myself by looking at a reflection.  I can only ever get an outline, and a sense of color-something distorted and partially true.  The weight and judgement from others never actually satisfies the question-is this what I look like?  Is this what I am?

If I do not know what I look like, and if I do not know what I am, what can I lose?  From where can I fall?  What depends upon me that can fail?  Until I decide to know myself in truth, I will be living in fear.

I will have no faith in my relationships-as no one will be relating to me, only to an image I cast.  I will have no assurance-as I will never allow myself to face the world without money and a place.  I will not sing-as someone else has told me that my songs aren't selling this year.

So, a paradox: I fear a life without faithfulness, trust and community if I try to express my self; yet a life without faithfulness, trust and community is what I have if I do not express my self.

The singer has to decide, simply, one day, to overcome her fear.  Sometimes, the notes land just right.  Sometime, she gets laughed off the stage.  Sometimes she loses, falls and fails, but not always, and never for long.  She learns that she lives through a loss, a failure and a fall.   It is hard to know.  The only true thing is she can never be a singer at all unless she joins the choir.

Sing Life

So-Song is a metaphor for life.  So-life needs both Spirit and Soul.  So-singing needs Spirit and Soul; breath and communication of the human condition.  Most people I meet tell me, "I can't sing."  Since most people I meet are breathing at the time, I can only hear that to mean that there is something asleep in their souls.  Something silences their need to communicate their human condition to others.

After all, what more is a song? I need to share loss in disaster.  I need to share ecstasy in love.  I need to share terror amidst cultural disintegration.  I need to share my doubts-Dave Matthews' Band: Mother Father.  I need to share assurance-Matisyahu: One Day.  Neil Diamond sang I Am . . . I Said because sometimes we fear we "are not."  We test our existence by singing.   Singing is a work of the Soul.

Here is where I take issue with fame and celebrity.  Here is where I take issue with the Arts.  Somehow, we Americans have convinced ourselves that singing is a work that solely belongs to the artist.  We have decided that we sing primarily to be noticed, revered, or expressing some Kantian ideal of perfected Will.  We have decided there is not room for a wobbly vibrato, a pitch that hasn't been rendered inhuman through a sound mixer, and that singing belongs only to the individual with talent; as though what the rest of us need to say is not worthy of hearing.

If this is where you find yourself, you have been deceived.  Your voice is yours.  It is perfect when it wobbles.  It is beautiful when it grinds and gravels.  Maybe it doesn't fit in a choir.  Maybe it requires a different instrument to be set free, but it does not belong to arbiters of taste.  It does not belong to Simon, BMI or me.  It is something you inherited with your humanity, and it is there to express what exists beyond words in the human experience.  

You may think I am wrong, but singers without Soul, though they breathe into a microphone and move us to dance, wither.  You can see it in many celebrities.  People who "can sing," but cannot seem to connect with another human being without a veil of drugs and exploitative relationships.  They can breathe with the Spirit of life but they are not singing with Soul.

If you have been listening, you have started to hear the song.  May you have the courage to try and give it voice.

SPIRIT and SOUL

Living human beings breathe.  That's what they do.  When they stop breathing, they die.  There is really no way around this that I know about.  Yet, there are a few mysteries in this breathing thing.  For instance: what kick starts the first breath?  Why can't we just pump air into a set of lungs to get a human being going again, when the breath has stopped for too long?  Why can't I simply choose not to breathe when I want to?  How do I know the difference between a living human being and a dead one when there is a life support machine involved?

In these mysteries is something else.  Like the breath- like the spirit in respiration, inspiration, aspiration, and expiration-living human beings share another form of animating principle.   Something beyond breathing, yet much like it in form, invigorates us.  It is something that needs to be present for a human being to be alive.  It is the difference between a sleeper on a breathing machine and a genius with ALS in a mechanized chair.  It is somehow tied to the way in which a human being is capable of communication, the ability to have relationship with another.  

We have then, two words: Spirit and Soul.  One we define as breath, life and energy.  The other we define as the essence of breathing, living energized humanity.  Both start mysteriously.  Both end the same way.  Both exist beyond our mechanical means to duplicate.  Both somehow define what it is to be a living being.  The absence of either is death, though the death of Soul may not mean the end of breathing, and the death of Spirit may not mean the end of relating one to another. 

We live in an unsettled time, with many experts at cynicism and war.  We live into undreamt possibilities of change for the whole of humanity-changes in human biology, society, and person to person communication unforeseen and unknowable to any but our ancestors yet to come.  It is a scary time in which to be, with creation and destruction so close at hand.  It is a scary time in which to be, having to create new rules for a set of circumstances well beyond our control.

Spirit and Soul are important here.  What it is to be alive is important here.  We seem to be pretty good at the Spirit thing.  We seem to be pretty good at finding ways to breathe, but I am convinced that the Soul thing matters, too, and I will tell you why: breath belongs to the biological, but relationship belongs to the personal.   Without the ability to reach, touch, hear, see, know, converse, share, or relate, we become the living dead-breathing biologicals that somehow miss the mark at being human.  

Song

What is a song?  A song is a statement in sound that runs underneath the currents of the everyday.  It is sustained and connected in time, and to be heard, it relies on the breath.  A song, unlike a symphony or a sonata, is an intimate and individual theme.  Symphonies and sonatas are made up of many songs.  Even in the animal world, songs are individual and unique, small things expressive of the daily chores-sunrise, attracting mate, waking, finding food, greeting friend, or bearing child.

Like the soundtrack for our weekly TV shows, there is a rhythm and idea that plays constantly to highlight the tensions and suspensions of our activities, relationships, and patterns day to day.  It beats a pattern to which we can walk.  It sounds a sorrow with which we can cry.   It's there.  I guarantee it.   When you stop yourself and focus in, you can hear it.  It may be faint, or it may thunder like the calls of cicadas tree to tree.  Each one will sound different.  Each one will have its own message to share, but each one will connect to another, as well.   

Sometimes, you find your song is in harmony with other songs.  Sometimes, whatever it is that is running behind your actions is out of sync, and out of time.  You hear a song on the radio and it says just what you've always known, in exactly the way you need to hear it sung.  It's the song your soul is singing, and someone else has heard it, too.

Maybe what I mean is that a song is a metaphor, but then again, maybe I don't.  Maybe I mean that life really does have music behind it-small, individual themes, sustained and connected in time, relying on the breath to move outward and be heard.