MIRROR, MIRROR

I sit tonight in a surfeit of ideas.  They flow rich and thick as Colorado honey.  The inspiration comes from others.  I listen to music that is absolutely stunning, and I think, "That is not so hard.  I could pull folks together and we could sing that song."  I watch a play that makes me laugh, and I think, "That would be a lot of fun.  Maybe I could find some friends and we could run the lines with each other." 

Apparently, monkey brains are wired with something unofficially called "mirror neurons."  These neurons fire when one monkey watches another monkey peel and eat a piece of fruit.  The cool thing about mirror neurons is that the monkey without the fruit gets to experience all that the monkey with the fruit experiences, up to and including the feelings the fruit may engender.   Apparently, human brains can work this way, too.  What this means is that we not only learn by watching, we experience by watching.  

This is seriously important for music and performance art.  When we share the real deal with our audience, they experience the real deal.  When we share from our souls, our audience may find the chords we strike sounding within their own souls.  Then, they may step out of the performance hall and share those sounds with the next fifteen people they meet.  

Ideas will pass from person to person without the benefit of writing, education, intention or societal goal.  One person's creativity may light up the creative parts of another's brain, and two artists will be born.  Compassion, which is feeling with another, is born in sharing.  Whether it is transmitted by "mirroring neurons" brain to brain, or whether it is simply the idea that I know how I feel and I want to protect others from that feeling, or pass that feeling along to the next person I meet, authentic singing is a way to begin the practice of compassion.

When I begin to see that power in music, it becomes apparent how dangerous the arts can be.

YOU WILL, TOO

I learned fear and forgot that life is fun.  For instance, the sick twitch in the stomach is excitement as much as it is terror.  Before I learned fear, I knew how to ride deep inside that tube.  Back then, insomnia was anticipation, and destruction was a phantom fogie made up by people who had forgotten how to be alive.

And life was this:
Signing up.
Dressing to state beliefs.
Owning people others' shunned.
Laughing at pain.
Taking time to listen.
Being Skeptical.
The Brutality of Honesty.

Then: fear; born of concern for place.  Status became more important than self, and suddenly, I was vulnerable.  Suddenly, destruction loomed, and it was real.  Being authentic led to lost opportunities, and relationships withered as appearance of integrity overwhelmed actuality.  One set of friends became liars and the other set threw me out of their club when it became apparent I did not live up to their vision of perfection.  I could lose my place, and life was no longer fun.

I didn't sign up for fear of regrets.
I didn't dress to state my beliefs for fear I wouldn't pass inspection.
I used the people others' shunned for fear I couldn't make friends.
I avoided pain for fear it could actually harm me.
I stopped listening for fear I couldn't be heard
I looked to other people for advice for fear of failure if I tried things on my own.
And I became nice for fear of the cost of real relationship.

Life became the management of anxieties and a restless yearning for control.

I began to lose my voice: shallow breaths and technique without emotion;  years spent perfecting the motions that win judge's marks but leave the audience cold; a thin, wispy whine in place of the rich, throaty growl that is the true voice.

Cultivating fear is a poor strategy.  It never delivers on its promises.  The worst you imagine isn't nearly as bad as it actually gets.  Control doesn't stop the flood.  Small gets squashed as readily as large.  Assholes are assholes, no matter what you do to appease them.

So stop appeasing them.  Stop wondering how it will turn out.  Stop trying to be on top of it all.  Ride deep in the tube.  Let the wave curl over you.  Scream, if you have to, but let yourself have the fun.  See where that takes you.  Decide to trade dread for anticipation.  Laugh out loud, and thumb your nose at anyone that stares.  Trust that a worthy friend always sees you without your make-up on.

I did, and I feel much more like singing.  I suspect you will, too.

SYNTHESIS

Synthesis is the opposite of analysis.  In the first, you take different things and put them together to make one new thing.  In the second, you take one thing and separate it into the different things that make it up.  A song is a synthesis.  It is one new thing created by combining many different things.  An analysis of the song will reveal any number of things; paper, ink, symbols, words, notes, sounds, and an instrument to name a few.

Is it any wonder that in a world so focussed on analysis, the taking apart of things, music struggles?  Is it any wonder that musicians find themselves somehow out of the loop in everyday function?  After all, the coin of our realm is putting unrelated things together into a new existence.  While colleagues dither over how much money hiring an engineer will cost, we can already see the bridge.  We live in a world of possible combinations-but jobs, recreation and politics spin around an axis of this thing or another.  The everyday world walks around in aisles that say "yes or no," "right or left," "black or white."  Yet, a musician knows that "right and left" together might reveal a totally different way to go.

While colleagues and friends rush around in rational, we have already put together all the little bits and pieces and formed a whole raft of possible shapes for the future.  The problem is that the rational, analytic forces don't see how it all came together.  They cry out that they need to see the "steps."  They refuse just to relax into the process and trust the outcome.  They believe that mastery comes from control of the pieces.

But the singer knows mastery comes from trusting the song.  Beethoven themes are two note themes.  Beethoven chord progressions are I-V chord progressions.  It is not mastery of two notes and two chords that gives us Symphony no. 5.  It is the unique synthesis of those elements that makes the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata take hold.

Scientists in laboratories tell us that breaking reality into its smallest parts will teach us its nature.  Musicians know that reality is the way those parts are together.  I believe the world could use a few more musicians at the wheel,in control, as it were; not so much because we are masters of the ways that things work, but because we are masters at the possibility that things can work, even if we don't know how.

THE HUMANITY OF INSANITY

Crazy.  It is an easy word to throw around.  It is a word that sticks to artists of all kinds: poets, musicians, painters and dancers.   It is hard to come up with a famous example of a crazy accountant.  One possibility is that artistic endeavors lead to mental instability.  Another idea is that mentally unstable people are drawn to the arts.  Perhaps, though, it is that the insanity of accountants has not had the human impact that the craziness of artists has had.

There has to be something to the fact that a poem written by a certified resident at Bedlam has inspired a musical genius of the 20th-century to set it to song.  There has to be something to the fact that a picture swirled in oil by a man who mutilated himself for love inspired a soft rock hit.  There has to be something to the fact that we can still understand the piano music of a man who suffered from multiple personality disorder and died incarcerated in a mental institution.

Art speaks to us beyond the place where rational conversation happens.  Art reaches inside and touches something we may not even be able to name.  Art moves us to feeling, and when we feel, we respond.  Maybe we laugh, or yell.  Maybe we rear back in pain, or lean in with care.  Art, which shares another person's inner life, proves we are not alone, and confronts us with the idea that rational discourse is not the only way in which human beings speak to one another.

Great art, even when conceived in a person who is out of touch with reality, lives.  It connects others with deep feelings and creates new ideas.  It makes sense, and it challenges sense.  Perhaps the most frightening part of the experience is knowing that someone who could not function in the day-to-day, still says more about what it means to be human than a host of sane bankers.

SINGING IS FEELING

Singing is, more than anything else, about communicating feeling.  Feeling is often too overwhelming for words.  Thoughts can fail us when we are in places of extreme feeling.  Ideas alone can rouse tumults of conflicting feelings.   What do we do with all that information?  Maybe we scream or shout.

Great excitement finds itself expressed in shouts.  Great pain finds itself expressed in yells.  Great sorrow finds itself expressed in screams.  Feeling is expressed in sound.  But shouts are lonely and inchoate.  They flourish in spirit, but lack in soul.  They do not communicate a meaning.  They do not share.

Singing-music-is formed.  The feeling is pushed "through a horn, until it is worn into a new note."  The feeling can be sung "with a cry in your voice, and before you know it, start to feelin' good.  You simply got no choice."  Willed and intended to say something to someone, feelings are transformed through song into relationship.  The singer uses words from people who have been in a similar place, and then is no longer alone.  The singer writes new words to an old tune, and validates the human-ness of feeling in the sound.

The words may say "Walking on broken glass," but when accompanied by a light, peppy dance groove, a message of deep irony is expressed.  The feeling of the music does not match the meaning of the words, and something powerful happens.  We stop to listen.

True singing, singing that shares something significant with others, singing that communicates, will come from a place of deep feeling.  A simple proverb that hangs on my wall says: "For heights and depths no words can reach, music is the soul's own speech."  Speech only shares our ideas and thoughts.  Music shares the chaotic, unformed movements of joy and sadness that color our experience of the world.