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Music is realistically the only way I'm going to distinguish myself. I'm probably better at prose, in most regards, than music; but in a couple of hours you can write two or three minutes of music that will change peoples' lives. I know I have a book in me—probably some sort of abstruse treatise on life and why we laugh and why horror movies are scary—but I don't have a demon driving me to write endlessly, like I do forcing me to make noises every hour of the day. And I only do what I'm driven to.
I'm a knowledgeable and dextrous but ultimately not exceptionally talented musician, as musicians go in life; knowledge and dexterity are tools, useful but not what makes a musician a musician—at least, not a musician first and foremost. For me, it's always been a fundamental drive but felt, in practice, like a second language. It's like the difference between being someone with a truly deep knowledge and enjoyment of a much-loved foreign cuisine, and being the cook who grew up cooking it and not knowing 'food' as anything else.
It's very tough to write true poetry in a language you don't feel in your bones. It can't be calculated or derived by rote. I can't write great poetry in English, either, in the conventional sense, but I can spot the poetic in unique ways and places and communicate it, and the real work is all done at the pre-intellectual level. The arts are a way of seeing, not of expressing. Unfortunately, though, there's no real literary equivalent of that 2 or 3 minute piece of life-changing music, that small package of complete emotional transformation. I don't expect anyone will ever write a transcendental blog post. But if I try to sit and write out my book, I'll just get distracted and I'll never finish it. I know myself by this point.
It suddenly strikes me that my urge to leave a mark on history, my intense distaste for my own transience, may be the chief cause of suffering in my life. Really, this isn't about distinguishing myself, but about redeeming myself to myself.
It just goes to show you, there's always yet another underlying assumption to worry about.
I'm a knowledgeable and dextrous but ultimately not exceptionally talented musician, as musicians go in life; knowledge and dexterity are tools, useful but not what makes a musician a musician—at least, not a musician first and foremost. For me, it's always been a fundamental drive but felt, in practice, like a second language. It's like the difference between being someone with a truly deep knowledge and enjoyment of a much-loved foreign cuisine, and being the cook who grew up cooking it and not knowing 'food' as anything else.
It's very tough to write true poetry in a language you don't feel in your bones. It can't be calculated or derived by rote. I can't write great poetry in English, either, in the conventional sense, but I can spot the poetic in unique ways and places and communicate it, and the real work is all done at the pre-intellectual level. The arts are a way of seeing, not of expressing. Unfortunately, though, there's no real literary equivalent of that 2 or 3 minute piece of life-changing music, that small package of complete emotional transformation. I don't expect anyone will ever write a transcendental blog post. But if I try to sit and write out my book, I'll just get distracted and I'll never finish it. I know myself by this point.
It suddenly strikes me that my urge to leave a mark on history, my intense distaste for my own transience, may be the chief cause of suffering in my life. Really, this isn't about distinguishing myself, but about redeeming myself to myself.
It just goes to show you, there's always yet another underlying assumption to worry about.
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