[995] Check Yourself Wreck Yourself

When you’re practicing a piece of music, you’re rehearsing a behavioral language. Whether you get to a place where the song sits somewhere besides the notes on the page comes after the work of making it into a song in the first place. You have to go slow. You have to be deliberate. You have to be persistent. You have to look for resources when you get stuck. You have to open and re-open the notes so they can be built into your instincts and recognition patterns. Only then do you manage some “mastery” or get the license to “cover” and remix it. Any art form requires the same general approach. The abstract artists can probably draw anything less abstract considerably better than the “modern artist” who throws paint at the wall. The novelist has ten times as many ideas that made their way to the trash or were borrowed from than books published.

I finished watching The Hand of God just before watching The Worst Person in the World. They are both the “slice of life” kind of film, following a person at a transitional stage of life and the often awkward or shallow observational place they occupy as they try to “figure things out.” Both movies, highly-rated, are surely indicative of a familiar fledgling sensibility that’s enshrouded the last several generations. They’re a point of view privileged to discuss a struggle from a taken-for-granted perch of wealth and options.

I don’t discuss privilege in the way I feel most people do. I don’t view it as this kind of scar you acknowledge to write-off whoever’s view or work you’re discussing. It’s merely a point of view and a head nod that it exists with it’s own influences and pitfalls for how you may think. I identify more with those of a certain access and wealth than those in genuine poverty. That’s okay. If I can’t identify that, I don’t have a prayer of translating how I behave or how I think across that experience barrier.

I look for words that do what I can’t. I can’t make you understand me. I can’t make you feel like me. I can’t give you confidence. I can’t increase your IQ. I can’t make the artists and philosophers who mean the most to me into something digestible and an earnest reflection of their “independent” value. This is where I start in every interaction I have, be it with media, myself, or you. I identify what I can or can’t control. It’s not always conscious, but it has been a deliberate practice for so long, that I just hit the “D” key on the piano of, “That’s not my problem” or, “I’m not capable of that.” I don’t scan, count back, or hesitate until I start writing. I feel that after you talk to thousands of people over many years, particularly about their problems or various crises, you get that deep appreciation and earned short-cut to certain “best” answers or practices.

It’s not privileged information, per se, to learn how to play an instrument or read music. It’s there, freely available, in many forms, and you can go slow, build your instincts, and get pretty far. James Taylor can’t read music, and you don’t have to assume he’s learned how to speak and translate the language. He’s put in the time and practiced “something,” that many of us aren’t in service to our respective arts or desires.

I get frustrated with how long things take. I don’t want to drive a second longer than I have to. I watch most things sped up. I see myself flub a note on a new song I’m trying to learn, and I instinctively get shitty with myself that I can’t make my fingers respond in exactly that way that would suggest I’ve mastered what I’m trying to do immediately. I know my brain doesn’t work like that. I know I have to take the time to make the pattern. I know I can and will eventually, but I still manage to “hate the journey,” when, in the moment, it’s exactly showing me what I don’t want, even while simultaneously existing as exactly what I need. You learn from mistakes. You learn from brushing against boundaries. You learn when you practice “openness” for all that can spill in while you’re working.

I think sometimes this frustration for the time obligation gets confused as a lack of empathy for how long it takes others to learn something. I don’t ask myself very often, “Compared to what?” What does it mean to “feel” like I’m “not learning fast enough?” It might be understood as lying to myself. If I’m trying to speed through a passage I haven’t etched into my instinct, I’m practicing a lie. I’m getting in my own way. If I profess to want to play this song, and play it well, why am I rehearsing a barrier? Why am I letting myself take even longer to get it learned and shown-off in public? It begs deeper and more explicit questions.

Do I want to learn the song? Yes. Do I want to learn it “quickly?” Well, maybe not. I’m someone who struggles to be moved by much. If I’m practicing something new, that was kind of the point already, just to have something new. Once I learn it, I fall into a familiar problem. I’m no longer practicing a new song; I’m hunting for a song that makes me want to practice. Isn’t that a lot to ask of a song? Why is the song motivating me in a way I can’t on my own? We can chalk that up to the miracle and intangibility of any given song and how you relate to it, or you can write dozens of blogs explaining how your “normal” life and obligations obscure and interrupt the time it takes to intimately relate to music.

Music kids are weird. Whether they come from a household where their parents pathologized music and forced their kid to practice, or they just found themselves utilizing the necessary practice as a way to work compulsive or obsessive tendencies, if you’re able to do impressive things on an instrument, there’s a decent chance it’s acted as a stand-in for lesser-understood things you might otherwise be obliged to practice. It’s a bedrock cliché the slew of famous musicians with drug problems, abusive relationships, or mental health struggles that are endlessly mined for deep catalogues and hits. Can you turn your bad break-up into three #1 albums? Can you make others’ hearts race like the cocaine made yours?

What is the nature of the necessary and obligatory work? It’s a foundational question. Are you on a hero’s quest, or a balancing task? Do you need to wake up, or allow yourself to sleep? Can you acknowledge when you’re, maybe not out of questions, but certainly arriving at the ones that consistently ask you why you haven’t fucking done something by now? There is no “fix” save the eternal obligation to slowly practice in the directions you think you want to go. Keep asking yourself if you even recognize where you are. Reckon with the nature and layers of your hidden dishonesty. It’s a dishonesty realized in as many ways as you’re willing to look. Maybe your stomach drops, jaw clenches, or you race to complete something you know explicitly you haven’t practiced as you should.

I’ve learned how to better appreciate “the journey” more than the destination. That’s taken practice. It’s why I enjoy practicing new songs at all or learning new facts or watching new movies. I’m not one to watch a series I like over and over or fall asleep with the same movie every night. I want to keep evolving and seeing how robust and familiar my concept of an identity or foundation might exist in other things or people. The heartbreaking part is two-fold, both in rarely ever being recognized, and struggling to see or hear how anyone else is trying to be. At least the movies, songs, and books exist. I could criticize David Lynch and find his process and message indiscernible, but dude is doing something, and with help I can discover it’s not just him going insane.

If I’ve discovered any remote wisdom in life, it’s that you have to do. So I do. I write. I work things, well in spite of my worst or best ideas about myself or how I’m spending my time. I have monuments of my acts and effort literally surrounding me. “…faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” I don’t have or need faith. I need work. I need meaningful work that I can attend to and that I can utilize to celebrate my instincts when I might not be finding the patience to put them on display through a mastered song. I don’t need to hear how poorly you understand your circumstances, I need to hear what you’re working on. Your “political opinion” is mute when you vote for fascism. Your high-minded ideals regarding “violence” bleed to death at the end of a weapon. Your fierce proclamations of “freedom” are consumed by the infinite icy void or virulent fire, whichever catches first.

I know what your problem is, every time. You pretend. You pretend to know more than you do, then you double down and pretend that you aren’t playing the “I know more than I do” game. You don’t humble yourself in your ignorance. You don’t allow yourself to slow down where the work of humbling yourself can begin to take place. So you run away, into walls, into people who will give you new language for constructing complex excuses, and as far away from “another obligation” as though you’ve accepted the first and only one that matters to make the rest make any sense.

When I’m not learning the song “fast enough,” I’m pretending it’s a worthwhile goal to “learn fast,” that I’ve ever bothered to define “enough,”  that real learning can take place like that altogether, and that I don’t have a small death I’m not exactly crazy about on the horizon once it’s learned. I also pause movies I’m enjoying 5 or 10 minutes before the end. I collect books I’m enjoying and refrain from completing them until…I can make peace with the idea they’ll be done.

 I’m not trying to sabotage myself, but if I refrain from ever looking at the nature of how I’m working or what I’m working on, I’ll never admit, discover, complete, or change. Thus, when you refuse to work, and profess to be “trying,” I know, immediately, the nature of the lies that lend themselves to your own self-sabotage. You over-burden a story about “what you think” that has very little analogous representation in the world. It’s a story formed by machinery you’ve not trained slowly, deliberately, to give you a decent representation of what you’ve been observing or working on in the first place!

Therefore the struggle, the familiar - universal flail - depicted across mediums and critically acclaimed sensibility gets to sub in for the work you’re not doing. Watch the masterpiece over and over like a child building into its foundational sense that good will triumph over evil or the square piece goes in the square hole. The happy ending is inevitable when you’re not looking for a sequel about the days and years after.

I want to learn the song, and hundreds more. I want to learn them even if I never get around to. I demonstrate that I want to learn them by practicing, and spending money on the tools to learn them “correctly,” like on weighted keys that build the muscles in my wrists, and software that facilitates time in front of notation. How do you know I want to learn the song? You see me post videos of me practicing and getting it approximately right or not-quite up to speed yet. How do I know I want to learn the song? I turn the nature of my work into a story about how it reflects across the levels of things that are more meaningful than whatever might be making me money. Can I hate my job, and see how the money for the tools can be a more emotionally compelling story than a spiral of stress, dread, and waste? It’s a simpler question when you can ask how the song or garage or business endeavor is coming along. When you can either point to your work, or commit yourself to co-opting someone else’s, what more is there to say?