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?
