What's your Story?

My friend, Sorjin*, is a guitar player. He loves to play the blues, and can seduce you with a few notes on the slide. He told me once that he decided to go the way of music because it is a free-flowing, real-time expression of you. Who you are, then. Not a distillation, a derivation or a rationalization of what you think your character is. That things like books and movies need a narrative - a beginning and an end. cause and effect. so if you start with one thing, you end up with another. music doesn't rely on that narrative formula, or any kind of rationalization. Take Merzbow. or Lustmorde. What they do is play subliminal 'noise' music, which cannot be brought down to a scale and moves (I think - I don't have it figured out) intuitively, like a mood changing through a landscape. 

Music has the ability, as Huxley said, second best to silence, to express the inexpressible. You can never know who you really are, maybe because there is no you; maybe because it is beyond our perception; or an elusive combination of both. But you will find that music - whether listening and appreciating, or singing or playing - can talk to the you inside. In a way that books, paintings and movies never can. And he played me a song the other day, called 'Untitled', in an album that was untitled - maybe to ensure that nothing more than the music itself could be inferred from that piece. 

#nowplaying Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain

It's a good lesson for life. We've often thought about the OST for the 'movie of our life', that captures in glitzy cinematic detail the trials and travails of a day in our lives. Even autobiographies that don't tell you how the writer became who she became, are decried for lack of a gripping storyline. 

But we don't live our lives like that. There will be days and days together when you don't understand what you're doing, but you know you're doing it because something is making you do it, guiding you in that direction. When/if it ends successfully, people call it motivation, a killer instinct. If it fails - well, it doesn't matter what you call it, nobody's listening. 

So for days like that, I think we'd all do well to think about something like this. I'm reproducing a quote below.

You will find that people love their narratives. They need for your life to have meaning; it must provide them a teachable moment, whether cautionary or aspirational. But you will never be who they think you are. 

The more you allow their expectations to dictate to you what you should be, the more unfamiliar you’ll become with your own reflection in a mirror.

I found this through my subscription to Andrew Sullivan's the daily beast, by the way. Whattay blog. It's a blessing in these days of mindless diversions. 
*name changed. But it would be pretty cool to have a friend called Sorjin.