....a mineshaft at night

"Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them."

-- Ranier Maria Rilke

I found so much solace in "Letters to a Young Poet" when i read it as a young adult. i was majoring in english at UTSA and truly that; a young poet. not a very good one, but those were the circumstances. i hadn't yet really finished writing a song i liked. it was (and can still be) a bleak, existential time, despite the fact that life all around me was busy and seemingly good. his words even now are soothing in a way that scripture and fables never were for me.

i am still, and will always be, wary of my own work.

but when something springs forth unabated in the early morning or late, late night and you somehow snare it, then it feels as if those things might be worth showing to others. everything else remains secreted, waiting for an approval that may never come: thrown down a mineshaft at night.

jitters

i'm usually not nervous about performing. probably because, in my mind, that's not what i'm doing. i'm just playing guitar and singing. i have clothes on. hopefully nice ones. but, as an old friend's t-shirt once read, 'wart you see is wart you get' (it had a frog on it).

there are the thoughts that zoom in like starfighters that you will commit a mistake, forget a line, blow a chord, but once you're resolved to the task at hand, you just forge ahead. and usually, within a moment or so, you're back where you're supposed to be; inside the song, feeling the music come through you, not really from you.

the antenna is used as a common metaphor for how music is created. as is the fishing pole. but the only real acknowledgement that music is occurring that i know of, is when the person performing or the people listening, for even just a fraction of time, disappear. and in that mysterious black hole, we are lost in the sound that came through all of us. and then someone coughs, or a chair squeaks and we're hauled back in by the gravity of life.

but just for a moment, we escape.

and that's really nothing to be nervous about.