I am so filled with the wonder of rectilinear shapes. Just thought I would say that. This is a little experiment from this morning, mainly with color. Trying to develop a palette based on Japanese prints but a little more saturated so I can find a bit more contrast. I am thinking this will develop into something over the weekend.

So I think I will try to temper my self-examinations with some admonishment for others to join in and do the same. I deeply believe that my creativity exists in order to help or motivate (and perhaps at some point, inspire) others to be creative as well. To find their own gifts and discover who they are, and where their gifts come from. So I will attempt to bring that into this process as well, I hope!

____________________________________________________________

I have put together the lyrics along with my “commentary” on them. Perhaps this gives some insight into the diversity of experience and thought that can combine inside of an artistic expression. The starting point was a story Jesus told:

“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
 

I’m lost. I think I always will be.

There is a lot of theological baggage attached to the word “lost.” In Evangelical circles it is a synonym for “not saved”—someone who does not have faith in Jesus Christ. By default, everyone is “lost” until they are “saved.” But I am using the word in it’s non- theological and regular sense, the way we use it when we don’t know where we are. [An additional metaphor: A complicated or confusing plot unfolds in a book or movie. “What’s going on? I’m lost.”]

You can treat being lost in a number of ways. Ask directions. Look at a map. Use a GPS device. Keep moving around until you spot something familiar.

However, if you feel like you are never going to find your way then lost becomes a trait rather than a condition. That is the place I am at. Being lost is replaced by feeling lost. This is not necessarily a horrible thing, it just means there is a constant underlying sense of “not knowing.” For me, it means I have a continual, and obsessive, desire to find things out—a searching. I don’t see myself as someone who has answers, but rather someone who has lots of questions. It also means I get uncomfortable when everything is static.
 

I guess it’s who I am or something about me.

So, in some way I have to accept that this is a part of what makes me who I am. But it also alienates me from a large segment of organized Christianity that teaches that when we have faith, we are no longer lost (see above). They want their ideas of “being” to also include the idea of “feeling.” I don’t see it that way. I think that the “lost” part of my personality drives me in ways I wouldn’t otherwise go. There are positives and negatives to this—
 

Sometimes searching, sometimes longing,

Searching can be a good thing, longing usually is painful. I am a searcher. This is what makes me experiment, and also obsess. I have to know things, but I also realize I am not capable of knowing the answers to all the ontological questions I have. Meanings. Reasons. And this can really bother me. I want to know this Creator. I want to know God. And I do know. But then I’m not really capable of knowing, because something created cannot really comprehend the mind or hand of it’s creator. In another song I’ve written:

“Sometimes in the gray of the morning
I feel breath on my face,
Passing above me, passing right through me,
Barely perceivable as I awake.
Sometimes in the gray of the evening
Shadows are darker than I know they should be.
Silhouettes darken as if the background
Is casting some unseen light over me.”

I feel/sense this presence around me. It’s like light, dark, shadow, air are all these barely-perceivable hints that God is there. I look for symbols and metaphor in everything, and I find them. All of creation is metaphor. That is why it is so important for me in the practice of my art.
 

Wandering.
Or just ignoring the pain.

My mind loves to wander. I think my art likes to wander. Wandering brings me into contact with all these things I wouldn’t normally think of, and then I have to somehow connect them. But it also overwhelms occasionally with bouts of meaninglessness, purposelessness. When there are a thousand thoughts in my head at one time, or I am deeply focused on creating something, suddenly the thought can strike me: “But so what, you can’t really know anyway.” This kind or mild existential angst displaces all my sense of metaphor.

But this in itself is metaphor. Not being able to know means something is outside of me. There is something else there, otherwise I would be able to comprehend because I can assess my own experience and existence. Since I cannot, it means my own experience is not all-inclusive. There is something more beyond me. (A play on “The Ontological argument” for God’s existence, as first postulated by Anselm.)
 

But I know that I’ve been born again
Cause I know all these things that I’ve been

The phrase “born again” is often misunderstood. Fundamentalist Christians began to use the phrase “born again Christian” to describe themselves, and it has become attached to them exclusively: “Born again” means “fundamentalist,” and to most people it takes on negative associations of narrow-mindedness, or judgmental attitudes.

But the term, as Jesus used it, applies to everyone that follows him. He said, “No one can see God’s kingdom unless they are born again.” Everything starts over, there is a complete change in life, the same way as when someone is born. Only now, you are getting a chance to be reborn. This is a powerful way of expressing what I believe Jesus came here to do— provide a way for us to change by giving up his own physical life. Redemption doesn’t mean fixing, it means starting all over again.

I see this tangibly in my own life. I was (and still am, many times) in need of change. I have done things I am ashamed of, been things that are horribly unloving, selfish and harmful to others. I don’t like who I am, deep down I am self-centered, self-serving, greedy. The theological term for this is “sin”—all those things which we do that tear apart, that ignore responsibilities, that make us so focused on self we see neither others nor the metaphors which point to God. But I know that I have experienced a “starting over,” a rebirthing.
 

I can’t tell you how or why or when

When I was in high school, I went to a very strict, fundamentalist Baptist school. They believed that a person would get “saved” at a very specific point in time. You are born at a precise time, you are ‘born again” at a precise time. But birth is a complex process. Conception, pregnancy, labor. I didn’t come to a point in my life where one second I was following the teachings of Jesus, and the previous moment I was not. (Not doubting this may happen for some people, though.) It was a drawn out process, which coincides with the searching and wandering which is part of my nature.
I certainly can’t begin to understand how this happened. This goes back to trying to understand what I can’t understand. And the why is even more mysterious—
 

Somehow, someplace, I’ve known grace.

But it happened. I’m just not sure of all the details.

The “why” really can get to me. I am the recipient of grace. Grace is another of those theological words, but it is really a simple and beautiful idea: The Creator wants to interact with me. There is no reason why, at least that I could understand. But God is willing to show me kindness and love, and it is only because God wants to, because God is God and doesn’t really have to do anything, particularly give me any sort of kindness. But God does, and this creates a problem for me. Why me? And why not others? I am provided for, shown kindness; while others suffer or starve.

Grace has two sides. If I go to a certain place and feed poor people, I have also chosen not to go to another place and do it, and therefore people there are not fed. When God makes this choice, it is incomprehensible to us. There are lots of attempts at theological explanations for this, but it is beyond me.
Still, I can’t deny that I have known grace. I have experienced it.
 

I’ve been this way since I was small
For as long as I can recall

I’m referring here to experiencing grace. I was adopted, my young life could have been much different than it was. I think about Jesus bringing in a child to stand in front of his disciples, and telling them they needed to be like children. Children don’t have agendas or ambitions, they have dreams. They are trusting, carefree and innocent.
Using the word “small” is kind of a play on words for me. My whole life I was always small, usually the smallest in my classes at school. (But then I grew 5” and gained 30 lbs my freshman year of college.) The idea of “smallness” has always suited me as a representation for my understanding. I can’t grasp the answers to my deepest questions, because I am “so small.”
 

Every day
I’ve tried to start back to that innocence
Find my conscience
Find my heart.

This is connected to the “born again” experience. I want to be a child again, in all the good ways. I want to be trusting. I want to have not done the things I am ashamed of. I want to be carefree. I want to have simple questions with simple answers. I want my innocence back.

In a way, these things happen. Imagine being able to relive your childhood, but with a mature understanding and your life-experience. You could do all those wonderful, carefree things, but avoid the mistakes. In a way, this is the place to which being born again brings me. I can choose to be trusting (rather than think about all the times people have screwed me up). I can choose to not do things which I will be ashamed of later. I can choose to be carefree (because I am experiencing grace). I can live with my difficult questions, because at some future point I will be able to understand the answers.

Strangely, being born again allows me the freedom to make choices about who I want to be. I am, in a way, able to pick and choose my own “inherited traits” and my own “environment.”
 

But I know that I’ve been born again
Cause I know all these things that I’ve been
I can’t tell you how or why or when
Somehow someplace I’ve known grace
 

There’s this field
Without a fence
And this little lamb
Without much sense
In the flock he feels
Constrained and unknown
So off by himself
And he just feels alone.

Returning to the imagery of Jesus’ story about the lamb. The flock of sheep is wandering about. The smallest lamb doesn’t seem to know what to do. The flock wanders, but he wanders on his own. I am uncomfortable with crowds. I don’t fit it. I feel “in a box.” I don’t want to be anonymous. But on the other hand, I also feel lonely.

The beauty of this story is that it is actually not about the sheep, but about the shepherd. One of them has wandered off, and he leaves all the others in order to find the single lost lamb.
 

I’m lost
I think I always will be
Searching around
But Jesus loves me

In my own personal theology, this is the final statement. It encompasses everything else. It’s what makes things personal, transforms a belief-system into a reality of relationship, and sets the ultimate example. It gives a hint of an answer to the “why” questions I have: if love is God’s motivation, then of course it is beyond understanding. Love is unexplainable. I don’t really understand it, but all good things seem to pass from it. Jesus said that the only way you could tell if someone is truly one of his followers, is if they show love. Not if they are perfect, not if they say they are a Christian, not if they follow some set of rules about right and wrongs. But rather if they show love to one another.
 

I know that sounds strange
But after all
In the end
I’m just lonely
Longing

It is strange. It is an incredible mystery to me. In fact, the intrinsic illogic of it all highlights to me the distance between creator and creation. If it is true, and I believe that is, then I really am longing—
 

And I’m still small

And I really am at a place of unknowing. I really am small. And that makes it all the more beautiful to me.
 

But I know that I’ve been born again
Cause I know all these things that I’ve been
I can’t tell you how or why or when
Somehow someplace I’ve known grace

So these tracks of individual performances need to somehow fit together. Their relative dynamics are adjusted, some of their tonality may be changed with EQ so they have more individual space and don’t fight with each other for the same frequency range, some parts may be muted and then only play in a particular part of the song. And again, some might not even be used at all. Whatever I had originally intended to convey, whatever emotion or feeling was there when I wrote and played the music and the lyrics, passes through this process called mixing, and I find it to be just as much of the creative process. What comes out of this becomes the identity of the song, how other’s will hear it, it’s public persona. Hopefully it becomes something someone will want to listen to, without it having lost any of the original passion.

Life is a little bit like this. We have all these individual parts we perform, and we don’t really get to re-do them. If we don’t like some of them, or they don’t seem to fit, the best we can do is mute them. Then we take all of the parts and mix them, and put together this identity. We adjust the parts, the volumes, the tone, and try to make it something someone will want to listen to. Or think well of. Or be with. We just have to make sure we don’t lose the passion in trying to do that, because if we do, we have lost the song.

I can crumple up the internal to-do list and start it over. Re-prioritize life. And then move out of the nothing.

I get caught up in the false-importance of all the trivialities that I mistake for things of consequence or significance. Most of them take on that guise because I keep going back to them. I empower the irrelevant by paying attention to it, because I don’t stop for 4 seconds. Stop. Stop and not-think before, out of habit, I make any old thought into some profundity I need to chase after.

Nothing is what I have to do until I learn to stop. Stop. Stop and non-think. Because after I stop — a full, complete, motionless stop — I can start again, with the trivial left back behind me.

So I came back, re-recorded most of the parts, and finished it. I found myself getting bogged down in my music with all of the options/possibilities/choices that you can have “digitally” (a lot different from when I first started in recording, ha), so I have intentionally limited myself to a “stripped down” single EQ/single compressor setup on my digital board and mix (like it was in the old days) and I found I just wanted to play more music, and turn less knobs, and it it way more simple and way more fun.

So song one, 20 to go. Next up in a few days, art!

[Parental advisory - There is one explicit word in here.]
:

____________________________________________________________

All I want

You can reach back into your histories or literature

And try to define

If we are hollow men, drifting souls,

Or pieces of the divine.

I sit back and contemplate for about ten seconds,

My understanding just implodes.

I might be many things. I might be few.

But I’m on the road

I might have a lot of profound things to say.

I might have a lot of profound things to do.

Everything is so profound,

But all I really want is you.

Ransacked memories inside my head,

Conscious, subconscious, collective or not.

Analyzed. Vandalized. Pretty much the same thing,

They just fuck up whatever you got.

And all the philosophers and all of the fools

And all of their selfish, self-centered, exegetic golden rules:

Look inside. Reach for the stars.

When I needed to look somewhere else and reach for the scars.

I might have a lot of profound things to say.

I might have a lot of profound things to do.

Everything is so profound,

But all I really want is you.

Here’s a clock without any time

And a calendar without a page.

Space without dimension.

Antiquity without age.

Here’s a light without a candle

And a wedding without a guest.

Love without conditions

And the least becoming the best

I might have a lot of profound things to say.

I might have a lot of profound things to do.

Everything is so profound,

But all I really want is you.

What I have come to understand is that I had become selfish. I’m not referring here to making something for myself, or creating because I wanted to. Rather, I was hiding/losing myself, my emotions, my problems within the doing. It was a distraction, not art. It ceased to be about making and instead became diversion, like a pastime someone might do in order to forget about their problems.  I was using one part of myself to forget about another part of myself, and not only did this produce work I didn’t like, it was a dishonoring of my gifts and the effort I had put into them.

As soon as I started facing the emotions I was trying to hide from, and the past experiences that sat down there and caused the emotions, my art becomes less about escaping, less about “self-therapy”, and more about, well, art. And the more my making stuff became about art, contentment began to slip back into it and I realized how wasteful it had been to utilize a creative gift as a means to dull the pain of emotional wounds. (Or simply ignore them by “being busy.”) Yes, it can help to heal, it can help me to express myself, to get down inside me. But really, how stupidly wasteful was this, and how selfish and ungrateful! You don’t hide your gifts, and your don’t use them to hide from who you are. And you certainly don’t hide from them. Now I like what I make, instead of being distracted and wasting away.

No, it never is.

Someone buys it. I hear a compliment. Someone downloads a song. They want to talk about it, or ask me what it means. Does that make it worthy? Have they paid for the emotions, the thoughts, the work? My contentment?

But then I wonder, “what is the alternative? To not make anything?” And that seems almost absurd. That which is there at the end, the final result: a song, a print, some words on a page. What is visible or audible. The tangible. But that is not really the art. The art is start to finish. It is the idea. The doing. Feeling. More doing. And then the end.

I used to think the “end” was for everyone else, so they could experience what I had done. Buy it. Compliment it. Download it. Talk about it. And I really didn’t care that much. After all, what was it to me if someone else experienced what I had done? But I have come to understand the endings are for me, not anyone else. They act as symbols or memories. Not just the result of work and thought and doing and emotion; but real signs to lead me back to those processes if I ever want or need to go there again. Placeholders, marking a point. I can move on from it, or revisit it anytime I want. And I don’t just see the art or hear the notes or read the words. Everything is right there within it. What is “finished” is the smallest part of the art. But if it stays unfinished, there is no placeholder. No symbol. No memory.

When something is unfinished, all of that fades away.

For as long as I can remember I have been filled with ideas, occasionally gifted enough to bring them to life, and very rarely completing them. Usually I get overtaken by a new idea and move on, or get so obsessed with making things perfect that I become stuck in this loop of re-doing over and over. I love “concept.” I love process. I have come to realize that I never loved the completing because I was never satisfied with my own work. If I was busy thinking or researching or making that was fine, but it was never good enough at the end.

I have been working on the idea of contentment. Maybe I should call that the doctrine of contentment instead. Willfully trying to change some of my beliefs in order to assess myself honestly. Faithfully recognizing the responsibility to treat whatever giftedness I have with honesty. When I finish making something, I don’t have to stand back and evaluate it against perfection. I don’t have to weigh it against what someone else may think. I don’t have to make a judgment about whether it is worthy. What I am learning is that I can step away at the moment of completion, appreciate the process of making which I just passed through, and enjoy that I can see or hear this tangible result. Actually stop and enjoy it, keep that moment for a while.

The Polyhaiku Construct is my label for finishing all those loose ends I have sitting around because I could never let them go. The word “polyhaiku” represents for me the idea of multiple layers of simple things that jump back and forth between complexity and simplicity. It was a word I used to describe a series of work I did in grad school exploring how those two interact. The word “construct” holds that same meaning but with a sense of action, of doing. This project is about doing—taking a number of unfinished pieces of art, and songs, and writing and completing them. Rediscovering where I was, moving through the process, and then getting to that point of stepping away and saying, “I’m done, and I like where I went with this.”

I revisited my massive “box” of things in the making and sorted out  21 uncompleted artworks, 21 unfinished songs, and 21 chapters of half-done writing. I am going to try to complete one from each of these every two to three weeks. If I do it, at the end of one year I will have gathered up the past, have all of this finished stuff, and be able to move on into something new for the last part of my life. I suspect that as I do this I will get sidetracked in numerous ways and discover more things I want to conclude, and make lists of new things I want to try. But all of this “pending” will become “ended”—and I am wondering where the “ended” will take me.