Let's talk about passion. There are days when I can't decide exactly what it is that I have passion for. Is it for music? Is it for words? Words about music? The "right" answer, one that can probably never hold much precision, is likely to be a combination of the three. Plus some other stuff. You might wonder why I care about this. Yeah, I wonder that myself. It has to do with periods of time when I spend too much time inside my own head. All writers know about this.
So I'm sitting around reading the first bits of Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece. In the most general sense, the book is about how if we pay attention, we'll find that art is all around us. It's not just framed paintings in a gallery. It's not even necessarily objects...it could just be a part of your life and how you live it.
Before the first chapter, entitled "The Art of Making A World" (about painter Pierre Bonnard and how he managed to shape his world despite his pained relationship with Marthe), the introduction ends with a powerful anecdote about Elgar Degas. When he was an old man, he visited the exhibition of his hero Jean-Auguste-Dominique-Ingres every day while it was at the Galerie George Petit. Degas was blind. He just wanted to be with the works and run his fingers over them.
That is passion.
A little bit before picking up the Kimmelman book, I had been listening to a CD called Cortical Songs by John Matthias and Nick Ryan. A piece of music created by taking the signals between human brain cells and rendering them as music, performed by a string ensemble. There are moments of incredibly beauty on this recording but there was one in particular that struck me. A figure ended abruptly, but with a fadeout that first revealed silence and then a morphed version of the original phrase, echoing off in a different direction.
For whatever reason, I was dumbstruck by that five seconds of sound. I immediately wanted to write about it. I wanted to hold it in my hand forever. What does that mean? I don't know.
I do know that sometimes it bugs me that it seems like nobody else cares about this stuff. Not this music in particular, but well...anything. Does anybody have a passion for something outside of sports, celebrity gossip, and complaining about the government? I suppose this doesn't matter and, on most days, the thought doesn't occur to me at all. I'm too busy listening and writing...or wishing that I was listening and writing.
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Article comments
1 - Josh Hathaway
That last paragraph is a glimpse into my world, Mark. I'm doing some day job work when what i log to do is write about this Copeland song that's gotten in my head and write the three blues articles vie mentally started.
It's with some mixed emottions i say that brainwaves as music resomates with me.