That Ineffable, Inarticulate Source

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 February 2015.

Lake Sils, Upper Engadine valley, Grisons, Switzerland

Home again today, resting up.

Quite honestly, "my heart leaps up" when you say "I could grab a couple locals guys out here and put the songs together, book a Saturday gig, and then you could come up Saturday morning, we could play through the songs, play Saturday night, and you could head home Sunday."

That feels right, not just from a logistical but from a philosophical perspective. I think we are necessarily doing something very interesting with the whole concept of "band." With so many bands out there and us being way past our prime, there's no way we can afford not to be original to the extreme. The anachronistic costuming and performance dimension by itself is just a gimmick.

I feel like my role should be, first and foremost, songwriter and Dionysian hero. I don't say this out of arrogance. I just mean that, if I'm involved too much in the nuts and bolts, my creativity (anyone's creativity?) will necessarily go downhill. I want to dam myself up, to "boast gladly of my weakness," and see if God/Art rescues me in the midst of that. That's a scary pairing in that last sentence, but it's something that I believe. God is first of all Creator. He is the one who move across the surface of the primordial waters. If there are no Apollonian takers, if there isn't anyone who wants to make something of this music, it just means that I haven't--like Nietzsche's lake--risen high enough (or grown deep enough) to be worthy of notice.

If I want "apostolic fruitfulness," the answer is, paradoxically, to spend more time in contemplation. I feel that God is calling me this Lent to settle into something deeper. It's not even "endeavoring" to become deeper, it's settling into something that is already there. Resting into these Lenten disciplines, damming myself up and not going out to some transcendent horizon of "achievement" or "accomplishment" feels like the right thing right now. A lot of these are already part and parcel of my life: openness to children, times of prayer, recourse to the sacraments. These are all things that I have already, at some point, "signed up for."

They all have those aspects of being preliterate, primitive, primordial, prolific.

I believe that music, perhaps more so than any other artistic genre, participates in this primeval source of creative energies. Singing and playing of instruments and dance. Visual and sculptural art is a distant second. Music and dance are a participation in that ineffable, inarticulate source. Even if dance and music come to nothing, they are the secret source of our regeneration.

To the outside observer, openness to children would seem to have been a great constraint on artistic endeavors. What a surprise to discover almost the exact opposite has been true! First of all, prolificity and/or openness in everything seems to be a precondition for creativity. Secondly, interacting with these irrational, preliterate, primitive beings--although frustrating for my rationalistic, literate, sophisticated self--has worked wonders for my spirit, bringing me closer to that epoch when human beings walked the surface of the earth in wonder.

Religious ritual and devotional practices--especially ones designed for illiterates--fall into the same category.

Okay, so long story short, I want to spend my time deepening this lake of music and contemplation, both through the blog and in the context of life. If you can gather musicians who are willing and able to learn and practice the songs, great! That's a lot better than me trying to coordinate things here. I think the best thing I can do for the project is to dam myself up here and, when and if the lake rises high enough, something may happen.

But, again, that won't be through an ambitious flowing out toward achievement and accomplishment, which impoverishes the life of contemplation, ritual, procreation, creativity, etc.