this will be podcast #2.
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a sort of intangible fire.
i'd like to spend some time talking about my educational psychology professor, whom i think may be one of the smartest human beings i've ever met. on and off over the last few days, i've been composing emails to her in my head. i haven't actually written one, though. on one hand, i think she's fascinating and i really want to pick her brain, but on the other, i'm sort of afraid to speak up. i don't often raise my hand in her class because i know that when she asks a question, she's doing it 'cause she knows what we will say and what we probably believe and that it will be essentially wrong and that she's going to use the next erroneous response to prove a point she wants to make. that's great and all, but it makes me think more about self-preservation than participation. maybe i'll get up the nerve to tell her that sometime. anyway, she's crafty as hell, and even when i don't agree with her, i can't come up with an argument that she's can't poke a whole galaxy of holes into. and even though you might not guess it by the fact that i don't bother much with my textbook and i never review my notes within 48 hours (or ever) the way she says we should, this class is setting me on fire in new ways each week. i'm actually thinking about taking more classes in this field, even though i really don't have to. the science of learning is terribly interesting. mysterious. i feel like screaming, "eureka!" in class sometimes, when the light suddenly pours into my head with such force that i make a significant connection between this class and my life. i want more of this; i want to know more about it. i may even pick up my text book over break, since i'll be going through information withdrawal.
most of all, i want to talk to her more about art and talent, because so far, from what she's said, she seems to believe that any skill can be learned to mastery if practiced enough. i can't quite buy it. i don't know if it's my overly sensitive artist's soul taking offense or what. i have to admit i think of artists, and by extension, myself, as a special sort of breed. i don't want anyone telling me i'm just like anyone else and that any joe schmoe heretofore declared talentless can catch up to me in the singing or songwriting department if he only believes and practices enough. but i don't think it's true. for sure, plenty of people whom i consider to be inferior musicians have surpassed me on the guitar, but that doesn't make me think of them as artists. there is something else besides technical expertise to consider. i don't quite know what to call it...soul, heart, emotion, spirit. i don't have a word for it, but you can tell when someone's got it. there are plenty of kids in band and they can all play their music if they practice enough, but some kids have something natural going on, some sort of internal timing, a sort of intangible fire. i've just quizzed my brother on this subject and he agrees, although i perhaps can't trust his answer, being that he comes from the same cloth as the rest of our family. strange, though...my parents are musicians, but they never really got into writing, whereas all three of their kids write music as if we were born to it. is that the next step in the evolutionary process? do kids of cover-band musicians write music just so they can go a little beyond the realm of their parents? the subject was certainly far from my mind at age thirteen, when i began songwriting in earnest. i was learning to play the guitar at the time and was left alone baby-sitting my three-year-old brother every day of the summer while our parents were building our house. my mom had given me the chords to a few of the hair band ballads i liked, but didn't have the time to give me any more. eventually, i got bored enough that i wrote my own songs, just so i'd have something new to play. i had been a poet almost as long as i'd been able to write, so it was a natural progression, one my grade school art teacher had predicted just the year before, to my scoffs of disbelief. "of course, i can't write music, miss bast. sure, i sing and i write poetry, but i could never write a
song." famous last words, as my mom likes to say.
once i "came out" as a bona fide songwriter the following school year, i was a bit of a celebrity. i was still the chubby, nerdy, smart kid picked last in sports, of course, but i had a guitar, and that was a especial novelty at eighth grade camp, where no one had radios. even the popular kids wanted me around then. i didn't have a lot of tunes, just a handful each of originals and covers, but it was good enough. maybe the other kids didn't want me out on the baseball diamond, exactly, but it was cool that they suddenly wanted me singing on the sidelines. i had found my avenue of acceptance, the one thing i could do better than damn near everyone else...better than anyone i knew, anyway. being the best academically never helped me, of course, because there i was in direct competition with everyone else, and the only time they appreciated me for it at all was when we worked in groups and they let me do everything so i could secure my obligatory A.
i do think there's a connection between art and growing up lonely or misunderstood. some of the gawkiest kids in existence never would have had a chance without their unique artistic talents to redeem them. without mine, i would still have been a smart kid, but there would have been no life in me, nothing to drive me out of my shell and show everyone my worth. you'd think the least popular girl in class would avoid the stage like the proverbial plague, but i felt i belonged to it. teachers were usually my allies in this; most of them adored me, which probably hurt my reputation ever more. i was in every play, every musical performance. i wrote poetry and read it at school assemblies. i didn't do it just for attention; i did it for myself, because i felt i belonged in front of an audience. i felt good when i was wrapped in art. i was more than just myself. when i lost a solo in seventh grade just because the other girls were jealous and didn't think it was fair that i got solos when no one else did, i didn't fold. they may have threatened me to give it up, but i was strong. just about the whole class threatened to quit choir, though, so my teacher did the folding all on her own...and i was furious with her. i can honestly say that part of me still resents her to this day, and i am equally sure that she doesn't remember it at all. she should have done more for me, though, considering that for years i was the only kid willing to sing in music class. i always pulled through for her and saved her the embarrassment of total silence every time she asked us to sing. she failed me. she's a nice lady, though, and my little brother's band teacher yet. she still says hi when she sees me.
speaking of my baby brother (we'll call him anthony)...as i have mentioned, he writes music. so does my other brother (we'll call him tom). they are twelve and eighteen, respectively, and they both started writing music at an earlier age than i did. i tend to think that's so because i was already doing it, and so there was none of that initial "i can't do it" resistance. of course they could do it; their big sister showed them it was possible. i have at least an album's worth of songs older than the younger boy and the older one was only three when i started. tom and i are much more prolific, musically, than anthony, who probably spends more time drawing cartoons and playing video games than anything else. going back to the tortured artist theory, i wonder if the little guy doesn't write as much because he doesn't need to. he's the only one that didn't end up an outcast in grade school. he has friends over all the time, people calling him before and after school to talk about nothing. he's good at sports. he can sing and play, too, but he doesn't need to do it constantly the way his older siblings feel they must. he'd rather run around outside and collect bugs like a "real" boy. more power to him. his only hang-up seems to be that he's got all my old teachers and they've apparently told him i was a brilliant, little middle-schooler back in the day, which i think he has taken to mean, more brilliant than he is. if i ace a test in college and want to tell someone, he is not my guy. he just shrugs like i'm supposed to get As, so big deal. it's like saying the sun came up this morning. well, duh. of course it did.
i can go into the psychology of it all and start with our parents, how different they were for me than they are for him. our mother certainly had scads of time back then to nourish my mind, whereas now my brother is lucky that she remembers to yell at him to get his homework finished. the relationship between my parents was probably a lot more harmonious back when i was little, too, or at least that's how it seemed. anthony is aware of them fighting in a way i never was. it gives me an odd, uncomfortable feeling; i can't imagine what it's doing to him. sooo...on second thought, maybe he should be the one writing the most songs. when i was a kid, my problems were social, not familial. school was often my own private slice of hell, but everything was good once the bus dropped me off and i was home. i had a closetful of my mom's books at my disposal and a wild, fantastic imagination...and parents that encouraged every whim i ever had. i don't know what it's like in my brother's shoes. maybe it's worse. tom is around the house, too, but he's pretty much always lived in his own little world, so he doesn't notice much. a classic space cadet. all he seems to care about lately is heavy metal, his own band and the ones he admires. the sky could be falling down and he'd still be gushing about as i lay dying and the deftones and how much ass they kick live. he'd rather have a fretless bass than a girlfriend. i wonder what my teacher would say.
anyway, i've been wrestling with this issue of artistic talent ever since we first talked about it in class. we were talking about procedural memory and practice and someone asked if that applied to art. my professor said that it did, that if someone practiced that skill, say drawing, hard enough and often enough, he or she would get really good at it; he or she would be an artist. "artist" is a tricky word to define sometimes; to me, it's a concept, like love. it's not just the act, but also the spirit of creation. someone can be amazingly talented at copying masterpieces brushstroke for brushstroke and be more technically skilled at painting that just about anyone alive and still NOT be considered an artist. perfect technical wizardry can be incredibly cold and unimaginative. vincent van gogh was told his entire life that he was a crap painter, that he didn't have a lick of sense or talent, but he
couldn't stop painting. he didn't have a choice. he only ever sold one piece while he was alive (and i believe that was an act of charity more than anything else), but he was an artist. a genius. an artist is someone that has to create and perform...create and perform or go mad. when i'm writing rubbish and my muse is on extended hiatus, i get depressed. when i write a really good song or poem, i'm elated for a day, maybe three, but then i'm back to despairing that it's all used up and i'll never write anything decent again. it's need, it's compulsion. a restlessness incurable by ordinary means. an itch. maybe what i'm looking for is just a form of mental illness. beautiful chaos. i think you can find it in certain brilliant scientists and mathematicians, too, the crazy ones that pursue their breakthroughs with a creative, barely-controlled madness that astonishes friends and colleagues. the ones able to make those critical leaps usually seem to be a bit off, from what i've heard, anyway. there are so many ways of being an artist, so many ways to be a little bit deranged. i don't know if i'm really ill, or if that's even an apt way to describe someone with compulsions like mine. one thing i do know is...i do not desire a cure. i would never exchange my dizzying highs and lows for simple contentment and evenness. the charge i get from creation is too delicious a thing to trade.
