is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Music, Wounding, and a Fine Risk.
Music, Wounding, and a Fine Risk.
You know what else makes me feel like a wound might be opened up? Sharing music. You know, music that really matters? Oh! It is even more treacherous than the movie intimacy I was talking about a couple of days ago, and which some of you were kind enough to write to me about.
(Digression: I actually wrote this entry on Wednesday, but then didn�t like it so I didn�t post it, but then I thought it wasn�t so bad, and now I�m posting it, and I just saw that Evany mentioned something about needing-to-be-alone songs in her diary yesterday. She always gets there faster than I do. Even when I�m driving! The End.)
So: �music intimacy.� Well, kind as you all have been to tell me that I am not more emotionally retarded than the next person, now that I have been thinking about this over the past few days, I think that maybe there is something wrong with me. Why am I such a coward? Why do I want to keep so many of the things that matter most to me so strictly to myself?
After all, my dear friend Gayle, who is a great songwriter and who has a beautiful singing voice, and for whom music is a BIG BIG DEAL, and not in any superficial way, is the first to share the music that means the most to her with the people she cares about. She buys me new music and listens to it with me and watches me listening to it with an excited look on her face.
Now, I could get all philosophically consistent and say that it is all about the private/public thing I�ve gone on about more than once. Public Jill is one person, and she can only be that person because there is a Private Jill whom she assiduously keeps sheltered from the glare of light and judgment. But sometimes our philosophical positions help us tell ourselves the stories we want to hear about ourselves, no? Socrates wants me to examine my life.
Don�t get me wrong. I still mean every word of what I said about how parts of a life have to remain private, or you stop being a sane and interesting and dynamic human being. But maybe I take the point to extremes. Aristotle would tell me to seek the middle path, because the extremes are too easy.
And anyway, when I said that parts of a life have to remain private, I didn�t mean they had to be hermetically sealed. I meant that there are some parts of us that we keep to ourselves, other parts we allow out only amongst the people who matter to us, and then further parts that we send to market or go public with. A person who is all public is a shell with no filling. You will not convince me otherwise.
But maybe a person who keeps too much to the extreme side of private instead of letting more out in to the safe surroundings where we meet with our friends and loved ones, maybe that person is as �retarded� as the person who is all shell and no filling.
So this makes me think that my music-privacy is at times a form of cowardice. Not always. There is nothing wrong with keeping something for yourself, or being slow to figure out who gets to know what about you. But anyway: sometimes this music privacy is a form of cowardice. A way of keeping people, even those who know me best, from knowing some things about me. Which is also a bit silly, as if someone else would hear music in exactly the way I do, or would know why certain compositions are so meaningful to me if I chose not to tell them� as if just listening would reveal something. But we�ve already entered the territory of �movie intimacy,� where sitting in proximity to someone in the dark somehow opens up that vulnerability. Listening to music makes me feel exposed sometimes. Perhaps by saying this outloud I will shame myself into being more brave?
But then again, I�m pretty set in my ways. The thing about me is that I sometimes say a lot without revealing much, and that makes it seem like I�m not hiding anything. But it actually takes a long long time spent with me for the real things to get revealed. I am a very careful guarded person masquerading as a fast-talking buffoon. (A philosopher?) But maybe that�s how everyone is, and I am only experiencing my situation as somehow worth spending my time thinking about (are you still awake?) because I am the only person in this skin. Every human being is a bag of secrets and odd sources of shame and barely decipherable insecurities. (Or, as I wrote in a recent article, �a human being is a sack of baggage and vulnerability and exposure to wounding wed to a capacity to inflict baggage and wounding on others. Every human being is that human being.�)
Anyway, here�s a symptom: when it comes to music, I am sometimes pathologically unable to make the choice to play music when others are around. Or when I�m at someone�s house and he or she wants me to choose the music, I am paralysed, on occasion. Not always. It�s a curious thing. Anyway, when I am paralysed, why am I paralysed? Here is what I�ve come up with: 1) it reveals something about me, what I choose. And maybe what it reveals will be all wrong? (That�s the coward in me.) 2) Or maybe what it reveals will be too revealing and I�ll be stuck there, a bare open wound who has to translate herself to the outside world? (That�s the overly private emotional retard in me.) 3) Or maybe I will have chosen something that will be, unbeknownst to me, painful or, on the other side of the coin, annoying or terrible, in the eyes/ears/mind of the person who asked me to do the choosing! (That�s the part of me who THINKS WAY TOO MUCH TOO MUCH OF THE TIME! And who doesn�t want other people to have to listen to music they do not want to hear. Or perhaps it�s the part of me who in her subconscious mind worries that way deep down in everyone I know there is a person who does not want me around, and picking the wrong music will bring to the surface their latent loathing of me. (Oh, so sad so silly so pathetic! Even funny! Socrates wants me to examine my life, but he also thinks that reason, by which he means logic and rationality, will solve every problem. Clearly he is wrong about that. A smart guy, that Socrates, but a bit of a dumbshit at the same time. Like the rest of us.))
(Digression: I was once watching the Drew Carey show. Yes, really. And Drew Carey was asking the female person on the show who isn�t the one who wears all the makeup, he was asking her something about his life, what she thought about some sad dumb thing he had done, how she would describe this thing he had done, and in response to his question she said, �I don�t know. Is patheti-sad a word?� Ha. Later in the show she asked him something about her life, and he�s all. �I don�t know. Is sarcasti-bitch a word?�)
It�s good to keep things to yourself. Not only for your own sanity, but because the larger world is so filled with instances of bad judgment and compromise and terrible taste and depressing lack of openness to new things that she who waits for the approval of others will eleanor rigby herself to the grave without having done anything worth doing. But none of us live in a vacuum, and our lives are impacted by all kinds of other people for better and worse. What makes it possible for movie or music �intimacy� to be painful or discomforting is the same thing that makes it possible for human beings to become attached to each other: the openness to wounding. That�s why I don�t want to be a coward.
This is something else brought home by Before Sunset: we don�t live in a vacuum and our free will is only so effective in determining the path or our lives. Choices made by others and ourselves come up against the stubbornness of fate and the rest of the world with regard to what we want, and all of a sudden we find ourselves where we are not knowing how the fuck we got here. Against all that uncertainty we can eke out little islands of security in the form of relationships with others who help to keep us happy, safe, and protected or distanced from the leveling treacherous public world. That�s why I don�t want to be a coward. The fact that so many people aren�t to be trusted and that has to be learned the hard way is why I sometimes am a coward. And letting one�s life be enriched and defined by others means that one is vulnerable to loss and the like. The safety we get when we open our lives to others is itself a form of risk. But I�m the eternal optimist for reasons that are unclear to me. Born lucky, or deluded, depending on whom you ask. And so I say, quoting Levinas quoting Socrates: life is really lived well only when lived �as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.�
12:06 p.m. - August 21, 2004
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