The human moratorium; sedation by uninspiration.

Beauty. Sight. Its subject. The object.
The best and most beautiful things in life are too far and too extricated from us; so intangible, so transient, so ethereal, they are known because they are felt and only felt because of the consequence of their beauty- the glorious, numinous state of an impermanent human prosperity.

Yet they are also all around us, so ready to affect us entirely; so near and yet so far.
You feel the beauty. You see what causes it. You long for more than to merely and simply know of its existence. You would long to be as beautiful as it is or long for the experience of such beauty to never leave you in the way you would guarantee that it never would whatever it is that you would do, creating a looping reocurrence that would ensure a most achievable permanance of its influence upon you. You either decided to record the whole Jon Foreman performance, or you didn’t record it at all.

The telling of such a tale would be strewn with all form of presumptous affectation as it would be the attempted best of an articulation; a translation of perception; the relationship interposed between the subject stricken with feeling and the object- the causation of their never ending song of praise. I’m talking about every single love song you have ever heard. You can’t believe your ears one moment and then the next, you’re writing something even more aggravating, and singing it at the top of your lungs to your intended.

All this while your contribution to the world in that instance being the reinforcement of the mush in the already mushed brains of all the love stricken folk. Naa. When you see beauty and experience it, you flip out and its totally justified. Let the judging spectators be accursed, for their ignorance to you, is indeed damnable in that moment and experience.

You see, to you as the subject so sincerely stricken with such consequence of feeling, it would be truth. Thus the inevitable identification of the object of whatever name called, by the ardently subjective, internally constraining and insufficient description and of itself in the single adjective-beautiful.

The things we experience beauty from exist so outside us, weaving their way into our inner mechanisms in such an unknown way it is so foreign, so special and unique universally and specifically to each and every individual. It’s so unnormal.
It is as though too close and likened to us, they would dissipate into an emotional dilution of familiarity so condescending to the object and fact of their existence, their essence would be irretrievably lost. So their nature is determined inside us with the effect of their beauty forcefully descending upon the centers and depths of us. They are the things outside us that shake our inner constructions. They teach us and gift us the feelings that come from the sight and experience of beauty and so we call them beautiful.

Their nature in its irrevocable abundance is directly sustained and identifiable only because of the liberation they demand in order to be, what in permanence they factually are- beautiful. They must be singularly and separately asserted, like a sculpture raised, given lights and center stage, as if even before it allowed you to observe, it declared, “I am apart from the normalcy of you.”

Beauty. Knowledge. Perception. Inspiration.
I believe inspiration comes from the perception of beauty therefore, and the ability to perceive from knowledge.

I don’t know how and why we find the things that we deem beautiful so, but I know from whatever those things may be for, whatever other reason, beauty inspires the human and orders his steps and existence somehow and somewhere. All our senses detect, decipher, deduce and confirm why there indeed exists an allure to a beautiful thing; we will see it, hear it, but the effect is internal. It is felt with the heart as I have already said but also processed with the mind in such a succinct synchronization.

Facts build knowledge, knowledge belief and belief conviction; convictions that would make the Archean war for Helen of Troy plausible and even probable however mythological the story would seem. The inspiration from the knowledge, experience and appreciation of beauty creates this story and so many more.

Beauty. Inspiration. Creation. Communication.
This is because when inspired, we create. We create to express. We express to communicate. Communication is a way of being for humanity. There are necessities satisfied for us to live healthy human lives in the irrevocable knowledge that something is being said and someone else hears and understands it. We would therefore seek beauty for the gift of its expression to others. We would seek inspiration from it in nature and solitude to make the next album amidst the possibility that you could feel and want to say and in fact say, but not be heard or even understood, let alone have what you’ve said appreciated.

Beauty. Knowledge. Heart. Strength.
I watched a series the other day and it dawned on me that the existence of what is known and said to be beautiful, or even what you would find beautiful coupled with the inspiration from it, doesn’t necessarily lead up to all the aforementioned. Beauty and the experience of it could be the most uninspiring thing.

You would numb everything that would allow it to affect you and in its presence you would remain unmoved, your heart hardened into denying its nature and yourself, your abilities because it struck you too hard, too much.

While there is beauty and hope, there are the hideous realities of life. Where there is light there is darkness; there’s light so bright it will burn your eyes through your skull and through the same crevice, darkness so tangible you will inhale and choke.
It takes such courage to see both the light and dark and allow their complete and simultaneous effect within you. That’s too much feeling. Its overwhelming to see all the variables that could exist and because they could, in most ways they do. So much to dig into and think about, internalize, understand and express at the same time, like a computer the foreseeable inevitability is a crash. The sky is either more blue to you, more grey or pitch black. To see the sky as all and even more and accept it is honestly stuff of the gods. It requires a rare form of internal fortification. You’d feel the hope of the blue sky, the foreboding and presentiment of the grey and the terrifying loneliness in the pitch black at once in their intensities. Too much knowledge to intake to explain it all, not enough time space and opportunity to do so and mostly not enough strength to get through it all.

There’s a beauty we will learn to see in everything and in other ways there is the ghastly deviance that will show too because humans are a death and life binary- in us we carry both. We are both. Carrying that weight in us is heavy and naturally takes it toll, especially the deeper and more frequently we have these centers affected in us to shape what we will decide is truth to us. That way truth  becomes relative and beauty as one of its influencers, derivatively is conclusively subjective. In the end our convictions are shaped as the pendulum swings and its tendency is determined either towards death or life. It’s like a light shining so bright as the voltage and surge of electricity within it increased and increased until it burst because it could not contain itself. Too much feeling. Too much beauty. Too much work.

Beauty. Obsolescence. Despair. More despair.
Something understood and imagined to be beautiful can therefore be symbolic and enforcing of the death in us; maybe because in such despair we want to long for life, but we know death will manifest in us too because we are human; or we have given up so severely because we tend towards death, beauty and hope is something so foreign to us. Most of the time we are afraid of the things that are good for us because the disappointments are more certain than the longevity of the bliss we would want. Its easier to destroy it all; at least in that way you are in control. Better that, than the carpet being yanked from under your feet yet again and you bashing the back of your head, yet again on the cold hard floor. We are tired, weary and expectant of the “yet agains.” We don’t want to be naïve. If we can’t fortify, our subconscious will defend itself.

The new way to be human will therefore become not to thrive, but survive. To operate sedated through everything. To exert a moratorium on what would push its way into the conscious realities of life. It’s too painful not to pretend. We are cowards, we know it and we don’t care because we tell ourselves we can’t. We place ourselves in the perpetuations of our self inflicted naivete, keeping our fake optimism intact. In fact like I’m doing right now, its cooler to know what’s wrong and take no action towards it; to know what the problem is but keep on euphemizing, making our demons our friends and getting comfortable with them, giving them nicknames, asserting our crumbling wills whenever they would seem to be too in control, and letting them have a go when we think it would be safe to do so. We will glorify the conundrum caused by our angst in how cool it is to be apathetic and unaffected by everything.

For most of us life becomes a spinning wheel of false highs and true lows. What’s the point of beauty then? Beauty is inconsequential. I can’t feel it and if I begin to, I won’t. We’ve stopped trying to defeat the demons that enslave us because we were always slain by them. We know that it doesn’t negate the fact that they can still be defeated, we are just so tired of failing. We are so tired of always making the wrong decisions; like that friend who isn’t really your friend but keeps buying your drinks and telling you to stay a little longer when you both know you have work early in the morning. So defeated. Not by the friend. By our inability to decide otherwise. It builds the guilt and shame and worst of all self loathing. That quickly becomes rock bottom. Our decision becomes not to decide; I don’t know what I am and so I don’t know what to do about whatever about me needs fixing.

The disease of uninspiration because we will not feel then becomes terminal. We will not experience the beauty. Because if we do we will experience the undesirable that contradictingly is there too. We don’t want to see how in seeking beauty our selfishness rears its ugly head, how fleeting our infatuations are- the beauty exposes us for what we truly are, despite what we would aspire to be- better. So much better.

We are beautiful, and in beauty we see that. But beauty is beautiful and we see how ugly we are in factual and objective internal comparison to it. We are uninspired despite so much beauty in the world because we will not feel. The longer you don’t feel, the more dangerous it feels to suddenly let in. So the cycle inevitably continues because we have “no choice”.

So we hate love songs and when we meet a nice guy, we kennat. When he proposes, we scatter. When it gets serious we don’t know what to do and when she owns up to her feeling it’s the most awkward it has ever been. We will not even see the beauty in the possibility of loving and being loved. Too much to remember, plus I don’t remember how to be a freakin’ feeling human.

Beauty. Heart. Him. Love.
I find love is the most beautiful thing I have ever known.
To love and be loved is beautiful and love makes that possible.
Love is beautiful.

This and all that you would find beautiful begins externally first and then within us eventually as reaction; there we are perceiving and then being smitten so precisely where we feel it the most. He sees you. He knows you. He brings the color to the scenes in the movie you call life.

Its so unapologetically what it is. It is not ashamed. It is bold and strong and convicted in its position. It is brave. It is forbearing. There’s nothing more beautiful to me than that in life. There’s nothing that will affect you more deeply that to love or not love, to give love, receive love or be denied it; even just to see and observe it. So I completely understand why I will initiate the moratorium; what if I am not as brave as I could and should be? What if I am not as selfless as I should be? The angst.

Yeah. I’ll write a bunch of songs for years with the same memo, “I’m not ready for love. I’m not ready to love. I can’t tell when to and I don’t know how.” I’ll tell myself, “All I can for now, is all I can for now.” I’ll write a couple of other songs justifying why love is something to stay away from, something you shouldn’t interact with entirely. You will call it the text book young adult experience. You will see it in movies and relate with the young adult characters in there. We are the new romantics building castles out of all the bricks they threw, with heart break as a national anthem so busy getting knocked off our feet. Yeah. That and more.

Then HIM; he’ll come along.

And he will show you, you are brave and strong enough to feel it all because you see that he can and in fact does. The beauty of love within him will slowly and unsuspectingly begin to creep up on you with your eyes wide open. The instinct will be to run. You won’t. For the first time in forever, you’ll want to stay and fight. So in the middle of the night you’ll get up and write a song about him, and it will have been the bravest you have ever been in months. And you didn’t burst like the bulb you thought would.
Then you can be an artist again.
Because you are human again.

You won’t need to perpetuate the sedation of uninspiration. You will end the moratorium.

Faced with the gift and beauty of love for him, it will influence your once hardened heart to threads of flesh once again woven into a beating heart and it will beat inspiration into every corner of yourself. All because you chose to feel again.

Beauty. HIM. Heart. Choice.