An Anchor for the Artistic Soul.

““Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

Ludwig van Beethoven

I’ve always had this theory; that while it is common and heard of to hear that life exists in “seasons” and “times” constituting the “ups” and “downs” and the plateauing in there somewhere, my experience of all those things has always been solely punctuated by huge paradigm shifts. By paradigm, I mean, almost super specifically, a huge and palpable adjustment in my internal pattern of existence and perceptions on life and reality. Sometimes, at the end or start of these “seasons” I feel like a completely new thing; like it’s the same programming and mission encoded in this unchanging vessel known to others as myself, but the sleeve of my consciousness is always replaced or morphed into this new astral existence, with a completely unrecognizable aura.

If you could register the signatures, from before and then after was a very distinct difference. I could always feel it vibrate through me; through the constitution of water and bones, that a change was coming. I didn’t know how that change would occur, or when it would, but that it would and an evolution of the understanding of myself and that around me would be radically changed.

Some shifts group together to a common intention I can decipher in hindsight. Others are as sporadic as they still seem when put against my own understanding gained from the unfolding of my life and coupled with my passions and desires regarding the direction my life is to take, or is taking.

Others are most memorable for the dissonance caused from a collision with the reality already in existence, or for their everlasting ramifications tied to my story and the perception others have of who they think I am. I have woken up sometimes and moved my pen differently into a new handwriting. I have woken up and friendships have ended for no known reason. I have put aside particular wardrobe styles and stocked up on apparel that exhibit another. Other times, I feel my discernment of myself has altered; like an explorer following a compass south that then suddenly points north. Those inconsistencies have always left life feeling genuinely interesting for me sometimes, to lacking any and all control of my burgeoning to just uncertain of the next step.

Resultantly so much of my perceptions of myself and myself in relation to others are fraught with a whole wide range of feeling and emotion in constant roller coaster motion. It’s just how I’ve always known life to be. It is my definition of life and what goes on inside my head- an unimaginable never-ending plethora of probability.

The only reason, I can most assuredly say I am sane and not outright mental therefore is because ever since I acknowledged my living and breathing consciousness, I have been like this. Always streaming buckets of emotions from multiple possibilities in a single moment like they had happened even before reality determined which thing was to be. Because of this, housing neighboring emotion from those around me in the multitude of them within their circumstances.

Life has always been much. Life is a lot that way and I was built to handle it, to enjoy it, to grow from it, to suffer so beautifully in it; I don’t know how I’d live in any other life because I wouldn’t want to. This place is where I found my creativity and have dwelt ever since. The spirituality of this blessed load gave me the voice to sing back to the feeling, what it dictated to me, what it allowed me to see. Without it, can I even make art? But more importantly, why even make art without that heavy and anchoring conviction and depth? I haven’t found a way for myself to make sense of it outside all I have explained.

In it’s known history, through the ages and eras of prehistoric, ancient and biblical music to Western art music with the maestros: the Handels, Hadyns and Mozarts, all the way to popular music today created by what we know to be the music industry, here I am trying to balance the duty to myself in making what I believe to be art, but facing the reality that it may be that my art doesn’t have that wide appeal conditioned by the music industry in most of the audiences I would like to permeate and have appreciate my music.

The Greeks believed there were nine muses, who  in Greek mythology were goddesses of the arts and sciences, and were daughters of Zeus, the king of the gods, and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They were they that bestowed upon man the ability to create, understand and enjoy art and literature. I like this idea of the origin of artistic creativity and inspiration because it always felt like that- bestowed.

Music is considered to be a cultural universal; common to all human cultures worldwide. There’s something “other” about art. Call it spiritual or whatever. It is the sound and echoing of a mind, of a spirit, of an intention. Plato said, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” I really believe that from my own experience with it. There’s a reason you find music at the churches and as well in the shrines, at the celebrations and as well at the funerals. Something of greater magnitude is conveyed by the arts and especially the art form music. I think it is something we all know, but are not deliberate enough to understand.

I have grown tired of the “us against them” banter therefore. I feel its more accurate to state it as “you against yourself”. Only you can make a way for you. I am obsessed with the Bronte sisters because of this. They are a great example of this. In a culture where women couldn’t write because it was culturally and sociologically taboo for them to air or even have an opinion, or even have the ability to regale and teach in social commentary with literature, these sisters knew what they create would carry itself through the world to those that would listen and appreciate it because it was true. Truth is hardening and that’s why it’s so powerful. Like a mirror, you either hate what you see or learn to love it and both routes hold so much transformative power for better or for worse, and these sisters understood this. From their childhood, writing poems and plays for their own enjoyment, nothing about that creativity changed due to their circumstance (all unmarried parsons daughters) and their gender as women. They wrote their books under aliases, because it did not matter if the world knew them, only that their truth was told. Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights , a book that still speaks today, and died even before she could know that it had been so well received it was a sensation, and especially for how candid and crude it was in comparison to what was read in respectable society at the time. 300 years later, it’s a book on my shelf that I regularly pull out to peruse and that teaches me something. It is probably the only thing that I need to know.

So in most senses yes, there are so many issues with how the music industry crushes and bottle necks the passage to appreciation with the resources available to them and not the destitute independent indie artists. But in some ways it is a moot argument, because we can always decide to just keep consistent and at it and still make something happen for us, biggest case in point are the like of Chance the Rapper (who was the first artist I think to win at the Grammys with 3 with a streaming-only album that had also peaked number 8 on the Billboard 200) and super exposed and quite frankly famous independent artists like Frank Ocean and like you know the awesomeness that preceded the freakin’ artist that Frank Ocean is. (Gosh he is so talented).

Then what about the consistent independents that have nothing giving, yet they are constantly giving their time, every ounce of passion and dedication and financial resource towards that “big break”? Is it fair that they don’t get the attention because of the divergence of their sound and art form from what we know as popular music? I bitched about this for as long as I have understood what the greater western music industry is and how it mechanizes this control of everything musical across continents. Bitching might inspire you to make some change, for example, start a blog about my own journey for whoever might be encouraged from what I have learned to make whatever decision they feel they need to regarding their own artistic journey. But the truth is, even as I have slaved away at putting this entry together, the big three are still the big three and there you are trying to figure stuff out.

I think it comes down to who you are. It is who you are and what you want that drives you towards certain things. Whatever path you take, across it, you eventually ask, are your efforts a solution for yourself and your art? Is a major label the solution you’re looking for? Have you really considered what your solution may be?

I am someone constantly, constantly thinking about stuff like this because I am a linear thinker. I have made projects without a concrete plan before and the pain of feeling “not-heard” or “appreciated” is real. I have made others expecting very little feedback and attention and been overwhelmed into a corner of stagnancy, unsure and uncertain of what my next move is. The lesson I have learnt is the best preparation I can make, as specifically to who I am is the duty I have to myself, to make the truest and most honest art. Even before the person that is intended to hear it, I make it so that I am happy with it. I prepare to the best of my ability for all the feedback in the world encouraging and discouraging me about the direction I have taken and sometimes I leave a room feeling so “little”. Imposter syndrome is a neighbor always knocking at my door. Sometimes I let her in and let her stay, when I shouldn’t have opened the door at all, and months go by steeped in self-pity and a shriveling esteem about my art, and its production and its substance.

I have found the anchor for my soul concerning my art is the blessed spiritual experience of its creation. I believe it achieves its purpose when I sing it out loud, alone in my room or to a small group of people or in a video on YouTube. It is myopic of me to deem its sole and greatest purpose to be only achieved before undulating and adorning masses of people at a stadium or validated through hundreds and thousands of views on social media. All that stuff is useful and awesome and beautiful and vindicating, but it’s not the only reason art is made, or no other art would be made. Yet it is still useful to make it.

I will forever sing the song that art is an expression of the human. You create what is unique to you as a person and as a human, you tell what you see through your eyes. I have to help the human to help the art. I have to work at being mentally and physically healthy to be true and dispense the whole duty to myself to make true and honest art. I realize the times I am healthier, I am doing more creatively and being so satisfied in it that a lot that would suffocate that enjoyment is restrained, because it is put in its place.

This is the anchor I hold to as I set out into a world of standard and condition and opinions. I believe it isn’t about the record labels, or exposure and following, or money and glam of being a “successful artist”.

That isn’t the end. I believe they are just means to an end. And as many and individuated as are the number of humans on this planet, are as many as the possibilities to create different means to the end of success as an artist, whatever you definition is.