Tim's Meander: March 2007

I've gotten into the practice of waking up and spilling my thoughts into a journal first thing in the morning. Its been a great way to vent the garbage out of my thoughts and has resulted in a clearing of my mind. All habits take time to establish, but this one has shown some great results in a very short amount of time. I had always thought of journalling as something that would be like a composition that I would sell some day. Not this gibberish. Its as if I'm skimming the floaties off my mind so I can get some real thinking done. Of course, there's always the danger that the real thinking is just left over floaties.. but I figure there's less chance of this using this process.

A big factor in this process is the silence that comes along with it. If you sit in silence, you'll find it really isn't silent at all. You start hearing voices and melodies, and concepts and ideas.. Ok.. not really.. I mean not really sounds.. but the thoughts that I associate with sounds and concepts and ideas and melodies.. You start thinking about what you haven't accomplished, or the things you should do. You might think about people you hurt and never apologized to. You think about the things that you would rather drown out with an episode of David Letterman. Trouble is, when you do, they don't go away. They just wait there, waiting for their time to be heard.. and when they are heard, they're even louder, the longer they have been waiting. Writing them down is a way of disarming them, or at least, greatly reducing their volume, and therefore the negative affect they have on my mood and attitude towards life. It also reminds me that there are some issues that need to be dealt with in order that they may be silenced once and for all.

It occurs to me that silence is the ultimate creator, as well. It is from the silence that my best work comes from. I just write it down. Not to say I don't write down floatie melodies and prose from time to time, and many times there are things that I write down that are intellectually derived, using my logic and stored information. Melodies, for instance can be engineered based on chords that I know go together from my vast (yeah, right) knowledge of theory.. but is that creation?

Puzzles

I don't think I've ever created a thing. I've put puzzles together. I've done mathematical equations in engineering to deduct solutions from a given set of constraints or raw material specifications, but creating? That's something that no one can claim. Even the mechanical designs I have assembled in the past contain coincidences in nature, where inertia and gravity and mass all came together and by increasing one while decreasing some of the others, or by combining them together to multiply their effect, a perfect 'design' was accomplished. OK.. not perfect. In any case, after working many designs, there is a humility that becomes to show itself, knowing that I'm not creating, but solving equations, or assembly natural puzzles.

The pieces are out there. In songwriting, for instance, there are 12 notes. Maybe I paste togehter a sequence that no one has heard (or remembers hearing) before, but the notes were always there. Lyrics are the same, right? I guess you can make up words, but for the most part they can all be found typed in a book on your shelf. Even new words depend on existing or similar mental concepts or pictures to paint their definitions. Combining letters into words is only creation in a sense that you combine letters to identify something that already exists. New metaphors are just an assembly of knowledge and culture and existing words, combined to tickle someone's brain. and although we may create a wrinkle that wasn't there before, it isn't really truly creating.

Creation

I'm a theist, and I believe there is a creator. As such I believe that there was time there were no things, as we know them, or at least in this dimension in which we exist. There was a time of creation, I believe, and we as part of creation are gifted specially to appreciate and act on that nature like no other species we know. I don't flaunt our superiority over other species, but I challenge another species to create a new metaphor. Its just the way things are.

It was hard for me to come to the realization that I cannot create something, and it took a lot of years to grow comfortable with that. I would much rather claim the credit and bask in the laurels (when and if I create something that deserves laurels) that come along with it. But being rewarded for things that don't deserve rewards, just result, at least for me, in more of those crappy voices you hear in the silence.

I think one of the best places to hear creation is in the silence. Once I've skimmed the floaties and listen, I hear things that I haven't seen combined before. Every once in awhile something comes out that is universal, true, and significant. I believe the silence is where you can hear the voice of the creator, and I believe He has something to say to each of us. Something we're supposed to share with others. Something, that perhaps, we are especially prepared to hear and to recite to our fellow man, even to the point of saying that we may be the only vehicle to carry the message. Yes. It could be a big deal!

On Sunday, I sat down to write a stream of consciousness onto the page, but decided to wait for something that makes sense. I started, after about 15 minutes, to jot down what I was 'hearing'. In a matter of minutes I jotted down this lyric and went down to my studio and recorded the melody and piano part that I heard.

This is the result:

In The Silence

Peace,

Tim