RE: MUSIC FOR WRITERS

Indeed you're so right, my friend @trucklife-family. I have recently discovered how music, surprisingly, classical music, which I didn't bother with before, moves me when combined with viewing either a painting or a photograph done well.

The weirdest part of it all is that my path to classical music came about my giving a listen to Jazz music especially Miles Davies, then i moved to Polyphia, especially their songs, GOAT, Aviator and Hour glass. And I discovered Polyphia through giving a listen to Snowy White's Midnight Blues. I realised I enjoyed riffs a lot. Now the last part of the path down this trail or rather the beginning, was a rap track by Meek Mill in which he made covering the aforementioned Midnight Blues.

So you see the movement of rap, to blues, to Guitar riffs, to Jazz and finally to Classical music. In the same vein, my poetry has grown deeper, more interior, more nature focused, more aloof, concerned with the grand existential questions, the philosophical story of the human life; the whys, the what, the how but never the who or the when. I am now very concern with the impermanence of our sojourn here.

Is this a spiritual re-edification? Do I seek the divine in all things? I do not know but I know when I read poets like Rilke, philosophers like Maritain, view Japanese art, listen to classical music, I feel my soul extend itself towards something real. I feel the need to go outside and dance nude in the mud, become completely soul. Do you understand?

In my writing, by this I mean my poetry, I make reference to drug use and abuse, addiction, mental health issues and though these might seem a rough terrain to seek the muse from, I feel like the soul is not a calm ocean but a troubled, untamed force and it cares nothing for social etiquette and capitalism. It knows only the celebration of the beautiful, the ugly, the divine things of this world. By divine I do not necessarily mean God in the religious sense but the things, the feelings, the conscious movements that transcend the optics of nature. I speak of the illusory world, the inner world which I believe as a poet, I must interprete.

What music does for me is creating the elevation on which I can safely stand and bare myself to this inner world. It is like going down a dark, dank hallway towards something primordial. It is a dangerous experience but if you overcome the fear of what you find, you will mine from the angels themselves, the beauty of their alleluia. This may be an overstatement, an exaggeration, hyperbole if you may but in the music, something enters me. Some thing that makes my body tingle.

Maritain considers poetry to be the art that is in every art, whether painting, architecture, music, theatre, etc. I agree that this world is movement on its hesitant first steps, every morning another octave in an eternal song. It is poetry that puts the rhythm to the song, that rhymes the tattered ends of the song but music is its flesh, the body that rises from sleep like seafoam and kisses the pebble on the beach, the palm tree root and sighs deep into sand. Do you understand?

📸: An old form of photography using plant based ink. I can't be bothered to find the name for it.