Saturday, August 26, 2017

Musings of a Guitarist : The silent canvas

Quiet, except for the rustle of the wind or the whir of the fan (depending on if I'm inside or out), there's a moment that arrives when I reach for the guitar and play something.
It doesn't have to be a song, it doesn't have to be a tune, it doesn't have to be anything in particular; In fact, the more unguided the playing, the more space I find for myself to fulfill.

A lot of the times I find myself following the same patterns, the same routes in between the strings. The tune is a familiar one, probably based off some song in the back of my head and then I swerve, jump and run along the road that builds organically from it. I come across various stop gaps that I realize (or imagine I realize) that other, more fortunate and famous, musicians had probably come across earlier to create their art. And I'd chuckle at how simple it looks from the vantage point of a mere runner along the road, yet how articulate the hand needed to lay down that same road.

But there are some, few, fleeting moments, that are different.
Like the one I mentioned before, when a quiet solitude descends on you and you can feel all alone by yourself.
Alone, but not unaware.
In fact, the more alone you are, the more aware you become. Small ticks in the cracks, a beep in the distance, the circulation of the air around you, your surroundings become a source of audio inspiration.
And then from someplace completely new yet familiar, you play something you have never heard before. Or at the very least, you play something that instills in you such a strong surge of emotion that it overwhelms any feeling of familiarity a more analytical mind may have had.
Any musician, any true musician, would understand what I'm talking about.
When the art that you have experienced with the science behind the skills required to create and mould the art enables you to come face to face with some sort of para-normal thing within you.

Nothing may come off it, some few who explore it and find the needed portal to bring it back into our corporeal world may get lucky and get to share it (or rape it and commercialize it), but just having that experience is akin to a minimal version of an epiphany.

The most frustrating of things for people who experience this is when they try to recreate such expeditions into the art, oft in presence of other company that they wish to share it with, and they find they have lost the secret key to that secret room.
You see, it likes it's privacy.

Almost none has it allowed to take a coterie into it with.

But I tell you now, from the heart of a man who has experienced it, the greatest sadness is when you actually do find the way and you find someone that you can share it with...and then they don't feel the same way at all.
Like an explorer on a grand voyage looking at the Aurora Borealis and all his companion can do is complain about the brightness or wish for a tubelight instead.

Of course, they have no obligation to feel the same way you do, but man, does it ever feel depressing.

There you are, with the your soul in hand, offering it to the person in front of you, and all she can see, is something less.