Romancing the Muse

How Chaos Becomes Beauty - an Exploration through Music and Poetry

Love opens us to the ecstatic pain of yearning. 
Merge with its cavernous invitation. Become it, 
become this bliss. You are not separate from your wanting.
Do you feel it?

I sat at the piano this afternoon, after I don't know how many years, noticing everything had always been so… technical. I was denied the process, alchemical, My natural urge to connect with the music, suppressed by teachers who cared only about scales and arpeggios. Young and fragile, how was I to know a world existed outside of this chamber of echoes?

Now, I press my fingers to the piano, and sound permeates me. Is this it? Is this the feeling? Which note next? Where does the music lead me? What makes me quake? The tiny bones vibrating in my ear cavities begging, pleading, to feel just the right thing. 

Though it can be, music is not purely mathematical. Feeling is more than numbers. Sometimes it doesn’t add up, and that’s the correct answer. 

Music comes through me. My teacher is poetry. I feel the scales in my bones, my fingers, my soul. “Let me express!” my body begs. Later, I’ll practice. For now, let me feel this. The technical fixation kills the muse’s ache - her heart bursting open, weeping. She needs to indulge the romance of curiosity. The heartbeat of creativity. Sometimes, the best technique is fumbling through the confusion of newness. 

The body knows before the mind does, anyway. What is a chord but an organization of feeling? Organization. I’ve always reverse engineered the process. That is my way. The muse’s way. It is not the way of this concrete world we live in with its linear paths and perfect roadmaps. Oh, if only I could dissolve into the sea of my yearning completely. Forget to eat or sleep or drink and become more alive by tending only to my heart’s ache to love more fully. With every breath I take, in every moment. The deepest pain lies in denying it is always there, pulsing. 

To understand, I must create. It is dangerous, this process. To open window after window into the soul and brush up against everything I am not supposed to know.; that knowing exists only in a moment of experience. For all the chords and arpeggios I could collect, what would they mean if I could not feel the dissonance, the tension, the connection. 

What would art mean if it did not come from the feeling in my heart? What would be the purpose of lines and shapes and letters strung together, if not to express my innermost yearnings?

A merging of chaos and order creates the most beautiful things. Once I know the feeling, I can organize it. Organization is confusing without purpose. Twists me upside down and inside out and I am left searching. Why this pain? Why is my heart breaking?

I’m blessed with a lover who holds all of me. My fiery body keeps him alive, he tells me. His aliveness keeps me yearning. This is our romance, our tension, our music, our balance. I feel chords of dissonance and diminishment and brokenness. But there is wholeness in that. There is space with him, to play my notes in their imperfect arrangements. To feel the darkness rising through what I thought to be major imperfections. In fact, they were symphonies composed in minor keys.  

I am not classically trained in anything. I am raw and unfinished like the songs I sing, Human. Seeking always, for what? Whatever love feels like today. Whatever makes me weep or scream or dig deeper into the flesh of this body. Whatever makes me want to kiss him. Whatever bursts my seams open to the ecstasy of loving without reason. 

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God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
	Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your notes be clear.
Don’t try to end it
Be your note
I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!
Sing loud!

from Rumi's 'Each Note'