♫♫The Sound Of Silence

The thing about music is once you have it in you, it’s yours forever.  No other art form burrows so deep inside your heart and your head like music.  You feel it. You crave it.  It creates sensations inside.  It makes you leap to your feet or can place you gently into a chair.  It makes you grimace, it makes you smile, it makes you laugh out loud.

It resurrects memories and sights and smells and tastes.  You see colors.  It reunites you with loved ones– or vice versa, the living and the dead.  It blurs the constraints of time or alters them completely.  Suddenly you’re twenty-five year old son or daughter is two again or you yourself are nineteen.  Music is the most powerful art form.

It’s not like a movie, or book or theater.  You can play whole songs in your head; your intimate, personal, private soundtrack  anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It’s portable.  No batteries required.  No equipment necessary.  It is all yours.  No one’s inner audio library is exactly like anyone else’s. No one may judge the sounds in your soul.

You can feel it by yourself or you can feel it in a group.  It can envelope you in melancholy and with the next cut, ecstasy. And the emotional explosion of excitement you experience when just one person relates to your inner sea. Music makes you feel good and makes feeling bad even better.

People fear death because they can feel just how much they’ll miss their music. Like a premonition– A foreboding.  Music is the moon that swells the tide of your being.  Music is your soul and your soul is you. What would it be like when music is turned off? It’s the SILENCE we’re all so afraid of.

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone

‘Neath the halo of a street lamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night

And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools”, said I, “You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you”

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

And echoed

In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls”

And whispered in the sounds of silence

♫ Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone

‘Neath the halo of a street lamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night

And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools”, said I, “You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you”

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

And echoed

In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls”

And whispered in the sounds of silence ♫

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫…

Soul, Sound/Fury, Soul

Hey, don’t you know I’m human
I have thoughts like any other one
Sometimes I find myself alone and regretting
Some foolish thing, some little simple thing I’ve done

I’m just a soul whose intensions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

I understand why artists go crazy or do terrible things to themselves like abuse drugs and alcohol or commit suicide, or succumb to mental and emotional disease. To possess a voice, a fiery passion burning in your bones, eating through your mind like a cancer with no outlet for expression or feedback is torment.

To know you are different and have everybody know it as well, only they don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing.  To always, always find yourself surrounded by people and not know anyone at all. To desire to be heard, but you sound like an alien so people ostracize you, exclude you or worse, utterly ignore you,  but never without first humiliating you. Passive aggression to the nth degree because the world says you have to be different, just like everybody else.

100 years ago, I was watching American Bandstand. It was Prince’s television debut performance. I recall him saying he didn’t care if anyone liked his music. As the years and several of his incarnations have borne out, however, nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t care if people don’t like us. We care that people like what we produce, whether it be music, or the dance, or acting or thoughts we labor to memorialize in writing. We want people to see, to read, to feel, to know, to care about what we experience. Validate our I Am. Acknowledge we were. Value the produce of our living soul.

“The soul… itself shall die.” Eze 18:4, 20

“…and God proceeded to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul.”
Gen 2:7

Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath , Georgia O’Keefe, Judy Garland, David Foster Wallace, Spalding Gray, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollack, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Donny Hathaway, Marilyn Monroe, Phyllis Hyman, Kurt Cobain, Willy Loman, Amy Winehouse (at least,not yet)… Tortured.  Tormented.  Once living, now departed. Souls.

Just a thimble full of the blood of the lucky ones. Everybody knows their names. Their roads may have been torturous, but they were heard (Some, sadly though, not in their lifetimes) and we remember. How come that wasn’t enough?

Unlike latter day “artists,”  people who announce on national television that their goal is to be “an icon,” who produce and then churn out formulaic, shrill, hollow noises celebrated as music, manic gyrations characterized as dance or excrement (animal and otherwise) that masquerades as artwork, these men and women, these Artists,  were literally publishing their souls. Every word was agony to produce. Every sound like the moon’s influence on the tide.

They were not interested in celebrity. These men–  these women–  habitually raped their own psyches and dared to peer into cramped crevices of their own minds and hearts to reveal inconvenient, universal, often incontrovertible truths  hoping only for some intellectual reciprocity but never really having any. Everybody looks and listens but no one seems able to share.

The Artist seems always to be alone inside their head wishing they had someone to talk to. Sometimes being your own best friend is enough. Many times keeping one’s own counsel is unhealthy and unwise. That’s the price exacted for needing to understand and be understood. The Artist cannot subjugate one for the sake of the other. That’s why these voices are timeless, why these voices still resonate like a boom when you think about the words and music rendered mute by death in graves.

Maybe that’s why the Artist is never an example in books about highly effective people with useful habits. The Artist doesn’t revere Oprah or Dr. Phil. The Artist doesn’t necessarily find joy and fulfillment in weekly group meetings although many  have tried and more than once.

The Artist always depend upon the kindness of strangers, may consume mass quantities of drugs or alcohol. Some attempt to explain and excuse these lapses in judgement and struggles with self-control by repeatedly uttering clichés about needing to dull the pain when what they really want is to understand, be understood and not be misunderstood. It’s an all consuming desire.

Mean People know how to spot the “weakness,” the gangrenous wound of acceptance and approval and then pour salt in it. That’s their talent.  That’s their gift to the world. Mean People believe they have souls, but Artists are Souls, dead or alive. Our soul–  our life is  present in everything we do.

That may be why we think about life and death a lot and we realize… Death is highly underrated. Just as life is the beginning, death is just the end. Sandwiched in between the crispy, cookie crust is the creamy nugget center called living.  All good things (and even all not-so-good things) must come to an end, right?

The Soul, living, breathing, is not some ethereal, mystical entity that detaches from you and lives on. You are the Soul.  The Soul is you. You and your soul are one. Alive, it’s kickin’. Dead, it’s done. It’s what we leave behind that lives on for as long as there exists someone who’ll remember,  and values that your living soul produced.

Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath , Georgia O’Keefe, Judy Garland, David Foster Wallace, Spalding Gray, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollack, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Donny Hathaway, Marilyn Monroe, Phyllis Hyman, Kurt Cobain, Willy Loman, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, Michel Mercer, Betty Davis, Ray Charles, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X—  “A name is better than good oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s being born.” Ec 7:1

Death of a Salesman

HYMAN

MARILYN

VAN GOGH

O'KEEFE

PLATH

HEMMINGWAY

GRAY

POE

HOLIDAY

FITZGERALD

POLLOCK

JUDY

COBAIN

WINEHOUSE

WOOLF

HATHAWAY

LEDGER

WALLACE

I’m just a soul whose intensions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

Seals & Crofts | We May Never Pass This Way Again | 1973

Place Of Skulls | Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood | Benjamin – Marcus – Caldwell / Originally recorded by The Animals | 1965