a scuba diver - Monday Morning Memo

A SCUBA DIVER:
In the November 7th, 2022, MondayMorningMemo titled
“Three Ways to Look at Water,” you learned that “Life is a journey on water. Your conscious mind is above the waterline. Your unconscious is beneath. That weightless, magical world below the waterline is fundamentally different from the world of facts, figures and logic that hovers above it. The arts are an invigorating plunge into the unconscious, that part of your mind that understands the languages of color, shape, proximity, radiance, shadow, silhouette, pitch, key, tempo, interval, contour, rhythm, and frame-line magnetism. Our relationship to the unconscious is like our relationship to water. We need it by the cupful to survive, but if you stay underwater too long, you will drown; a psychotic break.”

The arts speak to the unguarded unconscious, making them powerful tools in the hands of a skillful storyteller. The key to leveraging the power of the arts is to use them consciously, rather than unconsciously. In other words, take the air of logic from the world above when you plan to spend time in the deep. Learn to scuba.

“I write backward — I write the music first and then I write the words. Most people write the words first and then they write the music. Keith Richards was explaining his method of songwriting. He calls it ‘vowel movement.’ They come up with a riff, and it’s like sounds, and whatever sound . . . like ‘start me up’ — ‘up’ works because it has a consonant at the end of it, but if you go ‘take me home,’ it wouldn’t have worked. I kind of subscribe to that. It has to sound right sometimes even more than being a poetic lyric. It’s a struggle to fit words onto music, and I want it to be really, really good, so I take a long time. I love having written, but I hate writing.”

- Billy Joel, to Andrew Goldman in The New York Times, May 24, 2013