On Music, Creativity, and the Dark Side

I have been absent from these pages for a while.  Every writer has those times when retreat is essential, when it is required not only for your individual creative process, but for your heart.  Pretty much always for your heart.  Writing, creativity, invention, bringing something new out of nothing - these can be exhausting, and in times such as ours, perhaps even more so.  

I have found myself, lately, thinking a great deal about music.  I have no musical talent whatsoever.  Though I can (badly) play an instrument or two, I have no singing voice, and no talent for composition, but I do have a remarkable capacity for appreciation and immersion.  I began to notice, to the point where it overrode my attention on story, how much a musical score

either adds to or detracts from a story in film and television.  I began to think on the relationships I’ve had with music as various pieces I wrote were in progress - sometimes a single song, played over and over as I worked.  (The two most frequent? - Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 21 and the Beatles “Paperback Writer.”)   Other times, a playlist that simply must play as I work.  Other times, working in complete silence and then desperately needing music when I’m done.

There has been a great deal of research about the positive influence of music on learning and creativity, while, at the same time, a great many works on the influence of depression (and all negative emotions) on the creative process.  Both seem to induce (or, at minimum, help to evoke) a torrent of creativity.  

Music and darkness - an improbably pair, but one that speaks to something that every writer, every artist, every person intent on creative arts, should attend to.  We have a tendency in our culture to focus on “the bright side,”  on “positive thinking,” on all things on the side of light.  Without darkness, though, light becomes static, meaningless. It is not a cliche to suggest that we need a balance.  The artist, just like the average human being, needs the dark balancing the light, needs to see it, embrace it, hear its music.  

I find that my “down times” in writing are not really down, at all.  They are a battle.   They are me, finding a way to demolish the social inhibitions that restrain me from looking at, seeing, entering into the dark in order to embrace it.  Some time back, I wrote about three decisions that a writer needs to make, the last (and most important in my mind) being to decide “What kind of writer do I want to be?”

If I want to be a writer - and I do - who writes the truth, then I have to acknowledge that truth is sometimes dark, sometimes painful, sometimes a part of the light. That sounds a bit trite, I know - we need both the darkness and the light.  But it is more complex than that. The darkness we avoid, that we swear to fight, is often actually IN the light.  It is a contradiction, a paradox, and an absolute necessity.

Darkness weaves through a sunny Sunday afternoon, through the spirit of the kindest person we know, through the best of intentions and the most charitable of actions.  It is not just a balance, not just an opposition, it is part and parcel of all of us, of every day we live, of everything we touch.  And to be truly capable of truth, we need to turn, look at it, truly see it, and then embrace it as a part of everything - an essential part.

Listen to music, hear it, and pay attention.