Now that I am finally in a more neutral emotional state, I was hoping to address our prolonged and most uncomfortable encounter last night. Lingering lucidly at the foot of my bed, eager to emerge and infiltrate my perfectly restful mind space, your intrusive and domineering presence, though powerful and provocative, was most incongruous with my bodies willful attempt at sleep.

During the long hours we spent tussling in bed together last night, I had copious amounts of time in which to ponder your existence and  evolutionary meaning. Somewhat akin to questions like ‘why DO mosquitos exist?’ or ‘is there really a need for an electric kiwi skinner?’, I was struck in my inquiry by the complete superfluity of your being. I hesitate to ask you to explain yourself, as I know full well that you would take that as an invitation to more permanently inhabit my unconscious life, but I am intrigued by the ‘non-essential’ that seems to form the very “essence” of your core.

Apologies if you have heard this before, but perhaps you missed the memorandum, or were simply away when it was announced by wikipedia (ha):  Sleeping- a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness, relatively suspended sensory activity, and inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles, is a heightened ‘anabolic state which is meant to accentuate the growth and re-juvination of the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. Thus! My dear amigo Insomnia, this period of complete rest is absolutely essential, ahem,  to the optimal functioning of a healthy individual!!

Though I don’t really mean to hurt your feelings- as ultimately you are a product of my own mind, and to insult you would essentially only be to insult myself, but contrary to your current understanding of things,  I really do not enjoy your incoherent conversations and loud banter circa 5:30 a.m, or your working out of anxieties as if they were highly amusing problem solving questions in the dead of the night. Lastly, and potentially most importantly, I definitely do not appreciate your inability to engage in meaningful discourse and instead completely obliterate any rational or logical argument regarding an appropriate time for your departure.

I do however hope, in future encounters- as I am sure you are already planning when next you’ll drop in, that we can adopt a more diplomatic approach with regards to the nature and purpose of your stay, and that perhaps we may also begin to be open and honest with ourselves in admitting and accepting that our chemistry in bed is just really not that great.

Yours truly,

El Braino

Often, the only difference between an idea that is suppressed and never realized, and a hugely successful product, is just a matter of perspective and a little bit of external encouragement. The pre-emptive suppression of an idea is largely based on an illusory fear of self-defined failure, whereas the latter is fundamentally based upon optimism and a strong vision of success.

The moment that one is able to shed the many offspring of fear (self-doubt, skepticism, negativity, etc) from mind,  the world opens up as a playground of opportunity: a vast space painted with infinite potential and laden with all of the essential resources to bring a good  idea to life. All that is required of this is a mere shift in perspective, a psychological metamorphosis of sorts, in which one becomes an open receptacle and is able to see the world and its objects as inspiration on which to muse and create.

Fundamental to this perspective is an embracement of the idea of “failure” as progress; of divergence in a well mapped-out course as being a source of positive continuity, and an acceptance of socially or self- defined “failure” as an integral component of every process. As Henry Ford once put it, “failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”. Without the existence of failure- as clothed in it’s usual guise, self-doubt and the fear of failure become totally obsolete, and subsequently we experience a totally un-selfconscious freedom with respect to experimentation and creation.

Lastly, in my musings this morning, I was also contemplating the derivation of ‘self-doubt’ and of pre-emptive fear in relation to individual aspirations. Very basically, I pondered the notion that we, as individuals, are often too scared to carry out our ideas simply because they pose a ‘difficulty’, or a challenge that we are not entirely sure we can surmount. Because of our inability to predict success- prediction ultimately saving us from the public or private embarrassment of potential ‘defeat’, we suppress the idea before it can even manifest or take form, thus crushing the seed prematurely before it is given a chance to germinate.

Remembering a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s book ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rilke speaks to the importance of appreciating and cherishing challenge:
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult  are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our  joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are and learn to deal with it.

If the challenge were not so difficult, and the idea was already guaranteed widespread affirmation- the process of its cultivation, and ultimately the result, would not be so sweet or so valuable. Thus in the end, if what we are truly seeking is meaningful success, it would seem faulty logic to steer away from a challenge or to pre-emptively shoot down an innovative idea solely based on our own fear of failure or self-doubt. It is precisely within these thorny difficulties and on the battlefield against the intense prospect of failure, that an idea is given the opportunity to ripen, mature, and become resilient enough to ensure its eventual success.

Lined with an eclectic array of magazines, encyclopedia collections that were discontinued in the 60′s, art books, text-book reading from old Yale days, and an assortment of other literature, I recently  appropriated a slew of my parents books and am secretly holding them hostage in my room at the Banff Centre.

In a rushed attempt to stuff the old books into my suitcase- an incognito operation that if uncovered may have resulted in an embarrassing session of reprimanding (or some overly enthusiastic encouragement, depending on the whim of my mothers mood), I ended up with a funny assortment of literature ranging from Carl Jung’s Civilization and its Discontents,  to the New York Times recently highly acclaimed The Omnivore’s Dilemma- A Natural History of Four Meals.

Oddly struck by a bout of lazy boredom tonight, likely brought about by the eroding chilliness and early nightfall of autumn, I perused my stolen possessions. Back and forth between Freud’s Civilizations, and Jung’s Pscyhology and Religion, I oscillated between the various ideas and claims made by both thinkers. Feeling confused, enlightened, and then confused once again, I couldn’t stop thinking about the comedy of the scenario; how criminal I had felt hijacking my parents library in the quiet of the morning before they both awoke, and now- here, tucked away in a cozy bed in Banff, greedily and voraciously ingesting this “stolen” knowledge. A bit like a man who’d robbed a candy store and run, and was only just now tasting the first sweet of his newly acquired bonbons…

I must admit though, that this really is thievery at its prime: an act fuelled by highly motivated curiosity–curiosity quenched only by a ‘closeted borrowing’ of my parents books, literature whose sole purpose and existence lies precisely in the communication, generation, germination, and proliferation of ideas!

Beautiful, isn’t it?. Let’s call it, idea theft– and it seems to me, that the authors would be appropriately pleased. Also…I hope you don’t mind, mom..

[more on the books innards..later]

The Phonograph, A McGill University Schulich School of Music Journal Publication
March 2010, Feature Article
A Synthetic Nature; Re-examining the Fundamental Role of Experience in Creation
By Helen Kashap

Alone:  Isolated in a small sterile cubicle with a behemoth black instrument and a tiny window facing in, I sit and procrastinate, buried deep in a labyrinth of thought. Repeating note after note, gesture after gesture, I begin to daydream about the ocean, the gigantic wave and its salt-crusted upper lip. The cascade of wind that wreaks havoc with the water gods and the silent cries of the slippery sea creatures as they float up and down the tumultuous ocean shore, crashing and banging against jagged wet rocks.

I imagine sitting on top of a tall chiseled cliff in bare feet, staring directly down at the terrifying, inconceivably beautiful body of water. I stop, meditate for a second on the pulse of mnemonic time, and listen freely to the crush of the waves. This is how the ocean sounds when it speaks… soft, massive, and eternal. How strange to be consciously and actively absorbing the overwhelming sound of nature as it exists in the present moment. Is it not in every-day life that we hear the irregular rhythm of the rain, the displaced downbeats in the screech of the traffic, the atonality of the ambulance siren against that of the police? Have we not been entirely numbed to the organic sounds of a city’s breath? These musical anomalies that we so carefully isolate, craft, and study are but the ubiquitous realities of our quotidian affairs and daily existence…

I’m instantly thrown back into the present moment and the emptiness of my practice room. Here I sit, disillusioned by my own ears, trying so readily to re-create the sound of that massive body of water; the ocean in Scriabin’s second piano sonata. It slowly occurs to me that our life experiences are not so disconnected from our music making, and that perhaps my experience at the ocean years ago brings me closer to my ultimate goal of crafting impressions as an artist does, eloquently describing the waves like the poet to bring the ocean to the concert hall. Perhaps the absorption of real life sound and the required regurgitation of its perception serve a deeper relevance and require greater attention than do my repeated gestures and laborious hours spent deconstructing the speed of attack, the depth of weight in the production of the sound, and the follow through of the arm at the piano.

I stop to think.

In a musical society that is so obsessed with competition, perfection, and unfaltering work ethic, it is difficult to convince anybody, including myself, that the experience of life – the authentic and genuine interaction with humanity, culture, and nature – all of those things which don’t involve the instrument or a metronome – are essential to our work as musicians. These often undervalued components of life are paramount in the creation of beautiful music and are absolutely integral to both the depth and dimension of one’s creative work. How can one begin to capture the essence of rhapsodic wind without ever having consciously felt it? Or conjure the dark mysticism of a full moon in the early hours of the morning without ever having truly seen it? The attempt to create a realistic musical world out of a synthetic or imagined experience can only render a somewhat less genuine and sincere musical conception.

Argue and disagree with me if you will, but at some point in the future, I hope you will finally leave your piano bench or set down your violin without feeling like a terribly guilty and lethargic student. Engage in the world and its surroundings. Enjoy the smell of winter and its frigid, cutting air; experience the gravity and momentum that grips your body as you slide down a glossy winter hill. Absorb all of the raw sensual pleasures and the aesthetic of nature as it passes by, and save it, store it, as you will desperately need these inspirations someday soon in your creative process. It is really true that some things just simply cannot be learnt in a practice room.

Littered with millions of blogs already, topics ranging everywhere from intellectually stimulating political discourse, to teenie- boppers trading poorly spelled gossip  (in hot pink on black font) about their ex-boyfriends, make-up, and that ugly girl that “nobody really liked anyways”, the world wide web has become a mecca for a generation of seriously ‘entitled’ individuals to muse publicly on their thoughts.

Quick to adopt a certain critical cynicism with regards to the current blog-culture, I recently came across words spoken by the author Sylvia Plath, which, if twisted slightly, seem to address this particular view: “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt”. And so, to a certain extent, it seems likely that one should actually admire those who choose to place alphabetic symbols to their internal thoughts, whatever the subject matter may be, and publish them online for the world to perceive; thoughts that would have otherwise been lost at sea.

This realization, coupled with the fact that I have recently openly admitted  to myself to having a secret (on-going) love affair with writing, which, with regards to online sharing has almost always been trumped by my own doubt regarding the value or meaning of such silly technological whims as blogging, has led to the development of this project which, at best, can be called a formal experiment. Formal only because it is in print (palms beginning to get sweaty..) and it will be published (heart beginning to race abnormally..) online ( unpredictable pupil dilation..) for the world to see (heightened internal freak-out, followed by a prolonged apprehensive sigh of acceptance and then a silent retreat).

Kidding only, of course. Reluctance and caution in writing, and in art in general, would seem only to unnecessarily stifle creativity.

I am madly excited about this project and I look forward to sharing my (silly) thoughts avec vous!

A tout a l’heure,

Helen

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway

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