It has been suggested to me that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", and as I work (so very very slowly) on revising "Soft Shroud" (working title, working body...) I have that thought in mind. Not as something I accept, but as a kind of irritant. Sand for the oyster, or maybe just sand for the sandwich. I am asking myself - what is the authority of the draft?
And of this draft, which I dug out of sustained physical attention to felt sense within particular musical environments (especially the Animal Collective's Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (also Fall Be Kind)) that I chose to hold particular emotion & event environments (Charlie's death, bankruptcy, Grafton) that were for me totally experientially bound together.
None of that is nothing to me. It took me quite a long time to see how much was NOT carried in what I had written - I had to wait until my immersion fell away again, but still the territory and its signs are so personally infused that it is hard for me to step outside it.
When I think that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", I think the alternative is to be present (outside of myself) to what the words are on the page now, to let go of their personal histories and be fully conscious of them, independent but intact. But I can't. I can't be somewhere other than my body and its memories, which have emptied into words. And I can't eradicate my own purpose without losing too much. The purpose is not to convey experience as it happened. The purpose is to make an immersion (not just be in an immersion) that vibrates at the same frequency as the frequency I was in (physically, compositionally) in relation to those experiences.
It sounds easy to come to this but it has not been obvious to me at all.
What if the draft knows more than me now, rather than less than me now? And what if my role is not to cut it away from its moorings, but to move into those, to know that I don't understand them but they are 'mine', as in, the experience's? This would not be 'the mooring of starting out', but of a kind of backwards-forwards, which is very much the direction of the poem. A ship moving backwards, prow pointing back, into a night that's just like water.
And of this draft, which I dug out of sustained physical attention to felt sense within particular musical environments (especially the Animal Collective's Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (also Fall Be Kind)) that I chose to hold particular emotion & event environments (Charlie's death, bankruptcy, Grafton) that were for me totally experientially bound together.
None of that is nothing to me. It took me quite a long time to see how much was NOT carried in what I had written - I had to wait until my immersion fell away again, but still the territory and its signs are so personally infused that it is hard for me to step outside it.
When I think that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", I think the alternative is to be present (outside of myself) to what the words are on the page now, to let go of their personal histories and be fully conscious of them, independent but intact. But I can't. I can't be somewhere other than my body and its memories, which have emptied into words. And I can't eradicate my own purpose without losing too much. The purpose is not to convey experience as it happened. The purpose is to make an immersion (not just be in an immersion) that vibrates at the same frequency as the frequency I was in (physically, compositionally) in relation to those experiences.
It sounds easy to come to this but it has not been obvious to me at all.
What if the draft knows more than me now, rather than less than me now? And what if my role is not to cut it away from its moorings, but to move into those, to know that I don't understand them but they are 'mine', as in, the experience's? This would not be 'the mooring of starting out', but of a kind of backwards-forwards, which is very much the direction of the poem. A ship moving backwards, prow pointing back, into a night that's just like water.
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