There is a mouse in the B terminal of La Guardia Airport. Must have sneaked through security, and now survives by scavenging morsels of overpriced convenience food. It just scampered in a draftsman-straight line along the wall, under a row of passengers-to-be who stare at their cell phones, at their papers, and into space. The speed of small creatures still astonishes me.
I’ve been exploring New York at night, which makes for an odd combination with early-morning flights. Stay out late enough, and eventually you can just have a cup of tea and wait for the shuttle. In the autumn blackness the city is full of question marks, first pages of imaginary novels: a field in a park shrouded by balding trees, a lone man wheeling a bicycle, lights on in a high-ceilinged ballroom. If my shuttle-mates curse me for my 87-pound oversize keyboard, my boxes of CDs, they curse in silence. Everyone’s thinking how they’d rather be in bed.
I’ve given away my studio space, the Asylum; any of the three bands that share it now has already used it more than I have all year. These extremes of movement and not-movement… Everything I want to create currently lives in my head as concepts only, titles, gimmicks, lyrical themes. I try, but I can’t do the actual work out here. People more talented than I am could compose symphonies on the train, could practice piano concertos on wooden desks in ships crossing the Atlantic. But I can only hear things aloud. So—to have a room, the proper electronics, instruments with souls, and time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to be a performer also. I’m grateful to play these songs for people who seem to believe they matter. But in airport terminals and on conference calls, sometimes it feels suspiciously like I’ve become a traveling salesman, hawking small squares of paper and plastic.
I leave you with some words from Tennessee Williams and Ian McEwan. Not saying any of this applies to me. Made me think for a long time, though.
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial…
…once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of a man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with that conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to – why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where the danger lies.
- Tennessee Williams, “The Catastrophe of Success” (1947)
For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. It’s a little like sex, in that he feels himself in another medium, but it’s less obviously pleasurable, and clearly not sensual. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this. Working with others is one part of it, but it’s not all. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist.