Even if unsure of exactly why, it always emerges as apparent that we must keep being makers. Not in synthesized superficiality, but in the ways that shatter through our jagged depths to pull forth the beating meta-mass, even if covered in iron rich liquid. We are creatures set to embrace the benevolent strange, in the face of all the forced fortifications of farce. Even when endangered, the states of honest expression must survive.

But that isn’t all about the outward. In fact, if the center of the creativity is solely set upon the admiration by others- then that creative state is some lie unto itself. Reaction or rejection cannot be the founding basis of our expressive measures. Not only because of the malignance of recognition as the premise of expression, but you rob all those others by only satisfying the blatant and base requests. This life holds wonderful moments when we encounter the remarkable unknowns. Ignorant be the soul that claims they already know all that will move them when the meter of the timeline is still ticking.

So just as important as the veracity of our expressions outward, so too is the prevalence of our inputs. To absorb not only that which is already tried and appearing true, but to stand not in opposition to the creations of others, but open to as much and as many expressions we find around us. Not the focus group approved and boardroom stamped suggestions, but to the personal and peculiar and profound shapes, sounds and sonnet-such-stuff of the beings that appear closer to hearts and homes that are known. If you’re lucky, or attentive enough, you can find beings going about making their hearts and heads known in aesthetics both appealing and challenging, and all that wild and wonderful in between. We must consume consciously aware of the conflict with all the commercial conglomeration. And often more important than being heard, is to listen with chivalrous intent. Could be more important than ever, in the modern age of perpetual apparition of noise. Finding silence enough in all the shouts and bouts of benign arbitrary to truly hear the harmonious and delightful dissonance more proximal to our beings than all the corporate aloofness.

Or so thinks I. Or, wildly enough, believes I.

Still and yet, I think- of the precipice of perception while I worry of my own growing callousness. Is the current state some spawn of an ancient defense against some long-lost foe? All forgotten why in the folds of time as I hold, weary and stalwart, some shield that I have not looked beyond in personal eons?

While there is something to that idea, there is plenty of exaggeration as well. As far as much of this experience goes, open is how I remain. And the proof is found abundant in the tired eyes that comprise these lines. Both creative and captive audience to the sonic art of loved ones for most of the last forty-eight hours, I even managed to put on a bout of performance from my own cardiac cage and brain. Which, I have been told, was well received- lest my modesty fail me now.

Because there is play that remains very important to the human heart, no matter what age we are or end up as. With our communal spaces and personal atmospheres, to tinker with our time is perhaps one of the last remaining holdouts in this digital age that seems to be rapidly diminishing in its regard for conscious consent. So, instead of being force fed by machines made for manipulation, I invite to you something new. So new, that it is one of the most ancient acts we have known since we first started herding about together as upright apes. To listen to someone make sounds you have yet to know. In person, if you can, but you can even harness the digitized avenues if disciplined well and properly oriented. To witness the self-crafted spectacles and scenes that only hands attached to some oh, so very human visual vector might perceive. Find a way to withhold the might and majesty of the honest imagination of some other that does so not because it feeds into their success- but because they must, in spite of whatever multitude of failures already have and yet may still occur.

It is there still, I assure you. Real folks making real art. Not real because of some rubric ordained down from some specific administration. Real because the person(s) that went about making it hurt or ached, fell or was frustrated in some particular way that made it impossible not to try and have some say, either refined or something more primal. You may never know what the story is that went into the poem, the painting, the passage or play- but it isn’t about knowing. Not exactly. Not in some calculation of because this event then this, and that, or this again. But because the story that brings us to pen, page, or string, or stage no longer matters once the thing is made. It may remain a part, some underlying base, but it evolves beyond that into the ether that we all understand even when, or especially when, exact explanations are impossible to locate.

Even in all the predetermined patterns and postures we have discerned over the ages, no singular answer can emerge for why we continue to go about with such indescribable desire to express ourselves. And if someone tells you that they have quantified art or music or performance down to some reproduceable essence- I assure you, they are wrong. Even if certain patterns provide skeletons for works, just having that will always lack what it is that makes humanity keep going about with our artistic outcries throughout the ages. It isn’t the pattern. It needs the people. Both inward and outward, this existence we have is decorated in space and time with what we shout and show. And if that ever ceases, it surely means we have ceased to be human.

And I, at least for this lifetime, will keep being a human. Broken and battered. Failed and failing. Hurt and hurting. Kind and cold and clever and conscious that all of what I feel now will be something else eventually, even if the stances remain. And that if you can catch a bit of bottled lightning and make a piece of a moment imbued in some song or dance- you should do so. Because that moment will pass, but something beautiful might be grasped. And maybe that something might mean something entirely otherwise, but equally beautiful to someone else.

Surely, you know this is possible. After all, if you’re here with me now- some song must have brought at least a tear to you at some point.