Sunrises, and Being Condemned to Do What We Love Forever
In his essay, “Sky and Telescope,” from Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, Michael Chabon says, “The starry heavens became a lifelong locus of insufficiency, but so is everything you love most.” The statement is embedded into a story about his lifelong love of astronomy and astrophysics, despite being self-admittedly unremarkable at both. Is it true that everything, and everyone, we love is just a megaphone to remind us of our own, as Chabon puts it, “insufficiencies?”
It's a bold claim, but one that, without me performing thesis-level research, appears to hold up. I don’t believe Chabon is suggesting that everything we love is detrimental to our wellness, but rather that such things are never totally fulfilling. The things we love: We either can’t get enough of them, or can’t rise to meet them. Or both.
In another essay from the same book, Chabon equates the urge to constantly write as possibly being some branch of a disorder, with a tinge toward the obsessive compulsive. That might be dramatic, but the more I think about it, the more I think it might not be. After all, I write when I’m happy, when I’m depressed, when I have an audience, when I don’t, when there is something tangible to be gained, when it will assuredly lead to nothing.
I’m not sure I was ever closer to shutting my musical efforts down than I was in that 2016-18 window. Every song —even the ones that ultimately came out on the winning side— was a chore, being forcibly drawn out of me one painful, often underwhelming, line at a time. It was such an uncomfortable, uphill fight for every inch of battlefield that it could only have been love that kept my feet moving. When you love something, or someone, you grant them a wider allowance for inflicting pain than those you don’t. And music has inflicted no small amount of pain.
It is easy to equate this sort of affliction with all of those ironic punishments dolled out in so many cultural depictions of Hell. What is worse? To be unable to do what you love; or to be unable to stop doing what you love? I don’t know the answer to that question. Why do I write these journals? Why do I think my songs and musical life deserve the least bit of analysis? Why would I think anyone else would care to read such things? Aside from that obsessive compulsive bent Chabon mentioned, I don’t know. The same questions could be posed in regard to why do I write music in the first place? The answer remains the same: I don’t know.
I don’t remember much about writing “Sunrise,” other than that it happened over a single afternoon. I guess it becomes an appropriate metaphor, because there’s no secret to catching the sunrise, so long as you’re willing to show up and wait for it. And so I continued to show up at my laptop, at my piano and guitar, waiting for the sun. I’d like to say that illustrates some beautiful commitment to craft, or refusal to surrender to my lesser angels, but I don’t think so. I just think I am in love with the whole thing, being reminded of each and every insufficiency along the way.