When is A Song Born?
Is a song in its infancy when it just begins to be written, or is it when it has just been completed? Maybe the former is like conception and the latter is like birth?
My newest song I'm working on, "Rivers Rise," has at least achieved conception --beaming with the excitement that so often sits alongside the dawn of any new creation. It is the moment when the first few brush strokes land successfully and you immediately start dreaming of just how successful this effort might become. You can see the connective tissue between where it is and where it might go. My child is going to be a doctor, or an astronaut, or a renowned chef. At this stage, it all feels possible.
It has been nine months since Rift. Though "Rivers Rise" is not the only work to be done towards the next album, it is the first moment of excitement. The other work has been scattered ideas yet to coalesce into anything meaningful. I can't say I know what "Rivers Rise" is at this point, but the first few brushstrokes have landed and I haven't ruined it yet.
Make no mistake, I will ruin it, but that's part of the whole thing. Every step towards completion is a murdering of endless possibility. It's as if you start out on a bridge made entirely of possibility and potential and each step you take is adding one tangible board to the bridge, painstakingly removing everything it could be with everything it is.
This moment in the process is arguably the most exhilarating; the moment of unbridled creativity --that mysterious maelstrom that envelopes the space between you and the work you're doing, a life stream of energy feeding both ends of its spectrum. Maybe that's how we are "made in the image of God" --we have an infinite, mysterious, and mutually beneficial relationship with our creations, and we just can't stop creating them even if we wanted to.
I think this is where the trinitarian idea of God comes from too --two forces working in tandem so fiercely that a third force is created. We see this all over the world and all over nature, most clearly in procreation. Sex between two people creates a third, which simultaneously becomes a family: The three are now one, but have somehow lost neither identifier.
Christianity will say that this mirrors the trinitarian God, and perhaps it does. But is it possible that we have chosen the trinitarian imagery because it is what we (sub)consciously see in all aspects of life, every day of our lives? Synthesis between two forces is the DNA of the universe. Maybe Christianity chose the Trinity as the God image because it is the most familiar concept to us --the "unknowable" is actually the thing we "know" most familiarly. It is both perfectly rational and perfectly paradoxical, just like the idea of God.
When "Rivers Rise" and its future brethren work with me to create an album, our trinitarian concept will show itself for the infinite time: It's me and the song; the album is the maelstrom between us. But before that, it was me and the guitar; "Rivers Rise" was the maelstrom.
Keep going in either direction and you'll see the same story every time: Synthesis. You can't stop synthesizing and I can't stop synthesizing and the maelstrom can't stop happening --as true and inescapable as any god.