Beyond neurosis, there lies reality.
It wasn’t neurosis that made me come up with the ten disclaimers, essentially telling my followers they shouldn’t even bother listening to the song, and then posting the song the next morning anyway.
I wasn’t being bipolar when I was one way one day and one way the next. For beyond neurosis, beyond bipolarity, there lies this thing called reality.
And reality can sometimes be the last thing the Artist wants to face. In fact, maybe the fact that the Artist doesn’t like to face reality is the reason why the Artist became an Artist in the first place.
Maybe, at some long-forgotten age old time of childhood, a little boy learned something about reality that he just couldn’t handle.
Maybe his childhood was so idyllic, and he loved his parents so much, that he couldn’t handle finding out that there was this thing called “death” that would take away his father one day, and take away his mother, and eventually take away his own self.
Maybe that was so painful that for two whole years he looked around at all the people doing normal things, and thought painful thoughts of despair. “Why is that guy washing his car?” the child would ask himself. “Doesn’t he know he could die tomorrow? And what would a clean car be to him then?”
Maybe the child turned from about five to about seven, and suddenly realized he kinda knew how to do things like play Old MacDonald and Mary Had a Little Lamb on a piano, and write little children’s songs, and draw pretty pictures with colored pencils, and write little fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and sing silly songs long into the night, while pretending his fingernails were ice skates, his fingers the skaters, and the sheets of his bed the skating rink, where round and round the skaters would skate, and skate themselves out of their pain.
Maybe he figured that God’s creation was just too painful to face. So he created his own creations, and found pleasure in what he decided to create – a pleasure that cancelled out for a season, the pain of the creation that was God’s.
Whatever the case, it was not neurosis that issued the disclaimers, nor was it bipolar of me to be one guy one day, and another fellow the next. For on the third day, he rose, and he realized reality.
The reality he did not want to face.
The reality is that the song straight-up, flat-out sucks. And he knew it from the start. He wanted to be cute. He wanted to entertain. He wanted to fool people into thinking that he didn’t know the song would turn out as badly as the song in fact turned out. So he went for high drama, like the Actor that he can be, and played his show of neurosis to the hilt.
The truth is, he was never neurotic. The truth is that he knew all along the reality that he did not feel he could face. The reality is what it is.
The song sucks — and that’s reality.
But maybe the song needed to suck, because the Artist needed to face the music, and learn a needed lesson. Maybe the lesson he needed to learn is the reality all Artists must one day face.
For the creation of the Artist is by no means superior to the creation of the Reality. And that creation is not of the Artist. The creation of Reality belongs to God.
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(4) Another reason why it was 13 minutes long is that at one point when I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go, I drifted into a song I wrote back in ’74, called “When Feelings are Few.” Actually played almost the entire song before I found out a way to return to the originally intended theme.
Q. What do you mean by that?
