Coda: Journey to the Center of the Self

As a writer and a musician, I often find myself interested in the spaces between things, those inshore waters that are neither marsh nor open sea but that share aspects of both. During my childhood, I retreated into literature, enjoying the escape of great works and the freedom and authority of my own writing. At the same time, music had the power to make something inside me ache–with joy, with sorrow, with longing for some unnamable missing piece. Music felt like the percussive incantations of reading had reached their full expression—and taken flight.

In college I became fascinated with jazz. As most readers of this magazine know only too well, jazz is the “gateway drug” to music theory. By the time I graduated, I was doing more writing with a system of dots than with words. My parents were concerned, confused. I can’t blame them.

 

Reality Hits

During life’s big moments, the wisdom of the Old Ones reveals its bedrock truth. I graduated from college and learned that the world does not much care for sonnets, sonatas, or insightful readings of Rimbaud in the original French. Or, if the world cares, it does not pay. In the illimitable wisdom of God and the free market, my attempts to become an advertising copywriter were universally rejected by ad agencies from Alphabet City to Atlanta, and I learned one of the most essential lessons of being a grown-up: how to keep a straight face while in the grip of primal, white-hot monkey panic.

I accepted a job in the fledgling Internet industry with all the grace of a man clambering aboard a lifeboat. To carry that metaphor forward, they took me aboard their steamer, and I found myself in a budding career as an Internet developer but (to overtax the metaphor completely), soon realized it was going the wrong way.

I have never been in a plague, a famine, or a war. But to me this was a big deal. Instead of getting closer, I was getting further away from living a life of art and study. I believe firmly in that sweet American optimism: If you point yourself in the right direction and plod away, you’ll get to where you want to be. But my plodding was pointed toward the vanilla suburbs of Virginia and a life of button-down shirts, khaki pants, and dangling corporate name badges seemed like a slow form of spiritual suicide. It was time for drastic measures.

So I spent a year building my portfolio and researching masters of music programs. I still loved the process of writing, though I had become enchanted by the colorful nuances of violas and marimbas, and what happens when you blend them with oboes, cellos, and French horns.

I applied to graduate programs in New York and Boston, but it wasn’t until I found the music of Larry Thomas Bell at the Boston Conservatory that I heard a fellow traveler of the in-between spaces, and one whose work blended the polish of fine orchestration with the primeval magic of pop.

As an undergraduate, I wrote songs when I should have been writing sestinas (in the original French), so, uncomfortable being only fish or fowl, the only authentic choice I could make was to frequently play hooky from my graduate string quartets to churn out pages and pages of song lyrics. They were mostly terrible.

Grown weary of watching me bumble like a fly against a windowpane, God and the free market intervened again: The Internet industry collapsed and a job opened up at Berklee. The position called for an experienced Web producer with significant musical expertise. The listing might as well have had my picture on it. Perfect.

And yet . . .

To salvage the foundering steamship metaphor, even though I had made my way to an environment dedicated to art and study at the highest level, it felt like the boat had docked in the holy land but I couldn’t get a shore pass. As an artist, I was still locked inside myself somehow—no, locked outside myself. I still couldn’t see the world with the terrible clarity of Bob Dylan or Duke Ellington or John Steinbeck. And what I could see crumbled before I could get it onto the page or staff paper. I felt like a serious artist, despite all evidence to the contrary, and was desperate to break through whatever membrane was holding me back. I won’t say at any cost, but I was willing to pay a lot, and at times to do so on credit, taxing the patience of friends, family, and spouse.

I flailed—a lot.

I took every lyrics class Pat Pattison teaches, and those lyric sheets started getting better. Some were even good. I picked up the bass and toured on the college circuit for a few years playing more than 400 gigs in 27 states. All this while my wife and I welcomed our first, then second, children into the world. All fan mail should be addressed to her.

And yet . . .

Still? This sense of being “not quite?” Not quite what? Smart enough? Good enough? Honest enough? I felt caught in a painful existential crisis and did the only thing I knew how to do: run back to my other love: writing.

 

The Long Way

Over lunch one day, a comedienne friend told me about the screenplays she was working on. It was fun. I understood how the architecture of the stories needed to work, and I enjoyed talking about language, about the music of words. I decided to try a few myself.

I wrote three treatments, extensive summaries of stories that could be the blueprints for what? Movies? Novels? The most striking thing was that each one got demonstrably better. I wrote a short story. I began devouring volumes at a rate unknown since the bookish days of my boyhood. I wrote more stories. A dear friend at work pushed me to explore one more fully, and it became a novel. It sucked. So I took it apart and rewrote it from page one. It was better. I spent another year (or was it two?) polishing it, but it didn’t sell so I wrote another one. I had a short story published. And another. And another.

Aha.

Last summer I was accepted to, and attended, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which is to literary conferences what Berklee is to jazz guitarists and film composers. I spent 10 days on a mountain in Vermont with famous authors, including the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner and current poet laureate–digging deep into the art of writing and our artist selves.

Lord, how I got over. The waters of the river Jordan could not taste sweeter.

Could I have done it better? Faster? With less disruption? I wish. Would I have been able to understand the thematic economy of Ralph Ellison and Jennifer Egan if I hadn’t spent a semester studying Beethoven’s compositional process in grad school? Would I have understood the importance of percussion and proportion in prose if I hadn’t been forced to deal with my dactyls and dipthongs in Pat Pattison’s lyric writing classes? Who knows? Would I have been able to go find my true artist self without an understanding and supportive employer and an even more understanding and supportive spouse (who watched three kids while I was finding myself in the woods)? Almost certainly not.

This journey to the center of myself, to the artist within, has been long and maddeningly indirect, has required a lot of help, and has been costly in many, many ways. But now that I’ve caught hold of the artist I am, you’d have to kill me to break my grip.