My Music Flows
John L. Waters
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My Music Flows
Copyright 2000 by John L. Waters.
All Rights Reserved.
John L. Waters
May 15, 2000
When I am feeling inspired, music flows out of me like water
flowing out of a hole in the rain-soaked mountainside.
Making music is as natural to me as singing is to the wild bird.
But I have to have a fine musical instrument and I can't be
bothered by the loud barking of a dog or the loud honking of
horns or the loud yelling of children in the yard next door.
When I listen to a record of my music playing it is like I am
sitting beside a waterfall or it is like I am sitting at the
beach listening to the waves. The music puts me into a serene
state, and I can spend hours just making colorful art or I can
spend hours just writing what comes to mind. This is the
inspired state.
These days there is a great deal of noise and other pollution.
This pollution has a negative effect. Loud explosive noises like
yelling children and barking dogs make it impossible for me to
feel relaxed and inspired. Something within me withdraws and
hides. There is no way for me to get it back.
A beautiful melody is good for all time. But only when a person
is really inspired can he get a beautiful melody.
Some people say that beauty is just relative. What sounds
beautiful to one person may repel another, they say. What looks
attractive to one person looks ugly to another person. But a
fragrant rose garden in full bloom is attractive to many people.
Put a bunch of noisy kids or barking dogs there and the people
will leave. The unpleasantness will drive them away. So beauty
and attractive isn't just all relative.
There's a quarrel between the people who don't mind a lot of
noise and other pollution as long as it makes them rich. But
then when you go find where the rich people live, you will find
that they live in those idyllic places where there is no loud and
polluting industry. And they have whole private beaches to
themselves.
So there really isn't any quarrel at all. The rich people just
don't mind making other people suffer. That is the basic issue.
Of course there are lots of poor people who don't really care
about other people either. Like you can probably think of some
person who just lets his kids yell and scream all they want. And
he lets his dogs bark as loud and as long as they want, without a
care. And you can bet he lives in a run-down house or in a
trailer park. Poor white trash. Do you know what I mean?
Meanwhile the rich people and the poor people flock into the
Church on Sunday and hear talk about "love your neighbor as
thyself" and all that crap. And the churches have been dishing
this out for centuries. But still there is this worsening noise
pollution and this worsening air pollution. The trouble is that
there are so many people these days and so many of them are just
inconsiderate and noisy.
When I am fortunate, there's not a lot of neighbor noise here and
I can go into my living room and turn on my cassette recorder and
my musical keyboard and just go off into the reverie of my music
flow. Then later I can sit at my kitchen table and listen to my
music flow. This puts me into a state of mine where I can sit
and type for hours. But when the dogs are barking and the kids
are yelling I just can't get into that zone. The process which
inspires me then is terminated.
Now I realize that the people next door value their children and
their dogs a lot more than they value my writings and my music.
The people next door do not love me and fondle me, but they do
love and fondle their dogs and their children. So if these
fondlings sometimes make a horrific racket, the neighbors don't
really mind too much. After all, I do not give my neighbors the
pleasure that they get from fondling a child or an animal pet.
And so if I complain about the noise pollution in this
neighborhood I am perceived as a crotchety old meanie. And my
own rapture in being inspired just never comes up.
It's true that the pleasure which people get from interacting
with fond pets and fond children is well-nigh universal. And if
pets and children are so controlled that they don't feel they can
ever be noisy then these same pets and children may not ever
really feel very frolicksome and friendly. And so someone like
me, who is very sensitive to sound, must either be rich enough to
live in some especially quiet place where he can work in peace,
or he must suffer and lose a great deal of time and
productivity.
This sensitivity to sound is a very basic part of me. It is this
sensitivity to sound which inspires me when I sit and play new
music and when I sit and listen to the music playing and type as
I am typing now. It is the sound of the music which sends me
into that zone of creativity. And when there is a lot of noise I
don't feel that way. I feel uncomfortable and want to get away
from the noise.
It just happens that I live next to a mobile home park and there
are twenty-three mobile homes on five acres. There is a rule
about loud dogs but the rule isn't really enforced. And on some
days the loud barking goes on intermittently for hours and I just
can't enjoy being outside. This is an imposition on me, but it's
hard for me to get any relief from the noise. I guess I just
don't know how to seem threatening to people. I guess that is
the basic problem.
To get away from this intimidating neighborhood situation I have
been able to go back to college studies. I've been attending the
university on their over sixty program which costs only six
dollars a semester. I can take as many units as I want. And I
took three units this last semester. That kept me busy with my
research, my writing, and my taking care of the property here.
And so I am at home on some days and I am gone into town on some
days. And so I'm not totally at the mercy of the noisy dogs and
the other neighborhood intrusions.
Of course when I'm gone I can't get as inspired as I get here
when I am just making music and feeling inspired at the keyboard
or at the word processor.
But what's the use of being inspired if the products of my
inspiration aren't enjoyed and appreciated by other people? This
is a question which people might ask.
I have found that inspiration is actually a healing process.
That is, in our society there is so much pollution and so much
noise, that some people are actually made ill by this pollution.
and of course the more hardy persons aren't made ill by this
pollution. But in my own case, I was made ill by a lot of noise
and other pollution and I managed to heal myself here in this
location. Of course I had to wander off and visit many more
quiet places.
So this is what inspiration has done for me. And I continue to
be inspired from time to time and I continue to produce inspired
works. These inspired works are works I produce while I feel
inspired. And my music flow is very central to this feeling of
being inspired. From the instrument making beautiful music which
fills the silence with beautiful music I derive the sense of
being inspired. Later I play this recorded music back and it
fills the air with beautiful sounds and this enraptures me. And
as I am enraptured I fill empty canvases with color and I fill
empty pages with wordiness.
Due to the expense of art materials, however, I've not done much
painting for over twenty years.
So today, for example, I have been sitting for about the last six
hours, listening to my music and typing on a word processor. And
during this time Icould easily have painted on ten canvases
costing six dollars apiece, and filled them with colors to make
some abstract paintings. Even if we don't figure the cost of the
paints, that is sixty dollars spent in a day just because I am
inspired. And that makes inspiration a pretty expensive
business! In a month, that is, twenty-eight days, I would spend
more than 1680 dollars. But I only get about seven hundred
dollars a month and so very soon I'd have no money left to make
any paintings. So I might as well just continue writing. I can
write for a month and the writings all fit on a floppy disk which
costs me about fifty cents.
This is the economics of a poor man.
Certain hobbies, like certain occupations, take quite a bit of
money to get started. To make a living as an artist, you have to
learn how to paint, and that consumes a great deal of time as
well as a great deal of materials. When a family is poor, they
don't have a lot of money to spend on art supplies for their
kids. And when parents don't support the schools, then the
schools don't have much money to spend on art materials. And so
what is to become of a child who has a talent in art, if his
parents are poor? The talent will be masked or lost.
Of course to a lot of people, a talent in art isn't valuable like
a talent in business or a talent in social relations or
communication. And so here I sit, at a word processor,
demonstrating some talent in communications. The reason I can
write this well is because I spent twenty years going to school
and every day I had to listen, or talk, or read, or write, and
usually I had to do all these things. And twenty years is a long
time. But suppose my talent was in art, more than in listening,
talking, reading, and writing? Then a hard-thinking, business-
type person would be aghast at the waste of money!
You can just see him standing there dumbfounded at the stupidity
of the old system, as he keeps on smacking his brow with his
fist, as he contemplates the atrocious waste of public money.
But I'm sixty years old now, and I can't just start life all over
again.
The thing is, abstract art is just not valued as much as
representational art, and my talent is in abstract art, not
representational art. And I had some art shows here in Humboldt
County in 1978 and 1979 and no one offered to buy any of my art.
I did have a local man offer to act as my agent and take some of
my paintings down to a gallery in San Francisco. But I wasn't
ready at that time. I was still pretty schizophrenic in 1980.
Yes, and that brings up my research on schizophrenia. I just
grew up being quite a good observer. And I notices the way
children were, and some of the children were more ordinary, more
popular, and more typical, and the odd children tended to be more
likely to develop schizophrenia later. It is a classic case of
which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is the person odd
because he is mentally ill or does he become mentally ill because
he is just not ordinary and life for him is more stressful
because people just don't understand him?
I have had to be thrifty with money and with other goods. So for
example recently, rather than panicking and buying some
insecticide for twenty-five dollars a gallon and spraying the
stuff on myself and probably poisoning myself to death, I have
elected to use log and shake oil which costs about three dollars
a gallon, and besides I have about twenty gallos of the stuff on
hand already. And rather than paying some kid five dollars an
hour to slather it on I am going out and doing the job myself.
In this way I've been able to hang on here and live in a nice
environment except for the neighbor noise. But it's better than
living in a three-room apartment in a lower-middle class part of
Hollywood where drive-by shootings aren't rare and where radios
blare all night and where prostitution and drugs are common
businesses.
Poverty is at work all the time, sucking talented people down
into whirlpools of despair.
Schools compound the problem by forcing all the talented children
to focus upon the same subjects, no matter where their talents
lie.
This short message should be trumpeted by hosts of angels from
the skies of every major city. But of course there really aren't
any such angels. There are only the big commercial publishers.
They pick and choose whom they will take under their wings and
promote. And they just didn't choose me.
Now when you think of school as a kind of business, you see the
schools spending so much time, talent, and money training all
these children to be writers. But of all these children who are
trained in school to be writer, how many are going to make their
living by writing? How many of your own classmates went out into
the world and managed to make a living by writing? And so why do
the schools focus so on teaching children to read and write?
Somehow, if a young person has a certain talent, the certain
talent in the young person needs to be addressed, defined,
cultivated, educated, and given lots of practice. Otherwise, how
is the young person raised in poverty ever going to get out of
poverty?
You can force a child to go to school, and keep the person in
school for twenty years, but if the person's talent isn't really
in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, then your
investment in him as a scholar is really not a good one. It
would have been much smarter if you had taken time when he was
little, and determined what his major talent was. Because when a
person has a facility in music and a facility in art, these
facilities take a lot of brain development and a lot of brain
energy. And it really is hard to re-educate, re-condition, and
re-develop the brain of a man! And the conversion always begins
as a psychotic breakdown, that is an acute schizophrenic episode.
I've known quite a number of adults who are at some stage after
having experienced an acute schizophrenic episode. Each person
relates essentially the same sad tale of having family,
community, and school expect a certain talent to be in them but
their real talent was in a totally different realm of activity.
And you yourself know how expensive art materials are. So what
is to become of the children whose talent is in art, but the
schools just don't have money to teach those children whose main
talent is in art. Is economic and social shortsightedness
producing a plague of psychotic wastrels? How many non-
productive adults today are just persons who as children had
really great talent but it was a talent in something other than
reading, writing, cyphering, talking, and listening?
One man stands before the philistine giant Goliath. From the
man's sling flies a stone with these words written all over it.
But the giant has already fallen. The whole social system is
flawed. To save humanity from folly, there is only one
answer. That answer is "talent". Communities must really care
about educating the children whose talents are great, even if
these talents aren't in reading, writing, listening, and talking.
Politics is not enough and the American Founding Fathers didn't
have the whole answer under their Puritan hats.
5:22PM Monday, May 15, 2000
John L. Waters
johnlwaters@yahoo.com
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