Any Means Available

I had an impulse recently to learn to play and sing the old Pink Floyd songs “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse.” These are the last two songs on The Dark Side of the Moon, an album I listened to with devotional regularity when I was fifteen and sixteen. It’s a pretty gloomy collection of songs, frankly, and by the time I was seventeen, and had fallen in love, and was starting to look for the good in life, I found other music and other stories and had hardly listened to it since.

Yet there I was, learning the chords, and relearning the lyrics and melody. It struck me that the lines I liked best from the songs when I was fifteen still stood out to me forty years later. I still liked “the papers hold their folded faces to the floor, and every day the paper boy brings more,” and then how Eclipse is just a long list of, “All that you touch, and all that you see, all that you taste, all you save.”

I did not know at the time I found these songs how important a role poetry would play in my creative life. I wasn’t reading poetry then, had no interest in it really, but my mind latched onto the bit about how “the papers hold their folded faces to the floor.” Obviously, no one’s face was literally being held to the floor, but wasn’t this a quicker and more interesting way to describe images in newspapers? And how satisfying that a paperboy really would bring “more” every day, and how this brought a natural, conversational, rhyming conclusion to the phrase.

And I also had no idea then that I would go on much later to be a philosopher, for lack of a better word (and I assure you if there was one, I would happily use it). But when I listened to “Eclipse” with its unspooling list of what we say, and do, and love, and steal, and create, and destroy, I sensed the value of seeing that maybe none of that really mattered, that it was all just the product of something else, something worth paying attention to if you get your head out of all the swarming details of life.

School can be good, and writing books can be good, and teachers and mentors and writing conferences can be good also, but finding these songs again reminded me that we will learn what we need to learn by any means available. Sometimes we learn on purpose, like when I learned the chords to these songs, and sometimes we are tricked into learning, guided down a path because we kept noticing something interesting along the way.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com