Great Literary Minds: Music and Connecting
Last week, I walked on a downtown Nashville sidewalk
alongside Eat, Pray, Love author
Elizabeth Gilbert. Well, me and about 487 other people, mostly women. We were
walking to Hume Fogg High School, and we all wanted to hear what Ms. Gilbert
had to say about creativity. Indeed, she’s a self-proclaimed expert: she is the
author of Eat, Pray, Love, which was
on the New York Times bestseller list for 3 years, and now she has written a book
about creativity called Big Magic.
She’s a tremendously intelligent and humorous woman, and I
laughed through her feel-good, conversational book talk. After all, I attended
the program only because I wanted to hear her thoughts on creativity: where it
comes from, what inspires it, what to do with it, and so on.
So at the end of the program, when she told the audience
that she wouldn’t be able to meet and greet after her talk—I didn’t think twice
about it. I’d had my fill, and I’d learned quite a lot. But she then told the
audience that “music is the greatest connector” and she’d like to have a
sing-along. So with her arms around the shoulders of her awkward-looking literary
compatriots Jane Hamilton and Ann Pachett, she led a darkly alto version of
John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads.”
The audience obeyed (she had asked everyone to look at the
lyrics on their devices, so many folks were hiding behind their screens), and
we all stood up and humored Elizabeth. Some folks got into it. Some folks just mumbled,
embarrassed.
Was Gilbert trying to manufacture a “moment” with us? And
was she doing it for herself (because she felt that we’d hate her for not doing
a meet-and-greet)? Was she doing it for us? And…why did I even care?
Well, the moment struck a chord with me. It took me back,
some twenty years, to an Allen Ginsberg performance I’d attended as a
Birkenstock & bell-bottom clad, wide-eyed university student in Ann Arbor.
I was a music and literature major, and along with my hippie, folkie, rootsy,
band-mates (who were also literature majors), I would never have passed up the
opportunity to see the great Beat poet.
The anticipation was magical; after all, I was part of a
generation that worshipped the previous generation of literary and artistic
greats. They’d broken down barriers with their anti-establishment views, and
helped to bring Eastern consciousness to the West, and seemed to personify the
ideals of what Woodstock symbolized. And so much more.
So when Ginsberg got on stage, and put on a musical…errr…concert
of his poetry; well, let’s just say it was disappointing. Of course my respect
for his literary accomplishments was not diminished, but my confusion about
this choice of expression went something like this:
1) Wow. This guy really cannot sing and play in tune or in
time. This is painful to listen to. And it’s so distracting that I’m not paying
attention to his literary work, which is what I came to hear. My connection
with his art is lost.
2) Ginsberg wants to connect with us. Perhaps he thinks that
reading his works of poetry will be too limited and stagnant, or maybe that we
won’t assimilate the works if they are read.
3) Ginsberg wants to have fun with this. He’s a genius and
he can do whatever he wants. Music is fun, and the emotions it conveys are
universal.
As I watched other audiences members (and especially my own
bandmates) squirm uncomfortably in their seats while Ginsberg sang his poetry,
my teenage mind came to some important realizations that evening. I was
struggling with my own artistic direction and expression at the time. I was
considering pursuing a career in creative writing, and was entering fiction
contests. I was in a gigging band, majoring in music, and writing songs. I
spent my summers at the School of Art studying life drawing and oil painting
(and briefly considered switching my major to Fine Arts). I wanted to express
myself, obviously, but you can’t jump from every window at once, right? You have to pick one.
That evening was a fine illustration of the power of music.
Creators want to connect emotions and ideas with others. Here was a master of
words and ideas; yet Ginsberg chose music to convey those powerful ideas. But why
couldn’t his work speak for itself?
Both Gilbert and Ginsberg developed high-level, original
creative ideas over time. I was willing to pay to sit there to listen to and
assimilate their ideas, because they had value to me. Therefore it was
confounding, and almost a bit condescending, that they presumably assumed that
their audience came for a dog and pony show and thus they decided to water down
their ideas with music that wasn’t up to the standards of their mastered art
form.
So, bringing it back to Gilbert’s sing-along. Did we need
that? Not at all—I think we’d have all been happy campers without the
sing-along. Gilbert has a great mind: her novel Signature of All Things should have won the Pulitzer last year. Did
Gilbert feel that she needed the music to make her presentation more
connective, more potent, more like a “moment?” Or, maybe she just thought it
would be fun.
As Gilbert says about the great paradox of creativity—it is so important that it means everything. And it is also so unnecessary that it means nothing at all.
