GOLDMINING #1 - Bridge To Somewhere

A Creative Diary

Welcome to the first issue of GOLDMINING, a creative diary. I find the creative process ever mysterious, humbling, and enlivening. I’m an advocate for anyone engaging in it. I think it’s a force for good, and a direct channel to universal love. This series chronicles my own practice in this space.

I’m choosing to do so partly to hold myself accountable and put my money where my mouth is (I sometimes wonder if I wax eloquent about the creative life more than I truly embody it). I also wish to offer a nudge to anyone who knows, with a burning knowingness, that there are gifts within them they’re not fully tending to, that they must unearth, yet something unnamed is in the way. How to handle that, as far as I can tell, is simply in the doing. The plain, un‑cinematic doing.

Recently, that “doing” has looked like sitting with big questions. The who‑am‑I and what‑is‑my‑purpose type of questions. The unoriginal, self‑absorbed, yet somehow essential questions. I find them to be oppressive, and I personify them as bullies. This notion felt like a starting place for a song.

I know that songs, or the answers to my big important questions, don’t reside in numbing out or passive entertainment, so I’m trying to read more, stay off my phone etc. I brought A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry to India, fittingly, and am enjoying it. It’s a tender, sad book. In it, I learned of The Towers of Silence: a circular, roofless stone structure used in Parsi funeral rites, where the dead are laid out on stone terraces for vultures and sun to return them to the elements. The idea is that earth and fire should not be polluted by the body, so the work of letting go is handed over to the sky and its scavengers. It’s a cool string of words, The Towers of Silence, and could make for a good song title, or lyric, I thought.

I began by writing a lean and unremarkable poem:

“I brought my questions

To the Towers of Silence

And watched the vultures

Devour the answers”

A friend of mine likes to say: There are so many answers I don’t have the questions for. I love this line. There is something very sensible inside of its nonsense. Reminds me of E.E. Cummings:

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”

I used my friend’s quip as a springboard for my Morning Pages, which are simply three pages of stream‑of‑consciousness writing without letting your pen stop. Sometimes, and not so much in this case, treasures emerge:

“There are so many answers

I don’t have the questions for

Like I am who

Do what next

Not why now

Oh god oh why oh how

Did I become so sick of myself”

I’ll spare you the rest.

After this exercise, I picked up my guitar and something came without too much fuss. Although I didn’t use anything from the Morning Pages, they were part of a series of exercises that opens the channel and awakens creativity. Each gesture is a bridge to the next bridge (and I don’t mean the bridge of a song, although that can certainly happen). As we cross these creative bridges, works — both great and pitiful — appear, and they, in turn, are just more bridges. It makes me think of the stellar tune “Bridge to Nowhere” by Sam Roberts. Check it out if you don’t mind the sting of hearing something you wish you wrote.

I should mention, before any of this, I listened to a Taoist story upon waking, about a man tormented by his own big questions. He goes to a monk by a river who is watching lotus flowers drift past. The monk points to one that is closed tight upon itself. The man asks when it will open. The monk says he doesn’t know, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe never, if something within it isn’t ready.

I wrote this song in a Mumbai hotel room, looking out the window at the ocean. Writing in front of a window is optimal, and if there’s water out there, all the better.

XORG

“Questions (Tower of Silence)” :

LYRICS:

Questions

Questions

I woke up to questions dancing on my nose

I woke up to questions acting like they know me

But I won’t tell those fuckers anything

They can flog and waterboard me

They can splay and flay and quarter me, yeah

I woke up to questions yapping like a little dog

I woke up to questions oppressing like an oligarchy

But I won’t pry open the lotus

Something within it needs more time

Why would I sound off a siren

Inside of this tower of silence

For I am a tower of silence

The vultures devour the answers

Inside of this tower of silence

(Now, I do have qualms with this song. I think I should be more creative than “fuckers”. Maybe “goonsquad” or “henchmen”. “Squad” will create a near rhyme with “flog” and “wa-ter”, so I’d probably start there. Or “monsters” could work. The ending, after the lotus part, feels a little meandering, like it’s a different song. And I wonder if I’m forcing the “Tower of Silence” bit, just because I think the words are cool. Like, is it getting too poetic and not lyrical enough? All stuff to beat to death later. The important thing is, it’s born, it’s documented, and I love it — well, most of it. On to the next, and into the mine.)

Hotel Window, Mumbai

“Bridge To Nowhere - Sam Roberts

The Towers Of Silence - Mumbai (Photo: Internet)

This Young Man - E.E. Cummings

Morning Pages