Pearl-Diving

I believe that musical art should be like poetry.

To make good poetry you have to go spelunking beneath habitual mind and seek out our treasure: the invisible connections between things. It's a practice of finding the hidden light that secretly illuminates the world.

We do not need more celebrations of ego to reflect back to us from their shiny surfaces the sad fact that our outward-manifesting lust is driven by money and prestige. For God's sake already, if we know one thing it is that ego will not save us. Not ours, and not anybody else's. All ego ever does is churn up the surface of the water like a motor boat.

What we do in fact desperately need is an art that can reach into our shadow places and show us what is hidden there. We need artists who go down deep, who are more like pearl divers than they are like media personalities or world-dominating corporations. We need artists who can offer us the wonder of touching those small, improbable by-products of irritation: the precious stone of hurt turned into beauty, brought up at great risk from the depths. A pearl-diver's art would say: see--this radiance is hidden in your dark waters too, down in the muck and in that hard, rough, unbeautiful shell. Just look: it is a beauty that might redeem us all if only we can find it.