Just the Tip

Just the Tip

"Approximately 90 percent of an iceberg is found under water.  What you can actually see is only the smallest portion."

Staci sat next to me with her knees pulled up against her chest.  On the lounge chair by the futon, she sat quietly, listening and watching.  Her playful eyes darted back and forth from my hands, to my face, and then back to my fingers.  I can’t say for sure, but I bet she questioned the empty look on my face. I think she probably expected to see something more than what she was seeing in my countenance – something more idealistic and romantic than my firm, blank stare. 

My eyes were focused on a candle that sat on a coffee table in front of me, but I think it was obvious to her that they were not actually seeing it.

“When I compose a piece of music,” I later told her, “And I’m really in the groove – my visual faculties dissipate. They’re like a blind man’s eyes; they stare, but they don’t see anything.”

“That’s odd,” She shrugged.  And I suppose it is a bit odd – but so is Staci. 

When I agreed to let her sit in on a writing session, I was living, rent-free, in her spare room because I had just sold or given away all of my belongings save my guitar, my amp, and a few outfits.  I had purged most everything I owned, including my home, in preparation for my move across the globe.  And at the time, everything I owned could fit pretty easily into one large suitcase. 

“Would it bother you if I sat in on one of your writing sessions?  I know you're going to sit in that room and play all day right - just like you did yesterday and the day before?  Well, I’d like to see what happens in there.” She chimed.

I told her that would be fine.  Weird, but fine.  And later that evening, in the small, dimly-lit room in the house that I found perfect for the solitary journey of music composition, I uncoiled a black instrument cable and secured the cedar grains of my acoustic guitar into my hands.  I pulled my handcrafted instrument from its case and eased myself down onto the futon. Turning the tuning pegs between my thumb and forefinger, I bent inelegant notes into shape and looked over at Staci sitting in her chair.

“I have to warn you,” I lamented, as the strings on the guitar twisted into tune, “this is probably going to be a little less romantic than you think.”

“That’s okay. But just in case you give birth to a song today, I want to see it happen.  I just want to see how you actually bring a song into existence.  I want to see the baby pop out.” Included in the list of things-that-make-Staci-odd is her exceptional ability to talk about serious things in a casual way. 

“I’m not even sure that I know how it works.”  I answered.  “Maybe you can help me figure it out.”

“Of course I can,” She smiled.  “What else do I have to do today?  It’s not like you need me to help you pack your suitcase.” 

She emphasized the word suitcase (as opposed to suitcaseS) to highlight the fact that I had shirked all of my possessions except for what could fit into one suitcase.  At that point - all of my worldly possessions were stuffed without much coercion into one large bag. I would be moving across the world in a matter of weeks, and my baggage allowance was 100 lbs.  With my guitar and case alone weighing 30 pounds, I was left with just under 70 lbs worth of material wealth. 

Still, I felt lighter and freer than I had in years.  I no longer owned a vehicle.  I didn’t have a closet full of clothes I never wore. I didn’t have a TV.  There were no decorative rugs to vacuum, no candleholders to dust, no drawers stuffed with koozies and fingernail clippers.  At that point, the only possessions that could lay claim to me were a week’s worth of clothing, my Nook, and my guitar. 

I was a living material-weight-loss commercial.  Look at us! Together, my stuff and I weighed 4,ooo pounds, and now we’re down to 250 lbs between us.  We shed all our unwanted fat in just a few months - And you can too! 

I no longer watered or mowed my yard.  I didn’t have one.  I didn’t pay my cable bill.  I didn’t have one.  I was liberated from my belongings.  My time was no longer chained to decisions and obligations.  Instead, my time was free, at large - ready for me to use it as I wished.  So for a solid week, I depleted entire days in that little room at Staci’s, writing songs by candlelight while she carried on about her business.  But now she wanted to watch.    

And watch she did.  At first I was too conscious of the fact that she was in the room to properly get in my zone.  I felt her eyes on me.  I kept looking over at her when I played something unpleasant to see if she was wincing.  I found myself listening to my playing through her ears, and what I was hearing wasn’t pretty. 

In a normal writing session, when you’re by yourself, a wrong note is a success.  Okay – I’ve eliminated that note from the list of possible notes.  But with another person listening, a wrong note is a failure.  It’s one thing to wander aimlessly through a thick timber of notes and chords when you’re alone, but quite another thing to do it in the company of an onlooker.

It’s okay to take musical risks and make mistakes when you're alone, but when people are listening they typically want a well-rehearsed song - not the sputter of notes and the stammering of unplanned improvising that musicians do when they're writing a song or jamming in solitude.

I frowned over top of my guitar from my spot on the futon.  This wasn’t going to be easy. I’d never allowed someone to sit in on the writing process before, but that’s likely because no one had ever asked.  People don’t want to hear the process of songwriting, they want to hear the product - the finished song. 

But sitting next to me, darting her eyes from my hands, to my face, and then back to my fingers, was a girl who seemed to innately understand that a finished song is only the tip of the iceberg.  The finished song is only ten percent.   Underneath that peak of floating musical precision, there are day’s worth of submerged song parts that have been reworked, thrown out, or rewritten all together.  Underneath the 3.5 minutes of song, there are endless hours of writing, rewriting, and rehearsal.  A finished song is just the ten percent that you can see. 

Eventually, because of her calm and quiet - I forgot Staci was there, and I began my slow ease into the writer’s zone.  I submerged into the dark world underneath the tip of the iceberg.  While the rest of my senses retired into temporary oblivion, my ears took over.  They focused in tightly on the dark warm tones that spilled out from my instrument, and they told my hands what to do.  

The way one’s eyes tell his legs to lengthen their strides when there is a ditch to cross, my ears told my fingers to jump up one fret here, to bend a string there, to relax and let that chord ring.  I was in the zone. Staci was still there, but I was no longer aware of her. 

For hours, my musical iceberg sifted, underwater, through an ocean of sounds.  My mind sunk below the surface.  My eyes no longer functioning, I glided through a sea of possible parts - drifted through note combinations, I watched chords and choruses swim in and out of my reach. 

And then, slowly, the tip of the iceberg emerged from under the cold water.  It moved, glacially, up from below and it materialized from the dark waters of improvisation.  Refusing to stay submerged, the song’s buoyancy floated it to the wavy surface.  The bulk of the iceberg was still underwater, but a song had emerged.  

I surfaced with the song, and standing triumphantly on the peak of the iceberg with a new song below me, I refocused my eyes.  Suddenly I saw a candle on the table for the first time in hours, even though I’d stared at it for just as long.

And then I turned, and there was Staci – still in the same chair, but no longer curled up tight.  She’d been glued there listening for over two hours, and during that time she’d shifted from her knees-to-chest position into a more comfortable position with her legs sprawled over one arm of the chair. 

As I adjusted back to the reality that existed outside of my ears, my guitar, and my hands, Staci stayed quiet for a bit.  I dried myself off from the wet world of creativity that I had been submerged in, and back on land I leaned heavily into the futon.  My ears still heard sounds, but they were no longer at my body's control center. 

“How?  What…So what were you doing just there? I mean, there’s a song there now right?”  She asked.

I nodded.

“Just this morning that song didn’t exist, and now it does.  You had your baby!  So how did you do that?”

“I guess I’ve never given it proper thought. I don’t really know.” 

Staci squirmed in her chair, unhappy with my answer and presumably sore from the lengthy session of sitting.

I looked down at the strings on the neck of my instrument and pinned one of them against the fretboard.  “I can’t really say exactly, but I feel like the song already existed.  I just set it free. Does that make sense?”

“Not really.”

“It’s like this, I didn’t feel like I was creating the song at all. I just felt like I was setting it free. I guess I was just eliminating the almost infinite combinations of tones, rhythms, and melodies that weren’t part of the song.  All of the chords, taps, and sounds I just made already existed in the realm of possibility.  I just had to play through thousands and thousands of possibilities to eliminate all the stuff that wasn’t the song.”

“That’s deep, man.”  I love Staci for her philosophical inclination, but even more for the way she wraps it in informality.  “So what you’re saying is that song already existed?”

It’s odd that even though I’ve written songs since I was 14, no one had ever asked me how I did it before Staci.  And suddenly there she was, insisting that I articulate it to her - persevering through hours of my improvisational wanderings so that she could understand the process of songwriting – so that she could get a firsthand look at the part of the iceberg that most people ignore, the ninety percent that is submerged.   

Staci has a Masters degree in anatomy or physiology or something like that.  She has spent her entire life studying the parts of the body you can’t see - the stuff at the skeletal and muscular level.  She can watch an athlete limp into a room, and pretty accurately describe what is happening below the skin before the athlete even describes the injury to her, because she has studied the stuff you can’t see.  She knows every muscle and bone in the body. 

Unlike most of us, who focus our attention on the outward, observable stuff, Staci concerns herself with what’s happening below the surface – her focus is on the things that are imperceptible – under the skin.  Just like an iceberg, the bulk of our bodies are hidden, and that hidden part is the part that Staci wants to understand. 

It should have come as no surprise to me then, that Staci would be the first to ask to see the hidden part of my songs - that she would be the first to show a fascination about what happens in my head when I compose a song.  That she would want to see, not just the ten percent of the iceberg that floats above water, but the ninety percent that stays submerged.

And suddenly I knew how to explain it.  “You know the statue of David right?  The one Michelangelo did?”

“Yes, I know the one. But I’m not sure this is helping me understand.” 

“Stay with me.  I heard this anecdote about Michelangelo.  This guy told Michelangelo that the statue of David was so well done, that you could almost understand his body at the muscular and skeletal level.  You could see the inner workings of David’s body, even though you knew that inside it was just marble.”

“Right.  So where is this going?” 

“Well, this guy asked Michelangelo how he managed to create such a beautiful, sinewy, humanlike statue from a hunk of marble.  He asked how the artist made it look like it had muscles tissue, bone, and a beating heart. Michelangelo responded that he didn’t create the statue, he just set it free.”

“Just like your song?”

“Exactly.  Michelangelo said that David already existed in that slab of marble, and all he had to do was chisel away all of the not-David.  He didn’t have to create David at all.  David already existed.  He just had to set him free.”

“So essentially what I watched you do just now was cut away all of the not-song.”

“Exactly.  All of those parts were available for me before I sat down with my guitar.  A musician’s task isn’t to whip something completely novel into existence; it’s to sift through the infinite possibilities - to eliminate almost every possible tonal and rhythmic combination, leaving only the few that suit his mood at the moment he’s writing.” 

And suddenly, because of Staci’s persistence, I knew something I didn’t know before.  Maybe deep down, on a subconscious level, I’d known this since I was 14.  But now this revelation, like the tip of the iceberg, like my song, had floated to the surface.

I placed my guitar back in its case, and snapped the latches on the side.  With Staci still sitting in her chair thinking, I coiled the black cable back into a loop, and carried it with my instrument back to the spare bedroom where I was squatting.

And there, on the bed, was my suitcase.  My one suitcase.  The bag that was to hold everything that I hadn’t chiseled away from my life. 

All artists know, whether the idea has floated to the top or not, that creation is about eliminating.  It’s about purging.  It’s about removing the stuff that doesn’t suit your taste.  It’s about chiseling away the marble that isn’t David or deciding that a major chord doesn’t belong in that bar of music.  It’s about taking the things you don’t need and ridding your canvas of them.

And there on Staci’s spare bed was proof that maybe, even though I didn’t know it consciously, I knew it subconsciously all along.  On that bed was the single suitcase that could hold my entire life in it.  I had chiseled away all of the things that were not-me.  All of that heavy marble that had encased me for so long – I had successfully hammered it away so that all that was left was what suited my taste. 

For so long, I attempted to make my life a work of art by adding things to it, when really – everything I needed was already there.  Like the song I wrote with Staci in the room, or Michelangelo’s David, a wonderful version of my life already existed - I didn’t need to add anything. I just needed to eliminate the not-me.  I needed to set myself free from a vehicle to maintain, a TV to watch, a cable bill to pay, a bunch of stuff that collected dust.  I didn’t need to insert something new into my life; I needed to exercise those things that didn’t suit my mood.

Yesterday I sat alone on my own small futon and played that song I composed, only a few short months ago, with Staci watching.  I played it, and I looked at my room, and the few things I still own.  A bookshelf, a few books, my guitar, a few clothes, and a bed. Other than that I have nothing.  There are two rooms in my flat that are completely empty, and I have no intentions of putting anything in them - because the rest of that stuff doesn't suit my mood, it's not part of my particular taste.  I tried those things out, but they didn't go in MY song.

I held my warm guitar in my hands, let the last note ring, and then enjoyed the silence.  Maybe, I thought, our lives are really just a short space of silence upon which we get to write a song. I hope so.  But even more, I hope that the song I've managed to write so far is just the tip of the iceberg.