This Business of Dreaming

It is written in Ecclesiastes: “A dream comes with a multitude of business, and a fool’s voice with a multitude of words.”  Dreamers though we all are, we rarely stop to look at the burdens our dreams bring to our lives.  We’ve been taught to believe in the imagination.  Yes, I also believe in the imagination.  But its burdens are there, nonetheless.  When we dream of a better world, a better lover, or a better type of work, a part of ourselves always wakes up crying when it discovers the gap between these visions and reality.  So wouldn’t it be better to learn how not to dream at all?

Imagination is not just fantasy, however, it is also concentration – and in this difference lies an important piece of wisdom.  If you close your eyes and try to picture what is happening in the room around you, you are using your imagination, but you are also discovering the world, albeit imperfectly.  In fact, it is perfectly true that all experience exists only because we have imaginations.  I think this is what William Blake meant when he wrote, “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”  Not that anything we imagine is real, but rather, that what is real only comes to us when we let it capture our imaginations.  The Thai meditation teachers often use this phrase, “capturing the imagination,” to describe the correct attitude a meditator should have to his meditation.  If a meditator tries to keep his attention on an object, say, his breath, he will quickly find this impossible to do unless he finds imaginative ways to picture, sense, or feel his breath.  In other words, it is only his imagination that allows him to stay with what he is trying to understand.

Music is no different: it is, and always has been, just another way to dream.  People talk about music today as being in crisis, or lacking soul, but music itself is never good or bad.  What decides whether music is worthwhile or not is whether it leads a person to discover something in his world that had escaped his notice before.  It’s true that this view of music as based in understanding the world isn’t very fashionable.  Certainly, that’s not how the music business evaluates music.  But I believe that unless music leads us into a state of discovery, it will always become burdensome in time.  The melody that gets stuck in your head can open up a world, or make your present one appear tight and constricted.  “It’s a Small World After All” is both the title of the song and the effect it has on you.

The English Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge, used to distinguish between “imagination” and “fancy”.  For Coleridge, imagination was the act of bringing something totally new into one’s consciousness, whereas fancy was the more mundane act of reconfiguring already existing ideas and elements.  This idea of fancy covers a lot of how the music business works today.  It is designed to reward people for interesting reconfigurations of already-existing ideas: new sounds combined with old melodies, samples, references, remixes, etc.  And of course, from one point of view, all music is based on ideas from the past.  But to see music in this way, as today’s music business does, by and large, reduces the experience of music to a predetermined set of “elements” – which is to say it rules out the possibility of real imagination, which has nothing to do with finding notes or chords that have never been played before, but rather, with the personal experience of discovering new in one’s personal world.  That’s what people call soul, and it will never be replaceable.

A large part of my journey as a songwriter has been learning to be honest about what counts as true discovery, and what is simply the “multitude of words” that Ecclesiastes says makes up the voice of a fool.  When I write now, more and more, I try not to ask whether my songs are good or bad; rather, I try to ask if they are true, that is, if they show me something about myself I hadn’t seen before.  The point of this honesty isn’t to win any prizes in virtue; it’s to make something that has real value.  For however much we might be tempted to look for value in recognition or wealth, these are other people’s dreams that we’ve picked up along the way.  They have no real value for us.  The dream that truly belongs to me is the one that truly reveals me, and so it is the only one I can truly value.

So if it can be said that a dream comes with much business, we might ask some questions about this business: what exactly is it?  Is it profitable?  If not, then why are we so hard at work?

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Love Songs From the Tree of Life

There’s this famous interview with Bob Dylan from 1991 in which he lashes out at the idea of a “love song.”  Dylan says at one point,

“It’s a proven fact: most people who say ‘I love you’ don’t mean it. Doctors have proved that. So love generates a lot of songs. Probably more than a lot. Now it’s not my intention to have love influence my songs. Any more than it influenced Chuck Berry’s songs or Woody Guthrie’s or Hank Williams’. Hank Williams, they’re not love songs. You’re degrading them calling them love songs. Those are songs from the Tree of Life. There’s no love on the Tree of Life. Love is on the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil. So we have a lot of songs in popular music about love. Who needs them? Not you, not me.”

You can see Dylan’s obsession with sincerity throughout his career, which is why no one should have been surprised to see him embrace Christianity.  In the Christian tradition, there’s an emphasis on not getting seduced by the inconstant, insincere things of this world.  The “Tree of Life” Dylan is speaking of is the one God planted in the Garden of Eden, the one that gave humans immortality, yet the one that humans forsook in favor of the other tree, the “Tree of Knowledge,” which gave us curiosity and death at the same time.

When you look at most popular love songs from this point of view of sincerity, it’s hard not to agree with Dylan.  After all, popular music, at least in our culture, coincides with advertising: it’s designed to make us want something.  In fact, just as is the case in advertising, it’s designed to make us want something we can never have: eternal excitement from another person.  The pretty woman is always walking down the street, and she always turns you on.  Love songs, seen in that way, are simply false advertising.  And in that way Dylan’s right: after a while, any sensitive person grows disenchanted with the bait, thinks it over, and says, “Enough.”

But Dylan is wrong that we don’t need love songs, just as he’s wrong that there is no love on the Tree of Life.  If you think of love as just a form of grasping at another person or pleasure, then yes, love binds us to this world and makes us forget the perspective of immortality.  From that point of view, it is un-spiritual.  But what Dylan and so many other monotheists forget is that all love – even ordinary, worldly, carnal love – presents us with the challenge of appreciating something in the face of its impermanence.  When we love, we are brought face to face with the truth of separation, that in time we will all be divided from the things that are dear and pleasing to us.  It is at these times that we realize that love is not getting something so much as letting go of something else.  And in the letting go, something eternal opens us within our mortal existence.  This is not just a pretty idea that the pious believe in, it is something we are constantly touching, however faintly and unconsciously, every moment.  So this is why we need love songs: not to trick ourselves into believing that a beautiful woman is always approaching, but rather, to remember that mixture of sadness and longing that is the beginning of wisdom.

I’ve been realizing something about my songwriting process recently.  I’ve been realizing that writing emotionally honest music has nothing to do with what I choose to write about, or even the music I set it to.  It has to do with understanding what I’m afraid of on any given day, and writing from the place of that confrontation with my fear.  For when we understand how to articulate our lives through the phrase “I am afraid that …” we understand what we need to let go of in order to be happy.  It could be fear of doing taxes or fear of a divorce.  Either way, thinking about life in terms of fear opens us up to the prospect of a new beginning at every moment.  This is love, and all songs that point towards this newness are love songs, whatever they are supposedly “about”.

In Dylan’s words, you can hear the frustration of someone older watching the world confuse love with youth.  These are old blues.  Popular music wants love to seem like the world splitting open for the first time, and old people can’t find themselves in that narrative.   But the newness of love isn’t the newness of youth – that’s the mistake both old and young make.  The newness of love is the newness that comes from having put down our old burdens of loneliness, not the newness of getting something for the first time.  This is why both the old and the young need their love songs – love songs from the Tree of Life.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Yes … And

A friend of mine who does improv-comedy told me being good at that type of performance comes down to staying true to the phrase: “Yes … and.”  In other words, the worse thing an improv-comedian can do on stage is to say “no” – either verbally or mentally – to what his partner has spontaneously started to do.  On the other hand, because the momentum of performance depends on constantly raising the stakes for the audience, it’s also not enough just to agree with one’s partner (saying “yes”).  So the alchemy of improvisation involves both a “yes” as well as an “and”.

Listening to my friend, I realized that that the phrase “yes … and” also has more serious implications for the human search for happiness, because it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between past and present action and the way we create suffering for ourselves by confusing the two.  That is, when something feels wrong or out of sorts, we tend to see our present condition of misery as inseparable from the past that we’ve inherited.  We think, for example, “I feel sad now because she was angry with me earlier.”  We don’t see that when we suffer from the past we are always doing something in the present to validate this past as a cause of our suffering.  It’s as though the past were an improv-partner and, rather than responding to it, we stand frozen on stage, saying “I don’t like that.  I’m not playing anymore.”  When the scene is ruined, exactly whose fault is it?

We don’t like to focus on the present in searching for the causes of our suffering, first because it’s hard to do (i.e. it requires more skill,) but also because, I think, we are afraid that by focusing on the present we are unconsciously validating the past.  We think, for example, “If I look at my present actions as the cause of my suffering, I will be condoning other people’s bad actions.”  In fact, the opposite is true: by not looking at one’s own role in creating suffering in the present, a person forfeits his ability to alter the meaning of the past.  Again, the principle of “yes … and” applies here.  It’s only by saying “yes” to what has happened that an improviser acquires the power to enter the scene and change it with his “and”.  It’s also important to understand that saying “yes” to the past doesn’t mean approving of it.  The word “yes” here means, “Yes, I understand what has happened,” not, “Yes, I agree.”  The word “no”, on the other hand, means, “No, I want no part in changing this” – which is to say, “Yes, I accept everything exactly as it is.”

In the Thai Forest Tradition of meditation, teachers sometimes talk about the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths as “duties”.  They mean, in other words, that the “truths” the Buddha taught about suffering aren’t just abstract ideas – they are calls to action.  But just as there are four Noble Truths, there are also four different types of action.  The first two are important here: the First Noble Truth is that there is some suffering in all ordinary human experience, and the corresponding duty is to understand this suffering.  The Second Noble Truth, however, is that the cause of suffering is clinging, and so the corresponding duty is to abandon that clinging.  These two truths in many ways refer to the difference between the past and the present: we experience suffering in relation to the past, but it only becomes suffering because we are clinging to something in the present.  So the key is to know the difference between when to passively “understand” suffering and when to actively “abandon” its cause.  Most of the time, we make ourselves miserable because we furiously try to get rid of what has already come to pass and yet are remarkably complacent with regard to our present actions.

Another way of saying this is that life is at its core an improvisation, yet we pretend that there is a script.  That, I believe, is the reason why most relationships fail.  At some point, someone always gets angry that the other person isn’t playing by the rules.  It’s helpful to see this anger as a failure to act in the present moment.  This is, again, not to say that one should endure abuse from another person.  It is simply to say that our desire for “rules” is based on the childish belief that we ought to be excused from acting in the present moment.  Have you ever overheard a phone conversation in which someone is complaining about his or her partner?  If you listen to the tone of voice, rather than the content, you might be surprised how much it resembles the tone of voice involved in expressions of procrastination.  “He’s so difficult!” sounds remarkably like “I don’t want to go to work today!”  But if all the world’s a stage, the audience doesn’t know the difference between frustration and inaction.  And on some level, neither does the part of us that wants to be happy.

All of this means, of course, that being happy is a skill in the same way that improv-comedy is.  But our ability to learn this skill depends to a large degree on the beliefs we hold about ourselves.  And it’s amazing how quickly a person can learn once he refuses to say “no” to anything in his past.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

The Voices In Your Head

My teacher likes to say, “When you meditate, if you hear loud voices talking in your head, consider that a sign of progress.  After all, those voices have been there all along – you just never stopped to notice them before.”  I find it funny that our culture regards the phenomenon of hearing voices as a sign of sickness, when in fact the opposite is true: to not be aware of the voices in our heads is perhaps the greatest sign of being vulnerable.  Jiddu Krishnamurti used to say, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”  One of the beliefs our profoundly sick society clings to is the notion that when “normal” people make decisions, they do so based on rational criteria that allow them to bypass the subjective experience they have of their minds.  This illusion of rationality does a great deal of harm.  For one thing, it drives the voices that truly guide us underground where we can’t see them.  This means we can’t really observe the consequences of what these voices are telling us to do.  Take, for example, the idea that many of us have that it is good to work hard.  Most of us understand this idea through so-called rational thought: it is good to work hard because that brings success, material security, and happiness here in the world.  But the intention to work hard is not just an idea, it is also a voice that we all have in our heads, and very often that voice is not always a friendly one.  If we listen a little more closely to the voice itself, we often find it isn’t coaching us so much as yelling at us: “Work, you lazy son-of-a-bitch!”  This is why many people who follow this voice without actually listening to its tone and intention find that their work, surprisingly, brings them only failure, material insecurity, and deep sadness.  One implication of this is that it is only when we can let go of our belief that the beliefs we have are well-guided and accept that we are driven mainly by unreliable, untested voices in our minds that we can begin to have some understanding about why we aren’t as fulfilled in life as we’d like to be.

T.S. Eliot recognized that one of the functions of poetry was not just to manipulate language into beautiful forms, but also, to bring to consciousness what he called the “auditory imagination.”  This meant, essentially, that poets don’t just “think” about things and then put them into words – they actually discover already-existing voices in their heads and transcribe these.  I don’t think Eliot was being sentimental or arguing that we all have some sort of genius inside of us that is waiting to pop out onto the page.  The point of listening to the voices in our heads is not that all of these voices are good or beautiful; rather, that when we listen rather than think, we understand the voices in our heads as they exist on their own, rather than as they exist as a means for some other end.  Eliot called this simultaneously “seeking the beginning and the end” through what is heard.  For example, just now I thought I’d try to describe the room I’m currently writing in, but rather than simply writing down my thoughts about it, I thought I’d try waiting to hear what the voices in my head were actually saying.  I heard a low baritone voice say that this is “an antique sort of place.”  There is a truth in this phrase that I would miss if I tried only to make my words a means to some rational expression.  The phrase as I heard it is not just information, it is a manifestation of emotion and intention, and in it I can see not just the “what” of my thoughts but also the “why”.  In this case, I can hear that the voice sounds like an old friend of my father.  If he were sitting with me right now, he would have found this place pretentious.  So by channeling his voice, I gain some self-awareness that I am not just objectively describing my surroundings, but also, reacting to them through the voice of someone who finds them pretentious.  This type of poetic consciousness, in other words, doesn’t just produce beauty – it also produces authentic self-knowledge, as opposed to the untested ideas about self that we normally are taught to trust.

Several people I know went to see John of God this weekend.  John of God is a Brazilian medium who allows different “entities” into him in order to guide him through the process of healing others.  I didn’t go see him.  I’ve personally never found a belief in spirits useful, but neither do I have much patience for those who scoff at the idea that we can be “guided” by a foreign presence.  I would argue that we are always being guided, whether we are honest about it or not.  Understanding this guidance in terms of actual spirits with personalities and metaphysical reality might be too much for some people (it is for me,) but that doesn’t mean we are off the hook in trying to understand this process of guidance and how we can use it to overcome the obstacles in our lives, rather than remain stuck where we are.  Perhaps the poet Rimbaud said it best when he said, “I is another.”  In the end, our development of a harmonious relationship to what is foreign in us is much more important than our ideas about what that foreignness is.

Another way of thinking about this is that the voices in our heads are like the strangers we meet in a foreign country.  If we simply obey them, we are bound to get in trouble.  But if we don’t listen to them, we aren’t going to find our way either, nor will we get anywhere by pretending the country is one we’ve already visited.  Between faith in spirits and faith in reason lies the true path: the art of learning to listen.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

No Pleasure But In Peace

The Buddha taught: N’atthi santi param sukham.  This means, literally, “There is no greater pleasure than peace.”  It’s interesting that the Buddha considered peace to be a type of pleasure, since we might be tempted to think that pleasure and peace are actually at odds with one another.  That, at least, is what our Judeo-Christian culture teaches us.  Pleasure, we are told, is by definition dangerous, and those who don’t learn to deny themselves pleasure end up going wrong, punished in some way, and losing any shot at happiness.  It’s interesting, though, that the word for “pleasure” in Pali (sukha) also means “happiness”.  The implication is that our desire for pleasure, far from being intrinsically evil, is actually our greatest teacher about what it means to lead a good life.  This doesn’t mean that all pursuits of pleasure are good, of course.  But what makes a pursuit of pleasure good or bad is whether or not it brings us peace.  “Peace” here means reliability, for if something seems like a pleasure but is unreliable, then it is really a form of stress, no matter how much we would like it to be otherwise.  In other words, the Buddha asks us to look not at whether pleasure itself is good or bad, but rather, at whether the particular pleasures we are chasing actually bring peace to our lives.  If they don’t bring peace, then they are only approximations of pleasure.

One implication of this is that love is also a type of pleasure, and its value lies in whether or not it brings us closer to peace.  Our romantic culture recoils at this idea, because we like to associate love with attachment and commitment on the one hand, and on the other, pleasure with all that is fleeting, dirty, and corrupt.  This too is the work of a Judeo-Christian culture that evaluates actions according to whether they are lawful or not, rather than according to whether they bring peace.  As a result, young people are taught to choose romantic partners based on how well a potential partner fits into their lives.  “Compatibility” thus becomes the highest virtue, and it is often not until middle age that a person first asks himself, “Have I found any peace in love?”  Meanwhile, such a person’s desire for pleasure has gone unrecognized and has been driven underground, where it expresses itself in the cheapest and most unfulfilling ways.  Thus, romantic culture reaches its epitome in the archetype of the “desperate housewife”: the person who in the name of this socially acceptable “love” has found neither peace nor pleasure.

I believe that beyond our society’s obsessions with dichotomies of chaste/promiscuous, virgin/whore, etc., lies another, more fulfilling way of looking at love.  I would call this type of love, for lack of a better word, “friendship”, though I’m aware that what I’m talking about is not normally what is meant by being friends.  The type of friendship I have in mind might or might not involve sex, might or might not involve formal commitment – but this wouldn’t be its basis.  Its basis would be a mutual desire for peace, and a desire to place all other pleasures in line with this ultimate goal.  To some people, this scenario might sound like the absurd premise of a science-fiction novel.  These people might object: “You can’t reduce love to peace!  There’s passion, and trust, and …”  To which I’d respond, “Who told you those things were important?  How do you know you can you trust them?”  Because a lot of ideas about love we inherit from our elders come down to the belief that we ought to seek our own suffering, which is about as logical as the idea of an “unhappy happiness,” which is an irrational, yet apt description of what romantic love means to most people.

I spent the morning with a good friend of mine.  We were talking about the artist’s life, and how so much of it, unfortunately, gets lost in planning artistic goals for the future.  “One day, when I paint my masterpiece …”  “One day, when I write that novel …”  In my case, I have the tendency to look at the songs I written and think how inferior they are to the songs I would like to write in the future.  It helps me in these times to think about art as a type of pleasure.  Why else, after all, would I have signed on for a life in which money and praise are so scarce, if the music itself didn’t bring me pleasure?  Yet if pleasure is the goal, how do my thoughts about not having written my masterpiece contribute to that goal?  Very simply, they don’t.  N’atthi santi param sukham: there is no pleasure but in peace.

We live in a world in which it seems as though humans think only about their own pleasure, but in fact the opposite is true.  How could we do the absurd things we do if we actually took our desire for pleasure seriously?

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Clearing Space For Love

I was walking down the street yesterday with my head full of plans and preoccupations, when all of a sudden a woman came up to me, smiling knowingly.  As she got close, I realized she was an ex-girlfriend of a close friend of mine.  Without wanting to, I turned away and kept on walking.  My reaction bothered me.  Why did I do that?  This woman had always been nice to me, but for some reason the idea of having to enter her world repelled me.  I rationalized this for a few minutes, thinking about how messy her breakup with my friend had been.  “Maybe it’s right not to get involved in a conversation with her,” I said to myself.  After a while, though, it became clear that my ideas of social propriety were concealing the real truth, which was that she had surprised me, and in the moment of being caught off guard, I had feared she would snub me in some way.  I had feared she would start yelling, or insult me for being connected to her ex-boyfriend.  My rejection of her, in other words, stemmed from an unconscious fear that she would, in fact, reject me.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu likes to say that meditation is the art of developing stillness and clarity, and that these – stillness and clarity – are like the left and right feet that we coordinate when we walk.  In other words, meditation is the art of learning that there is no stillness without clarity, and no clarity without stillness.  This is a hard idea for us Americans to grasp.  Our culture promotes the opposite idea that clarity is something we can attain only by becoming busier, by working harder.  If life seems sad, it’s because we’re only going to therapy once a week instead of twice.  And the same is true of our attitudes towards love.  We want to know why we haven’t found true love, but the only path to clarity in this regard we’re willing to consider is the path of self-improvement.  More dates!  More exercise!  More self-help books!  Thich Nhat Hanh compares this to shaking a bottle of apple juice in order to get at its pulp.  The more you shake, the more the pulp mingles with the water.  It’s only when you let the juice sit that clarity between the pulp and the water emerges.  And so it is in matters of love.  Only in stillness does true love distinguish itself from the false kind.

We Americans also have a lot of misunderstandings about what stillness is.  We think stillness is a cabin in the woods, which is a convenient way of telling ourselves we’re wasting our time trying to find it in our lives.  After all, who gets to live in a cabin in the woods anymore?  How much of the day can you meditate or take long walks?  Not much at all.  Fortunately, however, stillness as it relates to the heart doesn’t rely on external stillness, though the latter can be a help at times.  The stillness of the heart has less to do with literally being quiet and more to do with clearing space in the mind to let what has to emerge emerge.  The stillness of the heart is not about chasing away commotion, but rather, in giving it enough space to work itself out.  It’s like a room full of screaming children.  If the room is a Manhattan studio, the noise will be unbearable.  If the room is a gymnasium, however, the noise will be tolerable.  I believe that a lot of our problems in love have to do with focusing, metaphorically speaking, on the screaming children rather than on the size of the room.  When we love someone, we tend to want to hole up with that person in the smallest possible emotional space.  We want to do the same activities as that person, see that person all the time, and know what that person is thinking.  This is equivalent to making romance the same as riding in the backseat of your parents’ car with your brother or sister.  Pretty soon, the kicking and pushing is going to drive you crazy.

Part of clearing space for love does involve trying to live a calm life, which may well explain why I acted badly to the woman on the street while in the middle of crazily running errands.  But there’s a limit to how much of this external calm we can ever hope to have.  The real task of clearing space for love is, to use Jack Kornfield’s words, learning to treat all experiences as side-effects.  That is, learning to see love as a space that can contain many different types of experiences – pleasant and unpleasant – none of which has anything to do with the love itself, which is itself not an experience so much as a spacious container that holds experiences.  In this way, we can use clarity about the difference between love and experience to create stillness in our emotional lives, rather than waiting for stillness to bring us clarity on its own.  Most people see love in terms of proof of love, though, which is to say, they reduce love to a set of predictable experiences they want to have.  When we do this, however, it’s equivalent to shoving our love in a small closet.  We don’t see anything about love, and all we feel is the pain of flailing around in a tiny, enclosed space.

The principle of clearing space for love applies in music too.  One mantra I often tell myself when I play for others is, “This changes nothing.”  I say this to myself to remember that the love I have for music, and the love I have for those who are listening, can never be reduced to an experience or response.  Whether I play the “right” notes or get the “right” response from an audience has nothing to do with the value of my music.  The value of music comes not from a certain arrangement of notes, but rather, from the readiness of a heart to hold them.  This is why the Taoists say that the value of a pot isn’t its clay, but rather, the negative space inside it that allows it to be filled.  In the same way, music is good or bad in relation to the space one clears away for it.  The notes change nothing.  The performance changes nothing.  All music is masterful if it comes from a still mind, just as all experience is love if it comes from a spacious heart.

If I see that woman on the street tomorrow, I hope I will be ready to smile back at her.  And my smile will mean: “Yes, love is messy.  But how are you today?”

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

You Can Count on Me

One of the main recurring ideas in Ajahn Lee teaching is that an unhappy mind is characterized by the presence of “effluents”, or tendencies in the mind to flow out into the world in search of a resting place.  The reason these effluents constitute an unhappy mind, of course, is that no resting place, no stable source of happiness, exists in the world.  Normally, we don’t think in these terms.  We think of the world as coming in to invade our thoughts, rather than our thoughts going out into the world.  For example, when we hear a loud noise, we think, “That noise disturbed me.”  We don’t notice the part of the mind that has been already conditioned to seek disturbances in the world that it can latch on to.  We don’t see how, in fact, we disturb the noises in our lives.  This is true of things we like as well as of things we dislike.  We see a beautiful person and think, “She struck me with her beauty.”  We don’t consider the way our minds are constantly searching for forms it can label “beautiful”, and we don’t see the way in which our minds have to struggle to make those forms bring us happiness.  In all this, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, “there is much vanity and grasping at the wind.”

I, like most people, have issues with abandonment.  I say “most people,” because as much as I am tempted to locate the source of my insecurity in my childhood, I see nothing but abandonment-issues in the world around me, and it’s hard not to see this as a universal problem.  The Buddhist tradition suggests that we fear abandonment not simply because we ourselves have been abandoned, but also, because we have grown accustomed to placing expectations on the outside world that it can never fulfill.  As a result, the Buddha taught two basic ways of resisting this process of creating false expectations.  First, he said, it’s necessary to develop some dispassion or disillusionment with the things in the world to which our minds are clinging.  But it is also necessary to develop good will for these worldly things too.  This second step insures that we don’t simply move from being obsessed with something to hating it – for hate is just as much of an obsession and process of clinging as is liking.  We have to learn, in other words, how to love things without falling into them, how to wish things well apart from our attachment to them.

I feel as though the past few months for me have been a constant exploration of the issue of rejection.  Sometimes the rejection has been a small matter of a person breaking plans with me or not returning my calls.  At other times the rejection has been a matter of someone leaving my life completely, or of the threat of death, which is the final rejection that all who place their hopes in life must face.  Yet in all this, I have been comforted me by the fact that there is a skill to facing rejection.  One particular trick I’ve developed is a sort of mantra that I’ve found extremely helpful when facing rejection or the threat of rejection.  The phrase I use is, “You can count on me.”  When I think of a person who has rejected me, I think this and I feel better.  I even sometimes use this phrase with strangers: if I smile at someone on the train and he or she doesn’t smile back, I think, “You can count on me,” and I feel better.  Now, it seems counter-intuitive to think about being reliable to a person who is rejecting you, but the rationale for this phrase is that suffering comes not from the rejection itself, but rather, from the outflowing of the mind that wants what is undependable to be dependable.  When we say, “You can count on me” to people, we are saying, in effect, that we wish them well apart from our desires for them.  We are also saying that the happiness that comes from being reliable is greater than the happiness that comes from possessing.

You can count on me: the idea that there is a happiness to be found in being reliable takes some getting used to.  There doesn’t seem to be any “thing” there in being reliable that we can sink our teeth into to, and that, of course, is the point.  To be reliable is to be strong in a way that doesn’t feed off of others, which is why it is ultimately a more fulfilling happiness.   When you say, “You can count on me” to other people and mean it, the issue of whether or how long they stay becomes meaningless.  I don’t have children of my own, but I sense that this is the great lesson of being a parent: to find the joy in being dependable to another being.  Of course, most parents want something from their children, which is why children learn at a young age that they can’t, in fact, count on their parents.

The greatest compliment anyone has ever paid me as a musician is to call my music “reliable”.  I’m not sure I deserved it, but nevertheless, the idea has stuck with me that a musician who, year after year, continues to make beauty that people can depend on, can believe in, and can trust – that is a true musician.  People always wonder why musicians burn out or disappear, and I think a lot of it has to do with this: If you make music as a way of manipulating people into liking you, the source of your inspiration will dry up as surely as a lover who you treat that way.  If, however, you see your role as a musician not as a child begging for his parent’s attention, but rather, as a parent giving to a child, then you have a reason to keep going, to keep making music, and above all, to keep making music for others.

I think Bill Callahan of Smog put it best in one of his songs.  I’m not sure if he was talking about being a musician or a lover or both, but it’s a lyric I nevertheless keep in my head:

“Most of my fantasies are of to be of use,
to be of some hard, simple, undeniable use.
Like a spindle, like a candle,
like a horseshoe, like a corkscrew.
To be of use, to be of use.”

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Sympathy For the Devil

There’s a famous story in the Qur’an about how Satan came to be Satan.  Initially, the devil, called Iblis in the Qur’an, was one of God’s most beloved angels.  When God created Adam, however, he asked all the angels to bow down to his new, human creation.  This no doubt seemed strange to the angels, who had previously been commanded by God to worship none other than Him, and in fact, Iblis refused to worship Adam.  God did not have mercy on Iblis, however, and condemned him to an eternal existence in hellfire.

The traditional interpretation of this story is that Iblis was damned because he acted out of pride.  He assumed that his understanding of right and wrong was better than God’s.  But this interpretation has always left many Muslims unconvinced.  In the medieval period, many mystical writers argued that Iblis had, in fact, acted justly, for he had served God the most faithfully of all the angels.  Why had he been punished, then?  According to the poet, Iblis was like an ideal lover, who finds his reward in love itself, not in receiving praise from the beloved.  From the standpoint of true love, Attar says, hellfire was not so much Iblis’s punishment as proof that his heart could withstand any trial.

When I teach my students this interpretation of the story, they always become enraged.  “That’s ridiculous!” they yell.  Once I even had a student tell me, “God’s clearly an asshole!  Why should anyone be proud to be faithful to an asshole?”  He was obviously working from the idea that love should not be an abusive relationship.  “Well,” I replied, “What if God is an asshole?  How would you act, knowing that, if you were in Iblis’s shoes?”  The student confessed that he’d probably go along with the other angels and obey God – “but only out of self-interest,” he insisted, “Not because God’s right.”

My students pride themselves on being rebellious and individualistic, but in fact they have very little real sympathy for the devil – that is, very little commitment to the consequences of true rebellion.  Underneath their desire to do things their own way is a deep yearning to see the world correspond to predictable patterns of order.  As a result, they tend, when pushed, to choose justice – or at least their idea of justice – over love.  The idea that they would ever be in a relationship that would undermine their notions of fairness and equality horrifies them.  A lover should treat them right, or else … goodbye!  Very rarely do they ask where their concepts of being treated right come from, or why these should be what guides them through life and love.

The idea of Iblis as an ideal lover might seem masochistic to many, but it reveals the important truth that no one in love is treated by his beloved as he’d like to be.  Furthermore, the story shows that separation is a necessary part of the experience of love, whether it’s the literal separation of breaking up or the more metaphorical separation that lies between one’s expectations from love and one’s actual experience of it.  Our culture has a hard time with this.  We like to think of separation as failure, as not having played one’s cards right.  If you’d done things right, we are told, you’d have found a partner who would always treat you the way you think you should be treated.  As a result, we have become strong in matters of litigation, but very weak in matters of loyalty.  Another way of saying this is that, in love, as in everything else, we have become a consumer culture: we don’t aspire to taking responsibility for ourselves, we aspire to customer satisfaction – and if we don’t get the goods we paid for, well, we at least want the control that comes from being able to rate our supplier badly.

Whenever I read the story of Iblis, I can’t help thinking what a metaphor it is for a musician’s life.  For a musician is someone who puts energy into beauty in a way that his audience often can’t appreciate.  There are two conclusions to be drawn from this: one is that audiences suck, the music business sucks, and “no one appreciates me!”  The other is that there is nothing wrong with one’s audience or the world, since the energy of love goes into love itself and not approval from one’s peers.  Being poor and unrecognized all the time might seem like a betrayal from others or from God himself, but in fact, being poor and unrecognized have nothing to do with the love of beauty that starts a musician off on his path.

The moral of the Iblis story is not, I think, that love is pain or that battered lovers should stay in abusive relationships.  The moral is, rather, that love often offers us a binary choice between giving and getting.  If we choose to give, it is quite possible that we will not be compensated for this as we would have liked to be.  But if we focus on getting, we have already lost the love that prompted this choice in the first place.  We’d all like to live in a world in which giving and getting were perfectly balanced – in which there weren’t a binary choice – but this can never be, because any attempt to make these giving and getting symmetrical already expresses a desire to get – just as a gift given expecting a gift in return is not a gift at all.  But if this type of selfless love strikes us as a matter of being condemned to hell, we might ask: where does pain come from?  Does it come from the fire, so to speak, or does it come from our desire to avoid burning at all costs?  Love may pick the places where we end up, but it is the lovers who gets to call that heaven or hell.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Paying to Play

One of the last laughs that organized religion has had on modern culture is that, though more people every day are able to dispense with the idea of God, the concept of original sin is alive and well.  It is true that most people are no longer willing to believe in a “fall” of mankind from grace, but most people still are willing to believe that romantic love is a type of fall.  The religious passion (literally “suffering”) of Christ may seem like an irrelevant story to many of us today, but the passion/suffering of lovers still ranks among the most desirable states a modern person aspires to attain.   And the interesting about this type of suffering is that it is both a goal and a practice.  In other words, while we like to think that suffering is a natural consequence of being love, it is also true that we often don’t understand romantic love apart from suffering, which means we tend to create suffering in order to justify this thing called love.  The agony of love, in other words, isn’t just sprung on us by Cupid’s bow; more often than not, it’s a state that we cultivate in order to bring meaning to our relationships.

We’re a very debt-oriented society.  This means not only that we have debts, but also, that we don’t really know how to relate to each other except through this concept.  I see this idea at work all the time in the way parents treat their children.  They make sure to provide for them, first and foremost, in ways that establish a need to be repaid.  It could be a family cell-phone plan or a college degree – either way, the gift comes with the demand that kids will stay in touch and live up to their parents’ expectations.  Such gifts assert that love is really a type of burden, as in “One” by U2: “We’ve got to carry each other, carry each other.”  Now, with all due respect to what is a very good song, I think it is essential that we entertain other voices as well, voices that tell us that not only do we NOT have to carry each other – but furthermore, we couldn’t carry each other even if we tried.  No human can bear the burden that this laborious idea of love places on him.  For although we might like to believe that we can bear love as Christ did his cross, we aren’t Christ, and our crucifixions don’t do anything to wash away the sins of the world.

There’s this disturbing trend that’s been happening in the music business since the 1980’s called “pay to play.”  What that means is that, more and more, clubs and venues are asking musicians to put up money in exchange for time on stage.  Club owners defend this practice by arguing that escalating rents and lower audience turnouts make it harder for them to make a buck.  They might be right, but the ultimate cause of this trend, I believe, is psychological, not economic.  What I mean is, if you see music as a type of pleasure that corresponds to a desire rather than a right, you will naturally feel indebted to those who let you play and, like a movie-goer, you will shell out money for your ticket.  If, on the other hand, you believe that music, being an expression of love, is a basic part of who we are and not simply a “kick” for which we need to pay the dealer, then paying to play will strike you as ridiculous.  If that means that one day all true musical exchange will be limited to public parks or the Internet, then so be it.  You can’t pay to play music, just as you can’t pay to find true love.

The biggest challenge a musician faces in his life, I believe, is finding a way to make the music he plays unburdensome both on him and on his audience.  To accomplish this, I think, means believing two things at the same time: first, that your music, coming in some way from your heart, is of infinite value; but also, second, that it is completely optional for others to participate in this value.  These two beliefs strengthen each other, because if you really know the value of what you’re playing, you don’t need anyone to validate it; and conversely, when you focus on the optional nature of your music, you create space for others to discover it on their own, rather than being coerced into liking it – which is to say, your audience can truly value what you do.  This second part is often difficult for musicians to accept because they see the road to success as necessarily involving ad campaigns, etc., that focus on manipulating others into liking their music.  Such musicians don’t see that many people who have “made it” in this way have absolutely no conviction that their music has any value, which is why they are so easily manipulated by their handlers.  If the goal is to truly believe in the music you do, both of these steps are essential.

I started this discussion of “paying to play” by talking about love, and these two steps I have outlined above with respect to music apply equally to our relationships with others.  To find love is not a matter of carrying a burden, no matter what people and pop songs tell you.  It is a matter of both believing in your own value, but also, of realizing that no one is required to appreciate this value.  People who feel stuck in their love lives generally lack one of these core beliefs: either they actually feel worthless, or else, they feel frustrated that others don’t appreciate what they believe they have.  In both cases, however, such a person does not properly understand the limitless value of love.  It is only when one allows love to be limitless both in the sense of being infinite and in being no one’s possession that one can speak words such as “one love” or “one heart.”  For what is “one” about love is not its bonds, but rather, the fact that it is ever-present everywhere … and always totally free.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.

Skip the Beginning

At the root of the word “fixation” is the word “fix”. I know that’s not a precise etymology, but a psychological connection between these two ideas exists nevertheless. When we fixate on another person, a job, a drug, or simply random words that get stuck in our heads during the course of a day – all these instances of obsession are expressions of the feeling that something in us is broken and needs to be made whole again. Take, for example, romantic obsession. Even though a person may believe that fixing an image of a lover in his mind is an act that brings happiness, the fact is that such a fantasy is based on the premise of being incomplete, alone, and unstable. Such a fantasy asserts, “I am happy!” but really means, “I am suffering! Come and fix me!”

Fantasies are like introductions in books: they rarely add value to the content they seek to embellish, and are usually borne out of the insecurity that the real story isn’t all that great. Authors often fall into the trap of writing introductions that defend or over-inflate the parts of their writing they feel to be defective. The stories we tell in our minds are no different. You meet a girl who appeals to you, though in truth, not as much as you wished she would. So right away, your mind begins to obsess over her, which is to say, to repair her, to write an introduction that makes her the ultimate object of desire. “Yes, when you look at her from that angle …” Anger is often the most appealing fantasy, because when we have a feeling in the present moment we dislike but don’t understand – a rage of adrenalin, a knot in the gut – it seems as though the solution for this discomfort lies in giving this a context. So we write a long introduction in our minds that is meant to transition us into the present. But of course, like an orator who improvises a preamble to his speech, the fantasy generally comes out as garbled throat clearing that just muddies the mind.

We all want to write the beginnings of the stories in which we find ourselves, but the irony is that there is no more harmful act that trying to force a beginning on anything in life. I think this is what the poet Rilke meant when he wrote, “It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.” The beginning of every nation is bathed in blood. The beginning of every life is bathed in the tears of birth. And so it is in art: if you try to think of the perfect beginning to a creative act, you will end up destroying instead. The writer who wants to choose the perfect word to begin his writing will end up deleting all the words that follow. The painter who wants to start with a perfect brush-stroke will hate whatever follows. This is why Rilke urges the artist to skip the beginning and instead realize that one is always already in the middle of a creative process. If a person can resist the urge to “start” a creative project, and instead look around to see in what linguistic or musical or sensory world he already finds himself, he can become the vessel of creativity.  I try to keep this in mind when I write a song: the voice that is telling me to make this new song be different from others is the one that wants to strangle my infant tune in the cradle. But the voice that tells me that to borrow from what I know or have done, to let one song emerge from another – that is the voice of true creative fertility.

It occurs to me that our culture of monogamy has created enormous harm by trying to make people believe that love has a true beginning and that they must wait for this beginning to appear to them. “When your true love comes along,” this voice says, “It won’t be like anything you’ve ever experienced. Everything will be new.” A person who listens to this voice looks at the people in his or her life and thinks, “Well no, this isn’t it.” Such a person remains alone, of course, because no love could ever have such a pure beginning. The same is true of sex. We are told to wait, wait. But of course, the more one thinks about sex rather than doing it, the more likely one is to be disappointed by the actual act itself. It is important to realize that we are responsible for our own disappointments, because we are the ones who insist on choosing the beginnings of our stories – just as we are the ones who can let this fixation drop.

There is a great joy in realizing that none of our experiences are so special as to have an independent beginning. Whether it is our encounters with creativity, love, or any other aspect of being human, the fact that each of these experiences is unoriginal to some degree means that we can share them with others. The lonely person is the one who believes he can’t be understood because others don’t know where he’s been. The wise person is the one who knows he can be understood because he is always already connected to others. He is the one who doesn’t wait to be discovered in the tower of his fantasies. He skips the beginning, and so finds himself right in the thick of life.

Tam Lin is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs have been compared to those of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne and Nick Drake. This summer marks the release of Tam Lin’s third album, Begin Again, produced by Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Philip Glass). You can hear his music at http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic.