I recently read ‘Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church‘ by Philip Yancey.

The following is taken from his chapter about the writer Frederick Buechner:

“Why do we do it, we writers? ‘Of making many books there is no end,’ sighed the teacher of Ecclesiastes some three millennia ago, and 50,000 new ones will appear this year alone. Yet we keep at it, cranking out more and more words, with the potential to bring harm as well as comfort. I think we do it because each of us has nothing else to offer than a living point of view that differentiates us from every other person on this planet. We must tell our stories to someone…

…Every writer must overcome a kind of shyness, putting out of mind the fear that we are being arrogant by thrusting ourselves upon you the reader and egotistical by assuming our words are worth your time. Why should you care about what I have to say? What right have I to impose myself on you? In another context, Simone Weil presents a kind of answer: ‘I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me must only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves the perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am.’ That is all any writer can offer, especially a writer of faith: a unique perspective of creation, a point of view visible only from the point where I am…

…We can only write with passion about our own experiences.”

I recently read a great interview with Daniel Levitin, author of ‘This is Your Brain on Music‘, in the Dec/Jan issue of the wonderful Tape Op magazine.

Here’s my favourite bit:

“…what separates us from the animals is art. There are other things, but art is a way that we distinguish ourselves as humans and it’s a uniquely human undertaking. It adds meaning to our lives and contextualises our lives, and I think it’s a noble pursuit if you can do it.

I think in terms of studying it on the scientific side, it’s a way to understand ourselves as a species. Music and art have been with us since the beginning. Look at the cave paintings. There’s this drive. How can we understand who we are and what drives us and motivates us and makes us think the way we do? Well, we can look at human artistic experience, where it comes from and what it’s all about.

Music is especially interesting because it’s a way of communicating, but it’s a special form of communication. We use music to communicate about emotional things, not factual things… you don’t listen to music to hear about the literal events. You go to it to get an emotional interpretation of the events from the writer’s perspective, what it felt like to be there. Music, poetry and art are supposed to represent an episode, occurence or an event metaphorically, through analogy or some kind of beauty of expression that helps it to become more memorable and more evocative.

Another thing that seems to distinguish us from animals is our emotions. Animals can have emotional states – they’re hungry, they’re sated, they’re happy and they’re despondent, but they’re not aware of their emotional states the way we are. They don’t talk about them or communicate them. They signal their emotional states. An animal signals when it wants to mate or when it’s injured, but we’re talking about a qualitative difference in human emotion, and art is the language of human emotion. That’s why we do it.”

Seriously, this song is amazing. You can listen to, download and read the story behind the song here.

It was recorded as part of her ‘Solitary Songs’ project which you can download here:

Earlier this year Mark Linkous (of one of my all-time favourite bands Sparklehorse) and Dangermouse (not the one who’s the greatest secret agent in the world) teamed up to make the album Dark Night of the Soul, which also featured guest vocalists Wayne Coyne (The Flaming Lips), Nina Persson (The Cardigans, A Camp) & Suzanne Vega among others.

It’s a great album which, due to an ongoing legal disute between Dangermouse and EMI, has unfortunately still not been officially released. If you look hard enough online though you’ll find it

The lyrics of the first song on the album ‘Revenge’ are incredible. I don’t know if they were written by Mark Linkous, Dangermouse or Wayne Coyne (who sings it) but they beautifully articulate how revenge and un-forgiveness can eat away at us if left unchecked:

Revenge

Pain
I guess it’s a matter of sensation
But somehow
You have ways of avoiding it all

In my mind
I have shot you and stabbed you through your heart
I just didn’t understand
The ricochet is the second part

Cause you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once you’ve sought
The path of revenge
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more that it hurts me

Strange
It seems like a character mutation
Though I have all the means
of bringing you fuckers down
I can’t make myself
To destroy upon command
Somehow forgiveness
lets the evil make a loss

No you can’t hide
What you intend
It glows in the dark
Once we become
The thing we dread
There’s no way to stop
And the more I try to hurt you
The more it backfires
The more it backfires
The more that it backfires