Will We?

Well that answers that. From Miles, who is in season 5 (last night he started referring to years of his life as seasons, as in "that smells like something I liked in season 2").

He wrote this and gave it to me and I found it beautiful and mysterious, like he'd become a motivational speaker but a remarkably understated one, inspiration via oversized fortune cookie the general tactic, Yoda-as-life-coach. I center my own efforts so completely all the time; "we will" is what I need to hear. Again that line from "aspirational gardening," coming soon-ish (I'm thick into the follow-up to MaWtBaL): nice to believe, harder to know.

And harder still to put into practice a reorientation to creative work as something I do on behalf of, in response to, and in collaboration with other beings. Teaching works that was by design; maybe the markedly different maker-posture comes in part from the pervasive idea that teaching is out there and for the institution while making is in here and for me. In part because, goes the story, because of The Structural Problem with Music: I have to compete to be heard over so much sound.

Unless being part of collective sound-making is the goal. My voice might not emerge but my voice can contribute. I make ambient music, then; most of us do, by definition. Structurally. We are making a thing that recedes out of attention but that nonetheless transforms the environment, which we can know by its richness ("the market is oversaturated") and openness ("anyone with a laptop can make a record") and generosity ("no one pays for music anymore").

Of course I sense a hyperbolizing and a tortured logic here. It's in service of trying on a new skin, though, a course-correction. Cutting the wheel hard because there is just so much pushing in the direction of hero myths. I want to try to retell a story in first person plural.

I like "we will" so much because it affirms what we are already doing, answering questions I am sure we are asking or need to ask. Addressing doubt head-on. (I also like it as a madlib. We will ________, and then a litany of things? Insert my excel to-do document.)

I like it most, though, as an idea that we are willing a thing into being. Together we intend. And the structures that attempt to yoke that setting of intention into a sale-able widgets will always be a step behind What Is Actually Happening. We do our work aware of those structures, interdependent with them, but at best we might privilege the privilege of swimming in the current over the fantasy of being scooped out and made to speak on its behalf.