Take These Broken Words...

...and make them breathe. 

I fell in love with a poem. It was September, the summer fading fast—taking with it things I had thought would last—and Lord Byron`s Stanzas for Music echoed feelings in me that had yet to shape words. It spoke such truth that, reading it out loud, I started to sing instead. And it was beautiful...but I didn't understand it. The first line, "There's not a joy can give like that it takes away," perplexed me, and it wasn't until putting the words to music that I finally understood the poem's deeper meaning. 

A melody formed. It started through voice and was transported by a few plucked guitar strings. If I took anything away from my Literature and Music class this term, it's that anything—whether it be a word, whisper, sigh—comes from feeling. A work's success is generally indicative of its ability to move people, to conjure the author's origin of emotion in another. As interpreter of this poem, I could only attempt to draw from this origin of emotion ("the most melancholy I ever wrote," said Lord Byron), feel as much as I could and try to express it as Byron did, only in music.

Stanzas for Music 

Lord Byron, Interpreted by Me 

There's not a joy the world can give

like that it takes away 

When the glow of early thought 

declines in feeling's full decay; 

'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush 

alone, which fades so fast, 

But the tender bloom of heart is gone, 

ere youth itself be past.

Chorus 

Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and

mirth distract the breast, 

Through midnight hours that yield no more 

their former hope of rest,

'Tis the ivy-leaves around the turret wreath -

All green and wildly fresh without, 

but worn and grey beneath.

Then the few whose spirits float 

above the wreck of happiness 

Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, 

or oceans of excess.

The magnet of their course is gone, 

or only points in vain

The shore to which their shivered sail shall 

never (oh), ever, stretch again. 

Chorus 

Then the mortal coldness of the soul 

like death itself comes down; 

It cannot feel for others' woes,

it dare not dream its own; 

That heavy chill has frozen 

o'er the fountain of our tears,

And though the eye may sparkle still,

'tis where the ice appears. 

Chorus 

Oh, could I feel as I have felt, 

or be what I have been,

Or weep as I could once have wept...

...midst the withered waste of life.

So midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me...

so midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me. 

Chorus 

There's not a joy the world can give

like that it takes away 

When the glow of early thought 

declines in feeling's full decay. 

I sing and play music the same way I do anything else—by feel. I absolutely love this poem, and can only hope that my interpretation brought it to life in a meaningful way. This was a pass or fail project, worth only 5% of my overall class mark...yet I don't regret any time spent on it. Isn't any time spent in love time worth spending?

So I walked in to my professor's office, hair dripping wet from this year's first snowstorm, frozen fingers shaking as I opened my guitar case, and played this song for her. I was so relieved when she said, smiling, that she "loved it" that I could only laugh happily.

The next day, I walked into my last class to the announcement that I could have it professionally recorded, potentially filmed. I am so, so excited and giddy and thrilled! And though I've put up this image-less video for the time being, I'll be updating the new one as soon as it's recorded.

Funny how, sometimes, that tiny 5% isn't so small after all. ;)

Too Many Words and...Instagram?

Instagram. Useless. A waste of time, an app you add onto your phone only to have it turn into a portal that sucks you in...
and then you emerge at 2:00am, wondering what went wrong with your life. So....why? Why the obsession? Because, oddly enough, it's what made me want to write again.

My story goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a girl that wished for words and breathed music. Quiet, mostly reserved, she wrote wrote wrote, holding on to the dream that she would keep on writing because that was all she knew. She graduated from her tiny high school, and spent The Last Summer at her cottage with her family. Then summer ended, September came, and she got on a plane to England. 

Suddenly, the girl that had never been away from home longer than a week wouldn't see her family until Christmas. Traumatized, it didn't matter that her first year of university was in a castle, or that the gardens were dotted by the loveliest red blossoms or...anything—she wanted home. And there was only Shock. 

She couldn't write. 

Not when there were too many emotions threatening to claw their way out, not when she had to constantly bite her lip to stop from sobbing. She wanted to drown in music, and forget. The shock would pass. But it didn't. And it was this constant pain during too-loud silences, the bone-drenching numbness and the thought she would go insane—caught between homesickness and escaping the present—that drove her to Change. 

She made friends, got involved, focused on grades. She still couldn't write—tried, and put the pen down, preferring black and white piano keys to clarity. Because isn't that what we write for? To make sense of situations, make order of the mess? She didn't want to clarify. No, confusion was a friend. If she wanted to change, she couldn't over-think—she had to be. And so her old writings gathered dust, only pulled out when someone wanted to understand her, handed to them with unsaid things like, "this was me". 

Christmas came and left, the new semester in England started, and for the first time in a long time she was...Happy. 

So many pages were turned since then, bridges burned, lessons learned, and the girl that had dreamed she would write forever lied about writing at all. Until now. And this is when Instagram comes in. You see, it's not its entirety that captivated me, but rather the realm of quotes that drew me in. There were so many. Beautiful quotes, sad quotes, sarcastic quotes that made you bitter at the images of the person they conjured. The idea that these collected words could apply to so many people, linking complete individuals together, amazed me.

Suddenly, I wanted to create my own.

Just a few weeks ago, sitting in my Post-Modernity and Belief class, the lecturer said these words: "The truth about stories, is that's all we are."

I couldn't fully understand it at first, drew around the words and traced over their curved edges in an attempt to grasp the deeper meaning. And then I understood. There were many things that made it difficult to write: fear that I couldn't anymore, too many words that threatened to rise from a surface I had been contended to sit and watch, occasionally dipping in my finger to see what rings would form...but the  greatest was that I had lost my reason to write. I hadn't wanted to make sense of the confusion around me because doing so would have been too difficult, while all my life I had written precisely to make sense of things, to find their truths. What was the point in writing when I didn't want to make sense of any of it? If the truth about stories, though, is that's all we are, then can confusion not be just as true as clarity?

I write. Not because I want to bring order to things (though the temptation always remains), put them in their perfect little labelled boxes, but because I understand that there's truth in any situation, no matter the clarity or confusion. I write, because I believe there's a truth to be found in anything, and I love love love how the same truths can be found in so many people.

So at the end of all the questions, it's not about why can or can't you write, but rather...

Why do you write?