dotted with flickering insects that no one else could see until I showed them. And I remember another, tighter shot of children’s faces lighting up as I handed them glowing jars with fireflies I’d captured for them. I felt needed and talented at something.
Now, this dream wasn’t any kind of revelation. Hell, I was barely three years old. And although it’s stuck with me all these years, I’ve never taken it to be a message from above that I’m a chosen prophet, or Joseph from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. However, a half century later, it’s obvious to me that the dream reflects the way I see artistry and the role of an artist. At its most basic, making art is about following what’s luminous to you and putting it in a jar, to share with others.
Here you go. A melody. See? I found it. It’s always been right there. That’s why it’s so familiar. Maybe it was in the rhythm of the washing machine, the awkward pause in a conversation, or the random collision of two radio stations blasting from two different cars and how it reminded you of your parents trying to be heard over one another. Remove a note, one flicker, and it’s the sound of the door closing for the last time and her footsteps fading into the first silence in forever. But wait…nope, the silence wasn’t really silence after all. You just weren’t paying attention. There’s always sound beneath the sound you hear. Or something else to see when your eyes adjust. It turns out there was also the sound of children playing outside your window and, below that, the buzz of a ceiling fan. That’s a sound you’d overlooked before, but now it’s all you can hear. We all see different flickers in a busy sky.
That’s where the melodies live. What do you notice that glows beneath the silence? Can that glow be bottled, or framed? From time to time, we all catch a split-second glance of a stranger in a storefront window before realizing it’s our own reflection. A songwriter’s job is to see that guy, not the one posing straight on in the bathroom mirror.
As we speed past moments in a day, we want to give form to what we feel, what was obvious but got lost in the shuffle. We want to know that someone else noticed that shape we suspected was hovering just beyond our periphery. And we want that shape, that flicker of shared life experience, captured in a bottle, playing up on a big screen, gracing our living room wall, or singing to us from a speaker. It reminds us where we have been, what we have felt, who we are, and why we are here.
We all see something blinking in the sky at some point, but it’s a damn lot of work to put it in the bottle. Maybe that’s why only some of us become artists. Because we’re obsessive enough, idealistic enough, disciplined enough, or childish enough to wade through whatever is necessary, dedicating life to the search for these elusive flickers, above all else. Who knows where this drive comes from? Some artists, I suppose, were simply cultivated to be artists. Some crave recognition, while others seek relief from pain or an escape from something unbearable. Many just have a knack for making art. But I’d like to think that most artists have had some kind of dream beneath the drive, whether they remember it or not.
I’m amazed when someone sees the sculpture inside a rock while the rest of us just see a rock. I say “hell yes” to the architects who imagine the spaces we will one day live in. And a round of applause for the stylist who sees what hair to cut to make me look respectable for a couple of weeks. I bow low and fast in the direction of those who paint amazing things on the ceilings of chapels, make life-changing movies, or deliver a stand-up routine that recognizes the humor in the mundane. What all those artists have in common is that they point out things that were always there, always dotting the sky. Now we can take it in and live what we missed.
My dream about lightning bugs still fills me with the same pride and sense of purpose as it did when I was three. It reminds me that my job is to see what’s blinking out of the darkness and to sharpen