Late, late last night, still awake long after my beloved had given himself up to sleep, I thought of the people I have begun to know in the last months, and in the night stillness, their voices seemed to come to me as faint, distant bells. Signalling their presence in tones sometimes resonant, sometimes delicately crystalline, they compelled me to listen and after a time I began to hear their clear, pure notes joining and blending together in a harmony of ideas and intention, motifs and themes.
In Penned but not Published, the writer asks if symbolism informs our writing, or our lives. Music has always been part of my life, and I once heard it described as the purest form of human expression. It seems, then, entirely right for me to consider music as a symbol for what is created in this place of writers and artists. It is our vast concert hall, and without benefit of a conductor, we play and practice, our melodies simple, tender, bold, complex, amusing, heartbreaking, dark and unforgettable; the kind of compositions that we remember long after we first heard them. We create an exquisite opus, contrapuntal and melodious although dissonance is an integral part of the whole – without it, music is saccharine and superficial.
Then today, The Pliers wrote of paving stones and the grass that holds them fast to the earth as metaphors for the things we must do in life, and how we choose to do them. She refers eloquently to “ the rush of feeling connected to another, above and beyond words and the rule book delivered by the stork along with one's corporeal form; the joy of trusting one's non-traditional ways of knowing” .
Her reference to the rule book, or rather, to its irrelevance, brings to mind another analogy. At the risk of mixing far too many metaphors, I liken my initial experience of this community of writers to being the new kid at school. On the playground at recess there are already well-established groups, and relationships within those groups – a hierarchy to be respected and an etiquette to be observed if the new kid has any hope of gaining entry to the circle. Depending on her level of self-assurance, she might try to integrate herself boldly, or hang around on the periphery, watching and waiting, analyzing the behaviour and personalities of the others to best assess her chances of acceptance.
It took me a few months to realize how preposterous this scenario was as applied to the blogging community. It took me that long to figure out that, in this environment, the usual rules do not apply. In the relative anonymity of this milieu we can present ourselves in only one context, without the factors that often influence how we form relationships in the physical world.
We are, simply, what we say. What we write. We may accompany or decorate our writing with lovely images, but we have, essentially, only one way to present ourselves to the world. In regular daily life, we assess, judge, analyze and absorb information about other people from a number of sources; the way they look, dress, the accent with which they speak, the pitch of their laughter, the quirks they reveal simply by their existence.
Here, almost nothing of that comes into play. In his book ‘Blink’ Malcolm Gladwell relates the experience of a female French horn player who auditioned several decades ago for a place in a major European orchestra from behind a screen. This was not conventional practice at the time, and although her playing was deemed far superior to the other applicants, she was denied the job once her sex was known. She didn’t give up, and her fight to be accepted for what she could do and not what her physical self was interpreted as being capable of became the basis for the standard practice of blind auditions for many orchestra players today.
Essentially, we are those musicians behind a screen. We play, we are heard and we are judged (yes, we are!) only by how we present our song. But there is an essential, crucial difference between an audition, the playground and what we do here as writers, and that is that we are not in competition . On the contrary, support of each other is what makes the music beautiful and each new voice only enriches the chorus.
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