Centers of Attention
Letting go of personas to live a more creative life
Friends,
Picture this: I'm sitting at a long table at the Glen Workshop in the Santa Fe desert, shoulder to shoulder with fellow musicians who want to learn from Karin and Linford, the songwriting duo of Over the Rhine. I just shared a track off an album I recorded with friends in Nashville, and we're sitting in the silence, waiting for someone to share some feedback. Linford speaks up: “Michael, you've made an album!” And then, after a moment's pause, asks a question that reverberates through my creative life to this day: “I wonder what it would be like for you to write a song from your gut?”
His response was so generous, one that said in equal measure “You did a thing!” and “This isn't it—you're living in your head, and you're not reaching deep enough.”
Linford was right: the lyrics were heady and unfeeling, taped-together scraps from Christian parables and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The songs weren't bad, but I was trying to cram a theology and culture syllabus into three-minute melodies—I was all head, no heart, and the songs were heavy with grey matter. A few more people spoke up around the table, and then another songwriter started to sing. But I couldn't listen. How do I write a song from my gut?
It's been over a decade since that workshop, and spoiler: I haven't written that song yet. Because what became clear to me is that I wasn't just writing songs from a heady space, I was living there. And that, paradoxically, I had invested a lot in seeing myself as The Serious Songwriter, but that persona was getting in the way of a more honest, embodied life. The song didn't need to change: I needed to change.
That's one reason why I'm so drawn to Benjamín Kingsley's poem “small talk or in my hand galaxies.” The poem begins right after someone broke into the poet's car, and he's getting help from a mechanic. The first few lines are dripping with self-consciousness as he tries to appease the reader and show off his poetic skills. He's trying to be The Serious Poet. And when the other person comes into the scene—aptly named the “fixer”—she's just part of the background, a tool for his descriptive powers.
By the end of the poem, as the fixer cleans up the window, she holds the broken glass in her hands and offers it to the poet saying, “en mi mano galaxias”—there are whole galaxies in my hands. Dumbstruck, he realizes that his ego-soaked pursuit of being The Serious Poet was blinding him to the beauty in front of him. The center of attention in his own small life, he couldn't see that other people also had poetry on their lips, also had worlds in their hands, also had something to offer. Kingsley could've just written the poem just about the fixer, but the gift of the poem is that he writes the whole process—a journey out from creative self-centeredness, and it ends with insight:
i wonder
how often i have mistaken myself
for the seer for the see-er
and others simply as the seen.
or, Michael-translation:
I wonder
how often i have mistaken myself
for The Serious Artist
and others simply as my Audience.
The truth is that any creative effort, no matter how noble, will be dull and unfeeling if it's only coming from a heady, self-centered place. Creative work can only come from as a deep a place as we're willing to live, only as wide as the welcome we're willing to offer others.
The key imagery here, galaxies, is in her hands not his. He's not the center of attention. You're not the center of attention. I'm not the center of attention. Here’s the secret: there is no center, and the more we can stoke creative humility and a geniune interest in others, the faster we get to that larger, shared world where we actually live. And our art and music and painting and writing and enjoyment of all of the above will be better for it.
A few weeks ago, I was doing my own chores and found some of my old music gear from that earlier life: a dusty pedalboard, unsold CDs, a harmonica holder, and lots of business cards with a MySpace URL on the back. Y'all. I was trying so hard. I've always loved music, but somewhere along the way, I lost track of songcraft and got distracted by a songwriter persona. Sifting through all this now I just feel compassion for my younger self.
Old Michael was depressed and didn't know it, detached from his own feelings, and holding onto strategies that got him attention as a teenager. And he was worried of what might happen if he just....lived, instead of tried so hard to embody a creative persona. He was much more passionate about writing and research than singing songs, but he was afraid to admit it. And he couldn't yet see that a larger life was waiting on the other side.
That's the real paradox here. Giving up ego isn't giving up life, it's getting out of the way to experience more of it. Not less. Years later, so many of my interests haven't changed: befriending creative people, connecting with others through the arts, making things with my hands, enjoying music (ironically, I listen to more songs and play more guitar now than I ever did back then).
And all of that was still true when I was at that songwriting workshop years ago—I just couldn’t see it. I was at that table for deeper passions than a persona: tracing art I love back to the people who make it, entering that sacred space that the arts can make, and finding community there.
On one of the last days of that week in the desert, some of us walked down from our dorms to hear live music in the town square. I was standing near the back, stiff as an unlit candle. Near the front, in an opening near the stage, an elderly woman and a small child were dancing hand-in-hand, unaware of everyone else, free. They were years ahead of us, enraptured in the life they shared, no personas to be seen. What would happen if we joined them?
Take care,
Michael
“small talk or in my hand galaxies” by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
“it looks like the thief rocketed
their whole self through
the bull’s eye of my driver’s side door
and you’re not wrong to expect
the old joke about there being
nothing in my car worth the thieving
or maybe i’ve caught you eye rolling
please god not another
poem about windows but i cross my
fingers hope to die suck on diesel
and be hogtied i’ll avoid simile
for the eye and soul and i’ll be
careful as the fixer’s hands
who came to pry waterlogged
lining from my inner door
her small boots crunching sun in the
glittered puddle of fractured glass
i think how i didn’t think to sweep
but even so she is still kind i think
to get her a glass of tap water now
but then think of all the stairs
she says this big sol reminds her
of cuba y tu she asks but i don’t
relish speaking spanish anymore
i tell her no i have always lived
here in miami i lie but offer my father
was a mason and bueno too at that
i’ve given her this one fractled truth as if
it could be understood not to mistake
my soft handshake for ignorance
of all the working classes but she
is not thinking of me only the door’s
motor grinding she asks but what do i do
i hope she will ask
if maybe i am a mason myself but no
i say i am maybe a writer
me too she beams and offers a full palm
of what she’d vacuumed from the doorframe
shattered glass beads of blue refraction
wonder she says wonder at all they have
seen she insists ver towards the tiny eyelets
en mi mano galaxias she says and i wonder
how often i have mistaken myself
for the seer for the see-er
and others simply as the seen.”“You’re not the first one to start again.”
Here’s one of my favorite articles I read last year on “dancing” in systems
Is old music eating the new? The power of nostalgia in pop culture
I loved this, Michael!
Thank you...beautiful