By Mathias Freese
Listening Now to Puccini’s Aria, Che gelida
manina Sung by Alfredo Kraus
Tis a riddle. How to sustain my innermost feelings about all things as I
evanesce into atoms that have long composed my bodily self. As I
reflect about the major chords in my existence, one looms most. It is
the passion of the mind; the other, an intense personal constellation of
emotional feelings made up of many parts that touches my being, and
so moves me to express emotions, to feel them intensely. Pavarotti
sings his Nessun Dorma — and so do I in my fashion. Since I first
recognized this within myself, I have joined it in matrimony, for it is my
better half.
When I have written something of value, worthwhile, dedicated time,
will and expertise to crafting it, I know it is well made if I have wept at
portions I have spun into story. In my latest work, In the Throes, there
is much passion. It ends with clamor, cymbals clash, an apotheosis
which I feel deeply. For each sentence is me, down to the placement
of every word. The writer who does not feel this someplace in his work
and is not moved by his own soul made words is not a writer…just a
typist.
The opera singer sets forth an internal vibration that thrills; the painter
aligns images, applies color and perspective and transmutes, like Van
Gogh, what he sees into what he feels; and the writer sets off a
combustion, pistons and valves, verbal steampunking, interpreting the
human condition into words, etching word petroglyphs. All human
beings need to leave sign.
And there it is in a short sentence. Each of us needs to express our
pain first, the cosmic ouch, for it is painful to be born and painful to
exist. We all have our unheard scream. You need not become an artist
to let us see who you are. You do need to work on creating a
compelling statement, a self icon, about what it is for you to be. Find
that. Discover it. Say it to your self relentlessly, say it to the world
relentlessly. And much peace will come to you, like snow in a
Japanese print transforming the earth, a great deal shown by so few
delicate lines. Or the floral musical scents of Turandot.
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