organizing an accident is a weekly newsletter where I leak home demos of unreleased songs, first draft lyrics, thoughts on the creative process, & dispatches from music life in Paris.
Listen to “Far” (demo):
This song was written on November 2, 2017
This is demo leak #85
An excerpt from My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman:
“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “ why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
#
Beginning somewhere in my late teens—formative years spent chasséing on the edge of arrest, alcohol poisoning, and premature parenthood, years when everything is held to the flames of scrutiny, everything suspect—one of the first things to burn was my Catholic upbringing and a previously unexamined belief in the Man in the Sky.
This rejection of, in particular, the cartoonish myths of my given religion seemed a rite of passage toward adulthood (after all, who but a child could believe such things?), which I flaunted like a kind of intellectual puberty mustache. My doubt, frustration, and rebellion were all reasonable—necessary even (and not to mention en vogue with early-2000s “New Atheists” such as Hitchens and Dawkins gaining cultural cachet)—but, as with so many notches jabbed into my identity’s belt, left untended, it ceased to fit the man.
Time advanced, each year brimmed over into the next, and my passion for music grew and developed into a way of life. I gave myself over to its call, every day venturing further and further into unknowns, reaching out for something, asking unanswerable questions, and growing accustomed to living in their perpetual silence. And all the while, I never once drew a parallel between this daily ritual and prayer, never once imagined that the dimension of consciousness I’d happened upon might be, had I the language or the ability to shed my intellectual pride, what others call God.
While I still do not speak the language, I cannot help but reflect on the many years I have spent searching faithfully, blindly, muselessly through a musical no man’s land. When I do, what I find there, threaded within the thousands of entwined words and melodies, is a profound longing for which I had no target nor terminus—just a baseless tether waving distantly in a ruptured sky.
At times, I have wrestled with my faith, by which I mean I have doubted the merit of my artistic longing. As often as the work has sparked joy, it has also isolated me from important people in my life. The more years spent living between layers of consciousness, the stronger the temptation to remain in reality has grown—and it has only intensified after having a child, whose very survival depends on it.
On the other hand, I am increasingly finding that the ability to dimension hop—to see and engage with the world in a playful, sensitive, childlike manner—is more super power than crutch, especially as it pertains to relationships, creativity, and parenting. To live a creative life is to walk a fine, almost non-existent line with escapism. At the worst of times, it has been just that, and I have felt pangs of guilt for what I perceived as reckless abandon. But at the best of times—times of deepest faith—I believe it is the most powerful vehicle I have for bettering my own life and the lives of others. “Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image,” writes Wiman, “which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.” ◍
Today’s demo is called “Far” and was made seven years ago. The lyrics below beg the question, to me at least, to whom exactly was I directing my voice?
Far but I’m closer to you / Far but our voice is in tune
Apart, nothing can keep us apart / Lost until I am where you are
“Far” lyrics
You and I
Captured in light
You and I
Swallowed in time
Are you certain in love?
Are you sure that’s enough?
Far but I’m closer to you
Far but our voice is in tune
Apart, nothing can keep us apart
Lost until I am where you are
I am a misread page
I cannot be reclaimed
I am your long lost contender
Trying to be led astray
Right through the eye of the maze
Time is a baseless tether
These lyrics were written in November 2017.
From the vault
What I’m listening to this week
What I’ve been reading
Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping
Anton Chekhov - The Greatest Short Stories
Check out my previous demos and writing via the Substack archive + discover my official music releases on Spotify, Apple, or your platform of choice. Find me on all socials at @thisryanegan.
Read the previous post.