Photo by BrianWancho

Much of my writing composes itself in my head away from the keyboard. Much of it gets lost in translation by the time I finally sit to write. It has ever been, but lately it seems to happen more frequently.

The words come — maybe while I’m driving, or doing laundry, or in the shower — and they sound right to me, the notes I’d play if only my fingers were on the keys at that moment. Sometimes I think those words reveal great insight. In reality, the greatness is only in my being open to the revelations about myself, but at the time, the words seem magical, and as if appearing by magic. Perhaps no other process in my life confounds and fascinates me more than composing my thoughts into a piece of writing.

One of the worst feelings is leaving the moment, then returning, and discovering the words have fled. They are missing, perhaps lost forever. It can happen after having to deal with something more pressing. It can happen after going to sleep. It can happen as simply as responding to a knock on the door. Then you grasp for the words, and it’s like being in a boat that’s drifting farther and farther away from your destination as you strain to use the oars to get yourself back on course. And the harder you work, the more you push yourself away from where you want to be. So it is with me sometimes when I try to reclaim the words that came before.

Thinking about this recently reminded me of the title track from “Conferring with the Moon” by William Ackerman.

You can find versions with moon images in the video, but here I want the music to be the medium, and you can supply the rest with your imagination. But more the point, let me share Will Ackerman’s own words about how the song came to be, as they speak to the very dynamic I am describing.

This is a piece of music about unrequited love and misery. If you were in Paris in the springtime and occupied a suite of rooms overlooking the River Seine and the Eiffel Tower and romance was ostensibly in the air and all you could do was watch a French television on oral hygiene, nurse a respectable bottle of Lafite indifferently and pine after the blonde in California who was essentially unaware of your existence, you might well write the central two chords of this piece and play them obsessively into the wee hours of the morning to an audience consisting primarily of some rather tone-deaf and utterly cold string beans. This is what happened to me, in any event.

A recurrence of the same malady struck me a few months later on the North Coast of California. I remember the night and the full moon. I remember spending some considerable time conferring with the moon about love, and I remember being given a clear understanding of the whole matter and a sense of mastery of the subject in the college of the moon. The mistake was in falling asleep. Now I remember clearly that I knew, but have no memory of what I knew.

That’s it, yes — remembering that you knew, but having no memory of what you knew. I have been there many times, just not in Paris or on the North Coast of California.

I have a digital recorder, so now when the words come I can narrate them in a file I can later retrieve, but sometimes even that isn’t perfect. The state of mind that gave birth to those words cannot be recaptured even if the words can be. Unless my life one day allows me to stop anything I am doing at a moment’s notice and type the words as they come to me, this will always be my challenge. Far too often, after I’ve written them, there’s an unsatisfying feeling of having come up short of expressing them as I first experienced them. Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me.

Maybe it’s like what the late Sheldon B. Kopp wrote about in describing taking drugs as a young man and believing they opened up a world of profound thoughts. In “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients,” Kopp explained that he decided to record his insights when high so he could recall them later. What he learned was that it was all gibberish, and hardly what he’d imagined.

So maybe when I’m in that place where the words flow so easily, I am in some type of altered state, and when I am no longer in it, those words can’t find me. Which is the real me, and which is the altered state? I sometimes wonder. Is that the true me, and is this the one behind filters and walls and layers of denial and protection?

When I no longer care to explore those questions more deeply, when I stop coming back to them under the naive notion that this time I will crack the code, then I’ll know it’s over for me. Each time I come back to the journey is like a small miracle to me. Look, I think; I care enough to try again.

I will leave you with this link to another version of “Conferring with the Moon” and what Will Ackerman had to say about it: The two chords, alone this time, as I heard them in Paris.

Thank you, Will. I hope you consider this inclusion of your music and words fair use — for my modest but sincere therapeutic mission — and fair comment, as I will return to them from time to time.

I have often been lost — and who knows? maybe found — inside those two chords.