L'art

People are unreliable. God is not. That is why relationships with people fail. After observing my parent's relationship for 20 years, and having experiences of my own in the great world of romance, I finally came to my own conclusions about love and mental illness. A few years back after losing my college teaching gig at the University of South Carolina, I fell into a deep depression. This depression lasted more than 4 years, and it took longer than that to finally get my emotions back into whack. I had to change my perspective of love. In the South there is a tradition. Debutants, country clubs, and old money uphold a tradition I found to be oppressive. I left for the Midwest for a new chance at life. The cultural difference in the Midwest seemed startling, and it took a few years before I got used to the people. Once I did I became a Midwesterner and left the trappings of the South for good. I am glad I did, because in the process I solved the emotional issues that caused my depression. What was it? I grew up with a single relationship for seven years beginning in high school. It was one of the best times of my life, and the two of us were truly in love. I have a whole box of memorabilia I still go through from time to time to remind myself of what that feeling is like. It was part puppy love, part deep love, and part physical sexual love. The emphasis back then was probably on the sexual love seeing as we were budding adolescents with newly developing desires. Once I got a taste (literally) of sexual love, I was addicted. We were in a monogamous relationship, and we loved each other a lot, so our sexual activity was as normal if not premarital. We were careful to plan our activity and did not rush into intercourse hastily. Our relationship unfolded gently over time the way it seemed it should. It was one of the most fulfilling times of my life. Things change, and I have never encountered that feeling again. Only once for a brief time on a Carnival cruise ship did I feel the same feeling we had years ago. It was shocking. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to it, but I tried for a while to make the relationship work. With a language barrier it was impossible, not to mention the big rock she was wearing on her left hand. I ended up using her as a muse both for music and poetry and managed to capture those feelings in rhymes that conveyed the feelings almost as accurately as music. I became a poet! My last poem written for her was Angel from the Sea, and I am thankful for that brief time, although I came out disappointed. From then on I decided to rely on my new found definition for love, and that excluded the human being as the major component. I had found with experience with a human being your are destined to be disappointed. It is a formula, the great Greek formula for tragedy, and who can discount that? You love and you lose, so what is the point? Charlie Parker, jazz's Bird had similar feelings. How does one find love if the human being is excluded? For nuns and monks God suffices. I am too human and also a musician, so I had to find another way to actualize my love. It was through music. As a composer you can capture those same feelings in music, and they become preserved. That is the beauty of art. Once you discover this, that love is now no longer dependent upon a human being, you are immortal. There is no more heart ache, no more grief, and no more disappointment. Only the feelings you choose are actualized in your musical composition. You become the bard and the poet, and you alone choose what feelings will be had. There is great power in this process, because you are no longer reliant upon a human being for actualization. How can a mere human being be responsible for the happiness of another anyway? They can't really. This, I feel, is the mistake of human love. This is also why I think marriage fails so dismally. We cannot expect to receive everything we need from another human being. Who do we turn to for this? The answer is God. God will not fail us, when another human being will. Human beings simply are not equipped to provide this kind of spiritual insurgence we need throughout life. I watch as my parents, in their empty next phase, work so hard to maintain a life that is forever gone. Their children are grown and the life they have once known is over for good, yet they try with all their might to bring back to life habits that defined an existence gone. Experiencing this in close quarters, it is the same feeling of oppression I get from the traditions of the Old South. It simply puts death to the prospect of hope and new experiences with a drowning of life in the name of a staid and dead tradition. No one should live this way, and it is what I think causes mental illness and depression. Living in the past is fruitless. Pining for a lost existence is pointless. Actively trying to resurrect a past life by mere habits prohibits the act of life itself. These kinds of traditions should be abandoned. I have left those notions of love behind. It has not made me incapable of loving another, yet it has freed me from the tyranny of depending upon another for my own life. There are too many other things in life that are important. Marry yes. Love another, yes, but they should not be the only vessel to hold your wine.