April 2005

There is a new Mozart in our midst. His name is Jay Greenberg. He is 12 years old and refers to himself as ”Bluejay.” He says this is because blue jays are also small but colorful and make a lot of noise. Even though he is only 12 years old, he has already written five symphonies. When he was 2 years old he wrote the word “cello” and tried to indicate to his parents that he wanted one. When he was three years old they took him to a music shop and got him a cello of his size. He immediately picked it up and began to play. When they asked him how he knew how to play without any music lessons, he stated that he just knew how to do it. They do not know where his musical talent arose. His mother is a painter and his father a linguist. They just know that music pours out of his head in a steady stream.

Jay loves to take walks, because while he is walking music comes into his head. He first begins humming it, then directing it as he walks. He can see all the parts for all the instruments, and all the notes for all the instruments of the symphony. Moreover, it is not just one symphony or concerto that is in his head. He frequently has two or three pieces of music running in his head, waiting to be expressed. When he writes music on his computer program, it can’t come out fast enough. It is already there, just waiting to be expressed; sometimes he writes it so fast that the computer crashes. He writes what is already in his head, and can write a symphony in a few hours. When asked if he has to correct anything, he says that he never has to correct anything. It is always just exactly what it should be as soon as it comes out. Contrast that to Beethoven, whose manuscripts were so smeared and altered that it is hard to understand what he finally accepted.

Bluejay is more like Mozart than Beethoven. For Mozart, writing music was also virtually instantaneous, because it was already in his head and just had to be placed on paper. Not that is was not painful – it was. When you have something in your head that needs to be expressed, it hurts until you can get it out. Writing, composition and painting artistic expression is almost identical to a pregnancy. You have this thing in your head which keeps growing until you feel that you are about to burst. There comes a time when it has to come out or you think you will not survive. Then it pours out like a dam bursting. You can’t get it out fast enough. When it is done, you are so grateful to have gotten this thing out of you; you don’t know if you would have survived much longer if it had stayed within you. And then afterwards you are depressed, because this thing that was more important then anything else in your life finally came out, and you do not any longer have purpose in life. The only thing that saves you is that you have work to do – and sense that there is something else brewing in your head which will soon consume all of your attention.

We are awed by Bluejay, as we are by Mozart. How can anyone have so much creativity in their head, bursting to come out? How can anyone create multiple notes by multiple players using multiple instruments in an instant, and combine them into a form that has meaning and/or beauty for those who hear them? It is incomprehensible to us how anyone can have that much ability and that much talent. It is celestial. We truly understand how there are some who will say that it is a message from God. The minds of Einstein, Mozart and Bluejay are so far beyond the rest of us that we cannot understand how they function or how they can create so much that we do not understand, and cannot produce ourselves without a struggle.

Most of us who create are in the middle. We feel more like Beethoven than Mozart or Bluejay. Whatever we express has to be worked over multiple times before it is worthwhile. It has to be added to, corrected, rethought, rewritten, and then proofread many times before it is worthy of presentation to the public at large. Yet there is one aspect of creativity that we all share who create. It is a pregnancy. We suffer until we can get it out. Once it is out, we don’t want to have that burden anymore, but know that now that it is out, we are responsible for it, have to take care of it, and have to stay with it until we are no longer able to take care of it. We do not complain about having to take care of this thing that came out of us, because we know that it is still part of us, belongs to us, and is dependent on us for its care and progress in life. We also know that we take care of this birth from us so that we can eventually give to the world at large.

Pregnancy is pregnancy, whether it is a body in the belly or a head full of concepts that are bouncing with building pressure to get out. Sure, women who have children go through immense pain. Sure, once it is over, they make light of how painful it was to have that baby. They are stoic. Yet any birth is painful. The aftermath gives us burdens to carry with us the rest of our lives.

Many of the most exquisite musical composers that the human race has ever known lived very short lives. Whether this was because they were constantly tormented trying to get all of this music out of their heads, simply did not fit in with anyone else in society, or were like a woman having 30 pregnancies then dying of exhaustion, we do not know. It may have been all three. We do pray for Jay Greenberg; we hope that he lives a long and productive life. All of human life will benefit if he does continue to produce. We hope that long after his life, the human race continues to delight in the compositions that he has created.

Which leads us back to the original question. Is Jay Greenberg simply the vessel? Is the pain that all of us feel who attempt to create and express simply the pain of a transcriber? Does all creation come from God? Are all creations that come from human minds the creations of God? Is God the dictator and are humans only the transcribers of these messages from God? We don’t think so. We think that there is a tremendous variation in the talent of humans, whether it is art, music, mathematics, speaking, acting, compassion, athletics, teaching, leadership, parenting or any other gift of genetics. The Bell Shaped Curve is everywhere. In any category, some of us have extreme talent, some of us have almost no talent, and all the rest of us are in the middle. The only God that has anything to do with these variations of human expression is the God of Chance.

The corollary to this rationale is that each of us should do the very best that we can do to bring whatever talents we have to their full expression, even though it may be painful to do so. It also means that whatever birth we have is ours to take care of as long as we can. It’s all personal. There is no divine creator who has anything to do with it. It is all up to us to use whatever talents the Laws of Chance gave us to the greatest expression we can give them. God doesn't care; and God doesn't have a dictaphone in he, she or its office.

“In orthodox Christianity, God is something out there, apart from everything else. Orthodox Christians still speak of the Bible as being the word of God, as though God was some ‘it’ apart from the creation, speaking through some man made vehicle on earth, with secretaries taking it all down in shorthand or on tape. Zen/Taoists laugh at these absurdities. They would call them spiritually infantile.”

- William Edelen

“We ascribe meaning to the unmeant, and the sentences form with such synaptic speed that the acts of writing, when it is going well, seems no more that the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation.”
“But whether the creative mind feels it is dutifully transcribing a silent dictation, or that its work appears almost as an impersonal product of a generation, or that it is serving as a medium of the voice of God, what is always involved is a release from personality, liberation, an unshackling from the self.”

- E L Doctorow