Obviously, as someone who writes, words are my business. But sometimes I get to thinking about how, even in a good piece of writing, so much falls short in truly capturing the essence of the emotions and thoughts that we experience. There are certainly limitations as to what we can convey in writing, as compared to in other mediums.
When I was writing my article Listening With Your Eyes Closed last month, the reference I had in my mind was a song called For the Love of God. But the article really doesn’t come close in expressing the visceral experience I would have every time I listen to the song.
With a song like For the Love of God, it makes you feel like so much is being said, despite the absence of words. It is as if the guitar is playing the role of the lead singer, as it croons and wails.
I don’t truly know what the song may be about, but it makes me feel like the subject matter is too raw to be put into words. But if I were to best describe it, I feel like the song is a crying plea to God, to transcend all the madness in the world.
One review of the song that I came across said it best, that the song is a “bittersweet symphony of personal battles, as if the soul itself is in a tug-of-war between worldly desires and the pursuit of spiritual purity.”
The song’s composer, Steve Vai, is unconventional, even somewhat eccentric in his musicianship.
In recording For the Love of God in particular, he did it while he was in the middle of a ten-day fast, as he attempted to “push (himself) into relatively altered states of consciousness,” to “come up with things that are unique even for (himself).”
But it’s interesting for me to learn that even for Steve, the song falls incredibly short of the experience that he was trying to convey.
For the Love of God, like the other songs on the album Passion and Warfare, was largely inspired by dream sequences that he had.
As he described, he journeyed through a “celestial orchestra” in his dreams, whereby he experienced a symphony of strange sounds produced by thousands of unfamiliar instruments. Upon waking up, he would try to recreate, albeit failingly, those strange sounds with his guitar.
But such is the sublimity of the world. As artists, we are limited by our senses. Nothing we do can come close to depicting the world as it really is. The truest sides and colors of the world are in the things we are yet to know or understand, or even see, hear, or feel.
Sometimes at night, I am literally kept awake by thoughts of how little we know about the world we live in. We haven’t even figured out how the pyramids were actually built. And apparently, only five percent of the entire ocean has been explored. And what’s even crazier is that Earth is just a tiny and negligible blue dot in one of countless galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.
With our limitations as artists, perhaps one of the greatest values of art is in reminding us of how much of the world we don’t know. And in that, we find beauty.
Lately, I’ve been reminded of a great scene in The Shawshank Redemption, where the character Andy locks himself in the warden’s office and plays the song Duettino-Sull’aria for every person in the prison to hear.
Another character, Red, is particularly touched by the song, to which he reflects, “I have no idea to this day what the two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.”
Izzat Zailan 