All Is Quiet is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, May 05, 2004. It is part of An Instruction Manual.
A confessional concerning my nature and motivations, please excuse the deplorable self indulgence inherent herein.
I write here, at Rhetorical Device, because I can. I have built a software system to allow me to publish serial narratives because I like to write them and, sometimes, a few of you enjoy reading them. This is true, but it is not the whole truth.
A more complete explanation is that I began writing seriously during a year-long hiatus from composing music, itself brought on by my frustration with my collaborators, the music industry and my own inability to produce anything I considered worthwhile. The main lesson learned from that hiatus is that I am helpless in the face of whatever neurotic drive makes it impossible for me not to make things: if not music, I must write, if not writing than photography, &c.
I have always made music, starting with the songs I heard in my head when I was a little boy who could not afford to buy a musical instrument. There was never anything I wanted as much as I wanted to be a musician. Music was my muse, my master and my mistress, the only thing that really touched me when I was too emotionally shut down to connect with anything else.
When I finally acquired my first real guitar, through the largesse of a lover at the age of fourteen, I played it until my fingers bled. Finally, I thought, I would be able to express myself in the language spoken by my viscera. The reality of the situation was more disappointing. I was not able to play well immediately, as I had fantasized I would, but, rather, had to practice constantly before fighting my way up to mediocrity. I made up for my lack of talent and late start with extraordinary focus and devotion. I built my primary electric guitar, custom wired its guts, created my own effects pedals, hotrodded my amplifiers, and steeped myself in the instrument and its lore.
I wanted so badly to have a means of pure emotional communication, to become, like my heroes, a conduit through which universal truth would flow. Instead, I built technique and learned theory and became the kind of player who impresses other musicians, but to whom no one really wants to listen. No encouragement took the sting out of my failure; no compliment ended, or even paused, the internal dialogue of doubt and dolor. I was a fake, a charlatan, a no-talent loser who wasted the time of everyone with whom he came into contact, including himself.
It is simple cowardice that holds me back; the fear that I will try my hardest and fail paralyzes me, making it impossible for me to give myself completely to the music. The fear of banality causes me to compose over-complicated and emotionally inaccessible music, music designed to prove myself rather than music given as a gift to the world.
These are the reasons why I quit making music altogether. I gave my guitar, the one that I built, to my friend Michael, sold the rest of my instruments and my studio equipment, and began the aforementioned hiatus thinking it was the start of a new life. I did not make it very far before I started writing, enrolled in art school and, eventually, laid hands on another guitar and started buying studio equipment again.
There is a special kind of doom in being neither strong enough to quit nor strong enough to dedicate oneself entirely to one's art. I can take some faint solace in the knowledge that I am not alone: my friend Yves, a painter who trained at Florence, has burned his canvases, snapped his brushes and walked away from his art, only to return later, penitent and broken; Lux, an actor and novelist, hides himself in a spoonful of brown heroin when the pain is too great; many others just drink themselves away, fuck pretty strangers, and wait for the end to come.
There should be an epiphany, or at least a point, in all of this, but there isn’t. I have written you, gentle reader, an explanation for my periodic absence from this place, for those times when I cannot bear what I have made and thus can make nothing more.