Ceremony – New Order

          There’s something in our make-up that craves to create a beautiful object—a song, a poem, a film.  Essential to that is the knowledge that no thing we create can ever be without defects.  It’s the flaws that allow us perspective and admiration as fans of a piece of art.  They let us know the creator was human—“picture me and then you start watching.”  And what we value—what means the most—is that the artists saw the piece through to the end.  That determination, that resolve—the great strength of a band at maximum volume—is a kind of flawlessness.  It’s the will to transform chaos into order, or, at the very least, an ordered chaos.

Sometimes something happens that unnerves us, forcing us to become someone we weren’t before.  A person is lost, say, and we turn towards the time without them, a departure.  But that departure incorporates some part of that loss—we adapt and assume something of an individual’s significance.  Even if it’s as simple as a slight inflection of voice we took from them.  A gesture.

          Things begin simply enough—chance encounters, fractures of space, things said or left unsaid.  Or two notes, octaves perhaps, creating a push-and-pull tug-of-war, opening up a rhythmic field for other noises, other movements.  The two notes turn into two chords, creating a pairing, a couple, a relationship—“the same old story.”

          I’ve heard this song dozens of times, and I can’t live it down.  There is no real way to articulate why—it is due to an ambiguous sum of events and experiences somehow shared over space and time between songwriter and listener.  In the end, the why is not of significance.  Merely the significance is of significance.  What began simply has left us altered.  And we turn again.  To a different story.

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh, where he sells books, writes, and rocks.  He is also an editor at the New Yinzer.  He hopes to have a full-length book of poems out on Six Gallery press in the fall of 2007.