I just heard this wonderful quote:
“Art is externalising what’s internal” (source)
It reminded me of an insight I had last night. I was listening to Billie Eilish‘s live version of ilomilo (here), and it hit me how music is doing just that: expanding Billie’s universe into something that can be inhabited by other people. By listening to it, you can take a journey inside her mind.
That’s profound stuff man. Our personal universes are locked away in our own heads, and it’s rare to find that someone else can see it as it really is. Sometimes you can find someone who just “gets” you, but you’ll never find a person who gets all of you; who can live inside all of the same spaces that you live in. Occasionally, you might feel that bittersweet sting of how impossible it is to merge two minds; how, as much as you may connect, there are still parts of you living on an isolated island.
But with music it doesn’t need to go that far. Because music is both small and large: It’s small enough that it doesn’t need to cover all of you, but large enough that what it does cover still feels somehow complete.
I love music but I’d never thought about it in this context – about how it lets you delve into an otherwise indescribable part of someone else, even a part that felt impossibly isolated. When a piece of music vibes with me, it’s normally because it connects to something within me personally, literally vibrating with parts of my own universe in a way that I can recognise. It feels like I’m inside it, or that it’s inside me.
Especially the weirder stuff (like this), which feels like it’s touching parts that most people can’t even imagine – unlike other more common parts, such as finding Michael Mcintyre funny, or finding puppies so adorable that it hurts, where even if you don’t have these parts in you, they’re not radically different to ones that you do have. No, the stranger the song, the more likely it can connect with something really, deeply personal in me.
That’s what’s so interesting about this insight: The depth of that personal connection that you can have to the music’s creator. There’s no other way to get there, and when you do, it feels massive.
Moving on slightly, I guess that’s what good words can do too. Being a good writer means being able to describe parts of a universe with sincere clarity, so much so that other people feel like they can inhabit it. Conversely, bad writing feels foggy, it obstructs the path into the universe that the words intended to take you into… but even supposedly bad writing can offer insights into the author. For example, I can write eloquently about feelings, but only because I’ve spent a long time exploring them. If I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have the words for it. So perhaps, when words obscure the path to someone’s universe, then what they’re really describing is the muddiness of their own internal paths.
And that’s worth connecting with too, perhaps even more so. Reading the words of someone who doesn’t yet know how to express a certain part of themselves, because they’re seeing it now for the first time — it’s a different experience altogether, closer to a real-life conversation when you discuss fresh topics and process them together.
I love reading words filled with doubt and uncertainty. Seeing the shape of someone’s thoughts become whole at the same moments you too process them — it’s almost telepathic, and a wonderful thing to read. Of course, it’s topped by the aforementioned in-person exchanges where this very same thing happens… but it’s not very often that you get to engage with a person’s universe in this way.
I do try though — my conversations have been called “deep” and “heavy”, but it’s worth it for the chance to step into the places of someone’s mind normally reserved for their own inner journeys.
I wonder what other ways people offer themselves; how else do we invite others into our personal universe?
And oh, what a joy it is to embark on such trips.