Occasionally, we’ll be asking artists to pen some thoughts for Tone Deaf – varied essays on whichever topic the artist wishes. Today, we have a piece written by ARIA award-winning artist Montaigne, titled ‘On the Nature of Thoughts’. Enjoy!
It is important that I write words, that I arrange them into a bouquet, put them in a vase. Keep them in sunlight, keep them watered. The words are the vase. Keeps them together. Holds the water. Transpiration – the flowers stand erect for a while. Proud to show them off to people. Invite them round for dinner and be happy to talk about how I grew them, in what soil, why these are with those.
Change them when they die, because they will die. No such thing as a static thought, they’re always changing, the thoughts themselves, the thoughts about the thoughts, what kinds you decide to keep and which your better judgment decides to cut up and put in the green-lidded bin.
I haven’t been arranging the flowers lately. I’ve been picking them up off the ground, inhaling their scent for a second, tossing them aside again. Putting them into songs, despairing my short attention span, picking up and putting down, coming to no real conclusions. Lamenting oxytocin and dopamine, listening to songs recommended to me rather than the ones I know will help me stop checking my phone so often, looking out for men and women who aren’t in love with me and won’t be until this bit of writing that has been solicited from me is completed. Until I can emerge from meditation practice without wondering when the next expression of interest is going to arrive, and from whom. Even now, this: this is not me readying a bouquet.
My songs are not complete thoughts or ideas. They are the French homework I found easy in high school when I got frustrated trying to finish maths. They are my Pass marks in Linguistics and French Studies at university when most of my time was spent watching Theatresports and making friends via Facebook in lieu of study. They are finding metaphors instead of writing anything insightful.
Being a paid artist is dangerous because you are being rewarded for being capricious and emotionally indulgent. It is probably easy to spiral out of control. I have a perennially foregrounded desire not to do so, and perceive warning signs quickly and take heed of them conscientiously, so I am not that concerned about descending into some very dark place, but I do let feelings carry me away sometimes. Sometimes I am sidetracked and waylaid by my feelings and they paralyse my neck so that I cannot turn my head to find the path I was on. I’m not far from it, but it is certainly hard for me to see until someone or something turns my body round again. And when they do, I keep glancing, until they go.
Someone tell me how do I make them go? Give me the power of immediate evanescence (not just the band). Hey, there’s another problem. Someone tell me. I seem to listen to everyone’s advice about feelings and the actions I take towards them when, if nothing else in this world, I have learnt that things simply must be experienced and seen retrospectively to be understood. You may make mistakes and ruin the outcome you were hoping for, but such is life. Often, no matter how much self-help literature you consume, nothing is more wisdom-building than a constant accumulative awareness of your own experience.
Right now what I am experiencing is a lull in a dynamic life which is causing my thirst for stimulation, for animal things, to manifest as an insatiably romantic mood. Flower vases do not survive in this atmosphere. The pressure shatters them. I’ll go on tour and do shows and travel and write music and leave home sometime soon and the neutral mood will be restored. But it is infected for now.
Luckily for my listeners, that means myriad songs. It means lots of abstruse poetry that they can mould to their own shapes. I’ll show you the cuttings of my flowers and maybe they’ll prompt you to grow your own. Maybe they’ll enable you to be as distracted as I am. Distracted from the path to self-knowledge.
I need to start writing more prose about myself. The progress of my art is slowing down my development as a person.
Maybe these flowers I’m picking up and surveying while I write this will die soon. Time changes everything. I’m pretty tired of flowers at the moment. That will change too.
Montaigne plays with Tegan and Sara at Zoo Twilights: Wednesday 8 March at Melbourne Zoo and Thursday 9 March at Taronga Zoo.
Buy tickets here and check out the rest of the acts playing the Zoo Twilights series, including Martha Wainwright, The Living End and Kurt Vile, here.
