Simply Stella
Sometimes the vibration you hear is from a string which has not yet been strummed.
The first important thing I ever did was something I didn’t know how to do: play an old, beat up Stella guitar which had been sitting behind some clothes in the family closet.
The year was 1963. I was ten years old, struggling with adolescence, a latch-key child, tubby-bellied, and overall completely powerless. Then I heard a silly song on our scratchy AM radio: “Love Potion №9” by the Searchers.
“I held my nose, closed my eyes, I took a drink.”
Out of all the great songs in the world at that time, this was the one that compelled me to pick up Stella to figure it out.
Muses sometimes come in the strangest forms. Mine was named Stella. Where she came from, nobody knows. She was blond, a bit rough around the edges, and perhaps a bit of a loner, seeing as she’d been sitting in the closet ever since I could remember.
With some muses, you don’t even know they are muses until you make the right request. Mine was “Show me how to play Love Potion №9.” Only then did the conversation start, but it was more like being lassoed and three-legged tied to what compelled me. There I sat in a small closet surrounded by the aroma of well-worn clothing, sliding door ajar just enough to let in a silver line of light so I might see what I was doing. I was not “learning” to play the guitar, I was exploring how I might play a song. The guitar was just what I had at that moment to manifest the song. I took the power of the song in my head and heart, and awkwardly found the right notes to bring it forth.
What came out was very rough and only approximate. If anybody had heard what I managed to play, they probably wouldn’t even recognized “Love Potion №9.”
However, like the song and its words, the experience was magic. I was not bound by rules, thoughts, or instruction. Most importantly, I did not realize that I could not play. On that closet floor, alone, I came to play this blonde guitar, surrounded by quiet darkness. What I did not know at the time, what I could not know, was that I was hearing two songs in my head: one was “Love Potion №9,” and the other was the song of myself, emerging.
I experienced a power that day: the power of figuring stuff out, simply because I liked it and I was compelled by it. Somehow, I plucked the strings until the melody emerged. While I eventually learned to play a proper guitar and even went on to make a little bit of money playing in garage bands during my high school and college years, I was never a great guitar player. Rather, my talent was having an ear and eye for things so I could learn quickly and on my own. What is “possible” or not never seemed that important. It was about finding the notes that are already playing in my head, and then finding any old instrument to bring them to life.
Since that time, I have figuratively locked myself in small dark spaces and tapped out new tunes that buzz around my head, like the mosquito in your room as you’re trying to go to sleep. Only when I became older and “wiser” did I discover this is its own kind of exploration: a strange and organic form of creating — complex, yet simple. It’s about just hearing, beginning, exploring, and doing. These are the magical vibrations of strings not yet strummed — strings whose purpose is to be strummed.
I have never felt comfortable with the concept of “manifestation.” The idea that if one can envision it, or think it, they can bring it into the world. Tell me, does this really work for you? Why not? Perhaps because wishing it does not make it so. Wishful thinking is not manifestation. Manifestation implies something more active, something more muscular. Do you know what the French call protests? “Manifestations.” Their manifestation is an outward act against what is, and a suggestion of what might be. I have witnessed several manifestations in Paris. They are rude, messy, noisy, chaotic, occasionally dangerous, and sometimes even a bit comical.
This is a good description of the mind and soul of that ten-year-old boy on the closet floor with Stella. Out of the confusion flowed a certain order: the song from the radio, to my ears, out of my fingers, through Stella, returning the notes to the ether from which they came. Manifestation implies you are the originator. I originated nothing, I manifested nothing. It just came to me, and through me, without my own commentary or judgement.
Most of the valuable things I’ve done since then feel like this primal flow. It starts with not judging that I shouldn’t, that I can’t, that I am not qualified or worthy. It’s a protest. A protest against limitations, judgement, and definition.
There is simplicity in this vacuity. Stella knew this. The song knew this. The darkness of my closet knew this. These were the vibrations not yet played, but nonetheless heard.
