Stinky Situation - So What!?

Beauty From Nothing

This morning I walked through Prince of Wales Terrace, iPod plugged tightly into my head, letting Daniel Lanois'

transcendent album Here Is What Is slowly spill into me. Full of joy, full of gratitude, and yet still curious how the things I envision for my music will come about. Suddenly a track named Beauty came on which is just Daniel interviewing Brian Eno about great art. Here are Eno's comments.

"What would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of shit. Because nobody ever believes that. You know everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head - they'd somehow appeared there and formed in his head - and all he had to do is write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what's so interesting, and what would really be the lesson everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand because it gives peope confidence in their own lives to know that that's how things work.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted that they have these wonderful things in their head, but you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you'd say, "Well I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning!""

That, boys and girls, tuned my thoughts to a whole different station.

Cheers,

Dave