I sing this song with pain and heartache. I sing this song with love. Through the chorus and the melody, through the unfurling of my open stave, I give you this: this song, this swelling farewell song.
There is joy in this singing. There is revelry in this rhyme. A simple heart will raise it to our heavens, to a complex cosmos, to beyond the realms of this speckled universe. Goodbye, adieu, farewell my precious heart. This song will be the orchestral flourish that turns me to the unborn riff, the distant wave, the new tone of my next.
I open these bars, snap the buttons off this treble clef and release you naked to the world.
An aubade is a parting song. How lovely. To part with something through melody. To sing it to its destiny and final rest, wherever that may be. In its purest sense, an aubade is a morning song by a lover to another upon departure, but it could just as easily be sung by you to your art as you release it to the throng.
But we were never lovers!
Weren’t you? When you first dreamed this work into existence, didn’t you swoon over the potential of it, the excitement of the start of this new and impossible relationship? Didn’t you thrill to the touching of it, the mere presence of it in the SAME ROOM looking coquettishly in your direction? Didn’t you fight with it and make up with it and fall back in love with it in the course of a single afternoon?
Did you, greedily and most reverently, never want to share it with anyone else?
Lovers.
But this is the end of the affair. It’s time to let it go. Sing your farewell—open your throat and sing your aubade of goodbye. Wish it safe flight on its way to a new lover, or its final destiny or sweet failure. Will it take new residence in the heart of someone else? Will it become the favorite thing in someone’s life? Who knows? Your work can end up affecting someone in ways you can’t predict, but you will never know if you never sing the song. The aubade. The farewell composition.
The work, as it turns out, is the easy part—the aubade can prove impossible. How do you know when to let it go? How will you know it’s time to say goodbye? What if you’re not at all musical? I have no answers, but I do know that your art is a bird that wants to fly. Hold that bird too long and you will extinguish its song with the smothering heat of your well-meaning hand.
Hold it softly, now. Feel its beating body tremble with the quickening, the soft feathers of it, the twitch of its beak and shining eye. It seeks your permission. As the composer of this art, you are in a sense, its God. It seeks to spread your word, to give service, to share.
This is not letting go—this is a release. A release for both you and the work. Your bird is ready, even if it’s not fully feathered yet. And sure, it might fly directly into the first closed window it sees, but maybe it won’t—if you sing it a flight path. If you croon its confidence toward all points on its compass. As it motors into the air, gently rising with each flutter, I urge you to sing.
“Find your path!”
Sing!
“Don’t be too enamored by your own reflection!”
Sing!
“Watch for the choppy engines of low-flying, poorly piloted critiques!”1
Sing!
“Goodbye and good luck, my bird of love!”
We are in a constant pattern of saying hello and goodbye. The little birds we release fly long and high and low and erratically. They flutter at the edges of our peripheries, occasionally swooping in to visit and tell of adventures and dangers and close calls with death. Recognize its song, but resist the urge to cage it once more.
Because your bird no longer belongs to you—it belongs to everyone. Birdwatchers and twitchers and avian enthusiasts. Observers of flights and dive-bombs and magnificent plumage. I wish your birds the sexiest of murmurations as they meet with strange flocks and shimmer across skies in the throb of success.
Your aubade. I hear it as the sound catches on a draft, soaring off with your art to find its new life. To inflate hearts and minds and (hopefully) bank accounts. It whispers through the leaves on someone else’s tree. Hear its song: this song, this song, this most final of work songs.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“In the meantime, just because we are ambitious, it doesn't mean we have to act ambitious. Maybe if art were more like getting dressed—something we do almost unconsciously, yet with passionate attention to what makes us feel or look good—then the art world might become a place where the weather suits our clothes, not a place where uniforms are worn. In a moment when so many people are still stuck on autopilot, behaving like establishmentarians, pursuing the named instead of the nameless, there's no better time to do things your own way.”
- Jerry Saltz
Taken from his new book “Art is Life”. Excerpt from the essay “Babylon Now”, September 5, 2001.
That last line is gold, and just as relevant today.
On Rotation: “Brand - New - Life” by Young Marble Giants
Never give up. A “loser” horse with a pink mask (with Hello Kitty patches sewn on it) on a ridiculous losing streak saves a racecourse from going under. It became an inspiration for a whole nation and I don’t think I could love this story more. It’s 20 minutes, but worth it.
Via Storythings
Cats and catnip from under glass.
Via Boing Boing
And if they take you out, take them down with you.
Brilliant piece.