Hey, @JuliusGoat. I’m a professional saxophonist, and an easy crier. Whenever I experience certain works of art, I cry. It’s embarrassing: I routinely weep at the endings of movies that aren’t sad; I cry when a piece of music, maybe even something upbeat, surprises me.
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I’ve teared up confronting paintings that connected with me. I’ve teared up at stand-up comedy that struck me as especially inventive.
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I don’t like being this way: as I said, it’s embarrassing. I don’t like it when the lights go up in a theater and I’m trying to look dry-eyed, while other civilians around me just look normal and unmoistened.
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But I also know exactly why I do it. As a jazz musician, I routinely encounter people who are impressed with me because they think I’m “playing what I feel,” that I’m spontaneously spinning out this or that melodic utterance pushed along merely by emotion, somehow.
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It’s the opposite of that, of course: a finished work of art in any discipline is the tip of a profound iceberg. Gawd what’s it’s taken to learn to work a saxophone. It’s irrational. It’s abnormal the amount of time and mind and heart involved.
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Below the surface of any successful product of human imagination is an unseen edifice of sweat and uncertainty and hope and discipline and drive and work. Successfully creating something really good is a feat, something amazing. It’s what most astonishes me about us humans.
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When I come across a successful creative work, it makes me cry because I know what it took to get there. I’m impressed and touched and moved by that knowledge. A miracle has happened, and I get to see it. Sob.
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Anyways, I’ve just this moment finished The Revisionaries. It’s amazing. I salute you. But fuck you for making me cry.
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