Tuesday, October 1, 2024
When I taught conducting, I tried to instill in my students to never lose the potential in their gesture. This idea comes from miming. Never overextend. In conducting, when you want a loud dynamic, you can’t flail to your outermost limits. You can’t show your ensemble the extremities of physicality by putting your arms so far up or down, there’s no more room to extend. It looks desperate. There must be some room at all times. Otherwise, the sound will go from full and rich to ugly and loud, bordering on noise; or from lusciously soft to breathy, bordering on suffocation and death. There’s a fine line between scarcity and abundance.
Obesity is hunger, collectively viewed as bad. I’m not talking about genuine starvation, but about emptiness or doing without. In modernity, everything around food is instantaneously gratuitous. So, we develop silly words like “hangry,” as if to say that a little hunger is to be aggressively eradicated.
The effeminate qualities of emptiness are attacked by the compulsive ego. Not having is considered punitive when in fact, it’s beautiful. The vacuity of desire is what opens potential; but potential is soft and embryonic. Why kill it?
A desire first comes in your recognition that you don’t have it. What you don’t have is essentially the first fruits of your creation. If you didn’t recognize it wasn’t there, then truly, it doesn’t exist. If you recognize you have not, then congratulations – you have. Successful dieting means getting very comfortable with hunger – for a long time. If you eat too soon and too much, you lose the potential benefit of a slender body. Love the vacuum of “without.” Protect your potential. Don’t kill that beautiful space by not giving it a chance to fulfill itself with goodness and perfection. Fill the emptiness with hope instead. It doesn’t have a chance if you’re desperate.